Ella Baker: Freedom Bound by Joanne Grant

Author:Joanne Grant [Grant, Joanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs, Ethnic & National, African-American & Black, Leaders & Notable People, Specific Groups, History, General, Biography & Autobiography, United States, Historical, Political Science, African Americans, Civil Rights, Biography, Political, Cultural Heritage, Women, Civil Rights Movements, Civil Rights Movements - United States - History - 20th Century, Civil Rights Workers, African Americans - Civil Rights, Baker; Ella, Civil Rights Workers - United States, Afro-American Women Civil Rights Workers, Afro-American Civil Rights Workers
ISBN: 9780471327172
Google: kd8J9Kh-iIgC
Amazon: B000WLINCE
Barnesnoble: B000WLINCE
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 1998-03-19T05:00:00+00:00

Baker was the first person to suggest Walker for the job. She had invited Wyatt and his wife and the Reverend George Lawrence to her home in New York for dinner to discuss the possibility long before the December 1959 Birmingham meeting at which the decision was taken. She recalled later: “I am very vulnerable as far as young people are concerned, and I can perhaps be very easily misled when people give the impression of being dedicated. And I had begun to think of Wyatt as having great dedication.” She thought that Wyatt had been under the illusion that he would become the organization’s spokesman, just as executive directors of other civil rights organizations were, but “he soon learned that this could not take place.” This led to “dissatisfaction” and “some strains.” After Walker left the SCLC, Baker “never raised the question as to the extent to which he felt he had been screwed,” but she thought that Walker had erroneously assumed that the reason for projecting the president as the central figure before Walker’s arrival was because “there was nobody else in the organization worthy of being pro- jected.“44

In an interview for the film Fundi, Walker said that Baker had a difficult time in the SCLC because she wasn’t a minister and so didn’t have the ministerial skills of maneuvering among the preachers. She was never reluctant to give her views, and this did not sit well with the ministers, who were used to having their word taken as gospel. Baker, brought up in a religious household that did not countenance subservience, would have none of that. As board member Reverend C. T. Vivian declared, “She wasn’t church.“45

Andrew Young, who followed Walker as executive director, and who was himself a minister, had an explanation of Baker’s problems that came close to her own: King had a domineering mother and wasn’t about to accept a surrogate one in his organization.46 Baker said much the same thing, and also added the matter of class. King “was part of a middle-class background that was highly competitive on a level that to me means nothing.” Prominent black Atlanta families measured their children’s accomplishments against each other. Baker thought that King’s background “had not provided him with any personal sense of struggle in the sense of getting through school, finding a place for himself in the church.” She did not see him as a person who had fought his own way up and who might, therefore, recognize the importance of developing strengths in others. She felt that King, and others like him who had been provided with all of the advantages of a cossetted upbringing, could not accept the concepts of sharing and of developing the skills of others that she valued.

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