red/read: "Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement" by Barbara Ransby

“red/read” is a new book club series on my Substack. i’m kicking off the series with a review of "Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement" by Barbara Ransby.

“red/read” is a new book club series on my Substack. i’ll be writing book reviews of “red” books on socialism, activism, feminism, politics, you get the picture (get it? red?). the reviews will be less…review-y and more summary and analysis of what i got out of each read and what i hope you can take away from it too, whether or not you have time to read the entire book itself (although i hope you do!) 

i’m kicking off the series with a review of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement by Barbara Ransby. if you have books you’d like me to review, consider becoming a member of my substack community and dropping me a line with your request! enjoy and solidarity.

Why study Civil Rights? 

When we are first taught about the Civil Rights Movement in school, it often follows a whitewashed narrative that people peacefully protested for their rights and until they were granted by the government. The lessons overemphasize the commitment to nonviolence and spend more time on the figure of Dr. King than the movement itself. At best, you learn a little bit about the Civil Rights Movement. At worst, you learn lies. 

When you get older, it’s often tempting to reject these sanitized narratives. As a result, I’ve seen many young radicals turn their back on the Civil Rights Movement as an important thing to study. They want to learn about “real” revolution; they want to read Fanon, study Toussaint L’Ouverture, don black berets — and make no mistake, they should. 

But the fact that radicals today don’t study the Civil Rights Movement is, in my view, one of the biggest mistakes we could make. The reality is that Algeria and Haiti and Vietnam and Russia are all massively different contexts from the United States, and while there is still much to learn from them, we benefit the most from learning the history of the terrain on which we organize today. 

The Civil Rights Movement is one of the most important social movements in American history, comparable only to the Civil War and Reconstruction and the labor movement of the 1930s. It is the story of ordinary people, most of them completely disenfranchised, oppressed, impoverished and degraded, rising up against completely immeasurable odds and winning. 

Civil rights activists didn’t end racism, but they did defeat the cruel, undemocratic, fascist system of Jim Crow — something the average person would have thought inconceivable at the dawn of the 1950s.

The Civil Rights Movement carries countless lessons for building social movements and winning socialism in America today. The Civil Rights Movement teaches us about mass movements, how the creative capacities of everyday people can topple systems of oppression and violence. It teaches us about the fundamentals of community organizing — what structures they built (i.e. Freedom Schools), how they did it, and why. 

Ella Baker, a civil rights activist her entire life, saw the development and transformation of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1930s all the way to the 1980s. Baker was an organizer until the day she died. Though she was not one for famed political writings, we can read her theory of politics through her life’s work as an organizer. 

Barbara Ransby’s biography of Ella Baker, titled Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement traces this life. In this review, I draw out some of the points that stood out to me, particularly for their relevance for our political tasks today. 

Who was Ella Baker? 

Ella Baker may not have received the same notoriety of many of her male counterparts in the Civil Rights Movement — in fact, she expressed concern at the hero worship she saw budding in the movement — but she is remembered as one of the most influential figures of the Civil Rights era. Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) once said of Baker, “The most powerful person in the struggle of the sixties was Miss Ella Baker, not Martin Luther King.”

Ella Baker was born in 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia. Her grandparents were both into slavery; after slavery’s abolition, her grandparents purchased land on the plantation where they were formerly enslaved and started a farm. After completing her education, Baker moved to Harlem in the 1930s, where she was met with the vibrant political environment of the Harlem Renaissance. 

In Harlem, she joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League (YNCL), a consumer cooperative that sought to develop economic independence and self-sufficiency for Black people. The YNCL was founded by Black anarchist George Schuyler, who influenced Baker’s early politics. 

Her time at the YNCL was significant but short-lived, and after a few years she became a teacher in the Workers Education Project (WEP). The WEP was a program of the New Deal Works Progress Administration that sought to produce jobs and salvage the country from the Great Depression. The Workers Education Project is something so unlike anything the federal government would do today that it almost sounds made-up: paying full-time staff to develop their own curricula to teach to adult union members. Through the WEP, Baker worked closely with labor organizers and radicals. 

In the 1940s, she went on to work as a staff organizer in the NAACP, traveling throughout the South, developing relationships with local activists, and delivering powerful speeches before large audiences at local churches. Yet internal organizational struggles with leadership, whom Baker began to find to be chauvinistic and out of touch, led her to leave the NAACP. 

Eventually, she joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), headed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As a staff organizer, she aided in the SCLC’s campaigns to challenge Jim Crow segregation, from buses to schools. 

In 1960, a group of Black college students — only 19 years old at the time — staged a nearly spontaneous sit-in at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. A new era of Civil Rights activism had begun, this time led by a militant wave of student activists. Baker knew that these young people were determined; in response, she offered them organization. Baker organized a meeting at Shaw University (her alma mater) of these nearly 200 student activists who became activated by the Greensboro sit-ins. Out of this meeting came the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). 

SNCC went on to organize the 1961 Freedom Rides, a traveling caravan of interracial young people seeking to desegregate buses in the South, and the 1964 Freedom Summer, a push to assist Black voters in Mississippi in defeating the violence they faced simply for going to the polls. Throughout SNCC’s development, Baker ensured that the emergent SNCC remained student and youth-led. 

While the SCLC sought to exert its influence over SNCC during its infancy, Baker advised the young people to retain their political independence from any other groups. As a result, SNCC developed a distinct political vision and strategy, one that a simplified history might refer to as more “radical” than organizations like the NAACP and the SCLC. 

Indigenous leadership 

“Give light and people will find the way.” — Ella Baker

Baker believed in an organizing model of what Ransby calls “indigenous leadership” in which “You work yourself out of a job rather than trying to maintain yourself in a position or your organization.” Baker strongly held that movements should be led by those who were directly impacted by their issues. This did not mean that allies had no place in the movement, but rather that they should simply not be in the driver’s seat. 

Indigenous leadership for Baker was not based on something like identity. Today, we often fall into a fetishization of “lived experience.” This is not what Baker was after, at least not entirely. 

“In Baker’s view, if people did not feel they had taken an active part in their own emancipation, but believed that it had been won for them, then half the battle had already been lost; ordinary people’s sense of their own power would be compromised.” 

The importance of indigenous leadership was not because those outside of the immediate community (i.e. non-Black, non-Southern, or non-poor) wouldn’t be able to understand the problems. Instead, indigenous leadership was necessary because the process of self-emancipation was important in and of itself. 

It’s important here to think about why so many people today, despite facing massive amounts of inequality, exploitation, and oppression, aren’t simply rising up and resisting. It’s something I hear often — people are lazy, people are too busy, people are distracted. In reality, people are disempowered, and their disempowerment rarely results in their resistance; in fact, it results in the opposite. 

One of the first challenges for organizers to overcome is the initial feelings of disempowerment that the oppressed feel all the time, whether or not they realize it.

Though she was not necessarily or explicitly fighting for socialism, Baker was a staunch humanist fighting for universal human liberation from below; in the end, I believe, these are synonyms. 

Ella Baker believed in building mass movements that could change the world. Ironically, she spent her entire life fighting against the way that much of the Civil Rights Movement is often memorialized — through “great man history”, focusing on individual leaders as exceptional people rather than as parts of a larger movement. She recognized as early as the mid-1950s that the movement’s emphasis on individual figures like Dr. King was counterproductive to the goal of social revolution from below, which would depend on a mass social base, not leadership from above. 

Her support for indigenous leadership within SNCC, advocating for the group to remain led by the radical students’ movement rather than co-opted by more established and more conservative groups like SCLC and the NAACP was decisive in the organization’s direction. SNCC’s fearless leadership through the Freedom Rides called national attention to the inhumanity and violence of Southern segregation and helped establish a base for the civil rights movement in the South. 

Ella Baker’s political ideology 

Ransby clearly emphasizes Baker’s left-wing politics that viewed the struggle for Black liberation as deeply intertwined with economic justice for people of all races. To Baker, a Black freedom movement needed to recognize the unequal economic conditions of many Black people, both inter- and intra-racially. 

Her commitments to viewing the humanist goals of the Civil Rights Movement through class politics — though not explicitly socialist — are expressed in her 1964 Freedom Day speech: 

“Because even tomorrow, if every vestige of racial discrimination were wiped out, if all of us became free enough to go down and to associate with all the people we wanted to associate, we still are not free. We aren’t free until within us we have that deep sense of freedom from a lot of things that we don’t even mention in these meetings.

And I’m not talking about Negroes, I’m talking about people. People cannot be free until they realize that peace—we can talk about peace—that peace is not the absence of war or struggle, it is the presence of justice. People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job. Tomorrow, if we were able to vote our full strength and we still voted our full strength, until we recognize that in this country in a land of great plenty and great wealth there are millions of people who go to bed hungry every night.” 

Over the course of her life, Baker’s politics fluctuated between her early sympathy to socialist or communist politics, largely due to her connections to Communist Party members in 1930s and 40s Harlem, to succumbing to red baiting within mainstream Civil Rights organizations such as the NAACP. Baker maintained tight relationships with known members of the Communist Party; they were her friends and comrades. 

While Baker herself never identified as a communist or joined the Communist Party, her political views and organizing approach were both molded by her radical environs. 

Baker forged meaningful relationships with those from a diversity of backgrounds, from liberals to revolutionaries. Ransby stresses this as one of the defining features of Baker’s life and organizing. While many of her contemporaries suffered from sectarianism, Baker saw the value in building a broad-based coalition. 

The fight for an independent political party 

Of many overarching themes of Baker’s life that Ransby traces, one that stood out to me was the little-reported fact that Baker spent her entire life campaigning and organizing for an independent, third political party. From her affiliation with the Liberal Party in the 1950s to the Mass Party Organizing Committee (MPOC) in the 1970s, Baker was committed to a break from the racist, capitalist parties of the Democrats and Republicans alike. To Baker, Black liberation would not be found within the confines of the Democratic Party, particularly while it continued to entertain Southern Dixiecrats.

Baker’s first experiments with third parties began with her unsuccessful run on the Liberal Party ticket for New York City Council in 1953. The Liberal Party was a loosely left-labor party; in the aftermath of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (informally known as the Hitler-Stalin pact) during World War II, the Liberal Party broke from the Communist-led American Labor Party and took on an anti-communist approach. Unfortunately, the Liberal Party became swept up in McCarthyism, with some members even collaborating with the HUAC. 

Ransby writes of Baker’s city council campaign:

“The value of the campaign lay not in a vain hope of victory but in the broad-based educational effort that running for office entailed. In the early 1950s, as in later periods, some civil rights activists saw electoral politics as simply another mode of community organizing—a way to get issues in the spotlight.”

Baker exemplified the spirit of what we on today’s left often refer to as “class struggle elections.” Class struggle elections have become a bit amorphous, particularly as our “socialist electeds” find themselves captured by the capitalist Democratic party and drifting further and further to the right once in office. But Ella Baker reminds us of what class struggle elections might look like, using them as a way to platform our politics and meet people where they are. 

Baker’s organizing throughout the 1960s held electoral politics at a distance; it wasn’t until the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) that she made her reluctant return. In the 1960s, Black people in Mississippi were de facto excluded from participating in Democratic Party delegate elections. The MFDP was founded to demand the recognition of Black voters at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. 

Baker maintained a measured approach to the MFDP, skeptical of the Democratic Party’s willingness to budge on such an issue. Viewing it as an organizing opportunity, however, she worked with the coalition of young organizers excited about the campaign. The MFDP was an independent, grassroots political project — but it ultimately sought gains within the Democratic Party itself. 

At the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, the all-White Democratic Party officials offered a “compromise” of two symbolic seats for the MFDP. Some older activists pushed the MFDP to accept the crumbs. Baker viewed it as having “settled any debate about the possibility of functioning through the mainstream of the Democratic Party.” It was a critical lesson, learned by fire, in the futility of what today we call “party realignment.” 

Baker took this lesson and ran with it. In the 1970s, she became an organizer with the Mass Party Organizing Committee (MPOC), a socialist party that stood against the Vietnam War and advocated for Puerto Rican independence. It’s clear through Baker’s life and political decisions that she did not see the Democratic Party as a viable option for the liberation of the oppressed. It’s a worthwhile and important lesson: one of the most influential civil rights leaders in the United States saw no path forward through the Democratic Party, but continued to view the electoral arena as an important one for organizing.

Civil rights beyond the law

Though Baker and her contemporaries often utilized the legal system as a terrain of struggle, she made no mistake that the law was a means, not an end. 

“The passage of a law was the beginning rather than the end point of a struggle,” Baker argued. “Even the recent laws that have been passed are only as valuable as the people you have alerted and who are capable of using their combined power to see that they are implemented.” 

Critical race scholarship of the post-civil rights era has often questioned the ability of the legal system to provide restitution for racial injustice. The law, so the argument goes, was never designed to exact justice for the oppressed. Rather, the law was designed to protect white, property-owning men and their interests. Therefore, any appeals to the law for the rights of the oppressed are futile. 

Ella Baker took a different approach. Unlike those to her right, who sought to challenge Jim Crow through high-profile court cases, and those to her “left” who would refuse to engage in the legal system altogether, Baker saw the law as terrain. Jim Crow majorly impacted the daily lives of Black Southerners — and it was through tackling these laws that a mass movement for Civil Rights was born.

The struggle is eternal

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement is a must-read for anyone interested in changing the world. The biography itself is meticulously researched and beautifully written, with a slant towards the practical decisions of Baker that is particularly relevant to organizers. 

Ella Baker’s life is instructive for those who believe that a better world is possible, and it is our duty to call it into being. 

In the words of Baker, “The struggle is eternal. Somebody else carries on.”