Ron's American World

Sunday, February 9, 2020

Ella Josephine Baker

Ella Baker is one of the most significant pioneers of the civil rights era but was cast behind the scenes as women were often forced to take a backseat to men, even when fighting for common rights.

An African-American civil rights and human rights activist beginning in the 1930s. She was a behind-the-scenes activist, whose career spanned over five decades. She worked alongside some of the most famous civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King, Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks, and Bob Moses.

Ella Josephine Baker Dec. 13, 1903 – Dec. 13, 1986 was born in Norfolk, VA the daughter of Georgiana and Blake Baker. She was the middle of three surviving children, bracketed by her older brother Blake Curtis and younger sister Maggie. Her father worked on a steamship line that sailed out of Norfolk and was frequently away. Her mother took in boarders to earn extra money. In 1910 Norfolk had a race riot in which whites attacked black workers from the shipyard.

Her mother decided to take the family back to North Carolina while their father continued to work for the steamship company. Ella was seven when they returned to her mother's rural hometown near Littleton, North Carolina. Here she was regaled with stories about her ancestors and other Blacks who rebelled against slavery. She developed a sense for social justice early in her life. As a girl growing up in North Carolina, Baker listened to her grandmother tell stories about slave revolts. An enslaved woman, her grandmother had been whipped for refusing to marry a man chosen for her by the slave “owner.”

Miss Baker was an excellent student and attended Shaw University the oldest historically Black University in America,in Raleigh, North Carolina. In her book, “Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement,” Barbara Ransby explained how Ella’s background and upbringing would shape her path in life. Baker, she explained, was “nurtured, educated and challenged by a community of strong, hard-working, deeply religious people—most of them women—who celebrated their accomplishments and recognized their class advantage, but who also pledged themselves to serve and uplift those less fortunate.” With a focus on helping those less fortunate, Ella would leave the comforts and security of her hometown in order to bring change to the lives of the masses.

As a student she challenged school policies that she thought were unfair. After graduating in 1927 as class valedictorian, Baker moved to New York City and began joining social activist organizations. Baker worked as editorial assistant at the Negro National News. In 1930 George Schuyler, a black journalist and anarchist, founded the Young Negroes Cooperative League (YNCL). It sought to develop black economic power through collective networks. They conducted "conferences and trainings in the 1930s in their attempt to create a small, interlocking system of cooperative economic societies throughout the US" for black economic development. Having befriended Schuyler, Baker joined his group in 1931 and soon became its national director.

The Young Negroes Cooperative League, whose purpose was to develop black economic power through collective planning.She served as the publicity director and a board member of the Harlem’s Own Cooperative, a consumer cooperative which specialized in grocery goods and dairy products. A cooperative (often called a co-op) is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise. Baker saw that through the collective bargaining position that the co-op possessed, the individuals who were a part of it gained and maintained economic and political power. For the rest of her life, Baker would fight to empower people on an individual level by spurring them to be a vocal part of the group effort. She also came to believe that the true power to make change lay within the power of the individual fighting to determine their future rather than be led along by the nose by those who labeled themselves as the “leaders of the masses.” Baker also involved herself with several women’s organizations. She was committed to economic justice for all people and once said, “People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job.”

She also worked for the Worker's Education Project of the Works Progress Administration, established under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Baker taught courses in consumer education, labor history, and African history. She immersed herself in the cultural and political milieu of Harlem in the 1930s. She protested Italy's invasion of Ethiopia and supported the campaign to free the Scottsboro defendants in Alabama, a group of young black men accused of raping two white women. She also founded the Negro History Club at the Harlem Library and regularly attended lectures and meetings at the YWCA.

Baker lived with and married her college sweetheart, T. J. (Bob) Roberts. They divorced in 1958. Ella Baker rarely discussed her private life or marital status. According to fellow activist, Bernice Johnson Reagon, many women within the Civil Rights Movement followed Baker's example, adopting a practice of dissemblance about their private lives that allowed them to be accepted as individuals within the movement.

Baker befriended John Henrik Clarke, a future scholar and activist; Pauli Murray, a future writer and civil rights lawyer, and others who would become lifelong friends. The Harlem Renaissance influenced Baker in her thoughts and teachings. She advocated widespread, local action as a means of social change. Her emphasis on a grassroots approach to the struggle for equal rights influenced the growth and success of the modern civil rights movement of the mid-20th century.

In 1938 Baker began her long association with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was then based in New York City. In December 1940 she started work there as a secretary. She traveled widely for the organization, especially in the South, recruiting members, raising money, and organizing local chapters. She was named director of branches in 1943, and became the highest-ranking woman in the NAACP. An outspoken woman, Baker believed in egalitarian ideals. She pushed the NAACP to decentralize its leadership structure and to aid its membership in more activist campaigns at the local level.

She believed that the work of the branches was the NAACP's lifeblood. Baker despised elitism and placed her confidence in many. She believed that the bedrock of any social change organization is not the eloquence or credentials of its top leaders, but in the commitment and hard work of the rank and file membership and the willingness and ability of those members to engage in a process of discussion, debate, and decision making. She especially stressed the importance of young people and women in the organization.

She travelled throughout the south, organizing campaigns, recruiting members and doing fundraising. She was so successful that in 1943 she was named “Director of Branches.” In only five years she had risen to become the highest ranked woman in arguably the most powerfull Black organization in the United States. Her ascension, however, did not come easy, nor did it make her popular throughout the organization. She was very vocal about her belief in the need to decentralize the leadership of the organization and the need to place more emphasis in empowering members at a local grassroots level. She believed that an organization should be built from the bottom up and not from the top down and that the true strength came not from the polished words of its leaders but rather from the hard work, actions and decision-making of its rank and file membership. She particularly pointed out the need for participation by women and by youth within the organization, two groups that she would advocate time and time again.

While traveling throughout the South on behalf of the NAACP, Baker met hundreds of black people, establishing lasting relationships with them. She slept in their homes, ate at their tables, spoke in their churches, and earned their trust. She wrote thank-you notes and expressed her gratitude to the people she met. This personalized approach to political work was one important aspect of Baker's effective effort to recruit more members, both men and women, into the NAACP. Baker formed a network of people in the South who would be important in the continued fight for civil rights. Whereas some northern organizers tended to talk down to rural southerners, Baker's ability to treat everyone with respect helped her in recruiting. Baker fought to make the NAACP more democratic. She tried to find a balance between voicing her concerns and maintaining a unified front.

In 1946 she left her position with the national chapter of the NAACP and returned to New York to look after an ailing niece. She continued to volunteer with the local chapter, however, and joined the New York branch to fight against police brutality and school segregation. In 1952 she became the president of the New York chapter, but she continued to butt heads with members of the national bureaucracy and left the organization in 1953 to mount an unsuccessful campaign to run for a New York City Council seat.

She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and the South, she worked alongside some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists, such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks, and Bob Moses, whom she first mentored as leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

There would not have been a SNCC without Ella Baker. While serving as Executive Secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), she organized the founding conference of SNCC, held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina during the Easter weekend of 1960. She had immediately recognized the potential of the students involved in the sit-in movement and wanted to bring leaders of the Movement together to meet one another and to consider future work

Baker criticized professionalized, charismatic leadership; she promoted grassroots organizing, radical democracy, and the ability of the oppressed to understand their worlds and advocate for themselves. She realized this vision most fully in the 1960s as the primary advisor and strategist of SNCC.She has been ranked as "One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement." She is known for her critiques not only of racism within American culture, but also of sexism within the civil rights movement.

Baker recognized that “the young people were the hope of any movement…They were the people who kept the spirit going.” As she knew, “the average Baptist minister didn’t really know organizing.” But Ella Baker did and the students, sensing her abilities, listened to her ushering in a new era in grassroots organizing.

Her belief was always that organizing people meant that they could lead themselves. After all, who else was better qualified to articulate their needs? She often said, “strong people don’t need strong leaders;” but facilitating this required extensive travel, conversation, and meetings. Baker was well-known for her indefatigable spirit.

Ella Baker: Making the Struggle Every Day

Cornel West's Thoughts On Ella Baker

https://daejagray.wordpress.com/tag/t-j-bob-roberts-interestingly/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Baker
https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/baker-ella/
https://www.coaachhealth.org/black-history-month-ella-josephine-baker/
https://www.greatblackheroes.com/civil-rights/ella-baker/
https://www.pinterest.com/maryblackston0092/ella-baker/
https://famousbiographies.org/ella-baker-biography/
https://www.famousafricanamericans.org/ella-baker

Monday, December 23, 2019

Thursday, November 21, 2019

DEAR READERS OF RON'S AMERICAN WORLD: Please take time to express your opinion of this article below. What do you think is the right thing to do about removing both T-Rump and Pence for bribery/knowledge of bribery and not reporting or stopping it. The Constitution provides that the Speaker of the House then takes over the presidency. That speaker is Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat. That would be a historical first. How would the country react? Why not obey that rule? That is important to some -- actually many like me. But Leonhardt disagrees. Read below and tell us your opinion.

November 21, 2019

By David Leonhardt

Opinion Columnist

The president led a conspiracy to use American foreign policy for his personal benefit. We’ve known that much for weeks. Yesterday, we heard a credible accusation that the vice president, among other top officials, was aware of the conspiracy and evidently did nothing to stop it.

Imagine for a moment that congressional Republicans were willing to make good on the oath they have all taken to defend the Constitution. In that scenario (fanciful, I realize), both President Trump and Vice President Pence would be at risk of being impeached and removed. This combination would then create a new and separate political crisis.

Why? Because the second person in the presidential line of succession, after the vice president, is the speaker of the House, who is of course currently a Democrat — Nancy Pelosi. If both Trump and Pence were removed from office, Pelosi would become president, flipping partisan control of the White House and the executive branch.

That should never happen. A scandal should be able to lead to the removal of individual officials, but it should not reverse which party won an election. “If the electorate says that such-and-such a party should have the White House for four years, it ought to have the White House for four years,” Dwight Eisenhower wisely said.

The potential for a partisan reversal raises all kinds of problems. It creates incentives for one party to exaggerate a scandal (which, to be clear, is not happening in this case). It can also lead to more voters distrusting an impeachment process. “The whole point of having a line of succession is to ensure a smooth transition and a continuity of administration in a time of crisis,” my colleague Jesse Wegman has written. “Having a leader of the opposing party take over the White House, especially in an era of intense political polarization, would not achieve that, to put it mildly.”

Or as Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg Opinion writes: “It’s contrary to the entire structure of the constitutional system, which separates legislative from executive institutions and forces them to share powers.”

The line of succession stems from a 1947 law, and it can be changed with a new law anytime. Pelosi and House Democrats should pass such a law as soon as possible, so that every potential successor comes from the executive branch. It would be a victory for good government — and would also send a message about the severity of Trump’s and Pence’s high crimes and misdemeanors.

Monday, November 18, 2019

Malcolm X - Interview At Berkeley (1963)

Sounds vaguely reiminiscent of society of the present era at times, doesn't it? What does this thinking meant to our history as well as our present and future as a people as simply a "Way of Thought."

The Life and Surprising Times of Dr Dorothy Height

This is an amazing story of the life of a great African-American woman of distinction. Her life story is one of staunch self-development and appreciator of the life and times of the Black populous of the times. Having been turned down from her admittance to Barnard College in Manhatten because they had reached their two-Negro quota -- even though they had already accepted her, Dorothy managed to immediately make new plans for her young life. She then stayed on in NYC with relatives. lived next door to musician W. D. Handy, a blues composer, and hobnobbed with noted Black people of the Harlem Rennaissance like Langston Hughes, learned from encounters with W. E. B. DuBois and others. Dorothy was admitted to NYC and graduated with a Masters. She becamse an NYC Case Worker. Living in Harlem, she met notable people from many other organizations such as Mary McCleod Bethune, Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins. Bethune's influence was remarkable to young Dorothy at that time as Dorothy came to follow the footsteps of this distinguiwhed Black woman, Mary McCleod Betune, a Mover and Shaker of the times. She lived a life of dedication and achievement for herself and for her people. She worked with student church groups. She became a non-violent activist. Surprisingly she began her activist life spark in the tutelage of the Marcus Garvey Movement and advanced to other causes, specifically the organizational offerings of Mary McCleod Bethune who became a women of great worth to her people in her own right. Dorothy became a student activisits under the Garvey influence, Later she became a student leader of several youth organizations. She lived through the Harlem riot. She vowed to get into a position to do something more effective for her people. She got a job at the YWCA, where she could use the drive for equality and justice she felt. There she met Mary McCleod Bethune. Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women. At one meeting at the Y, both Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt came into Dorothy's life. The rest is history that unfolds interestingly and beautifully in the video of Dorothy Height's illustrious life. It would be of interest to you to listen and experience this significant story.