Book Review
Mansfield Institute for Social Justice

By Jeff Edwards

Even before I finished reading Barbara Ransby’s biography of Ella Baker I was telling all my activist friends that they had to read this book. More often than not, I got the response, “Ella Baker? You mean the singer?” It reminded me that when Barbara first told me she was working on this biography, I wondered the same thing myself.

I don’t know why so many of us hear “Ella Baker” and think “singer.” (A Google search, anyway, produces no singers named Ella Baker.) Baker is the one person to have played crucial roles in the success of all three of the most important organizations of the Southern civil rights movement—the NAACP (in a variety of capacities, including the Director of Branches from 1941-46), the SCLC (as a co-founder and its first paid staff person, in effect the executive director), and SNCC (as a co-founder and coordinator from 1960-65)—a feat all the more remarkable for her being a woman.

But listing these various positions and affiliations doesn’t begin to tell the Ella Baker story, which has at its core a particular ethic, a particular vision of social change, and particular conceptions of leadership and organization that all cut against the grain of those dominant in the major movement organizations of her day. She was absolutely convinced that social change could be brought about only through the empowerment and self-organization of the most marginal and powerless people in society. How did she effect the empowerment of the most marginal and powerless? How did she operate with great effect within organizations that had cultures and powerful personalities that were oftentimes at odds with her “radical democratic vision”?

Even if few of us until now knew this amazing story, much of the culture of today’s most compelling left-progressive activism is rooted in the vision and values Baker articulated. Dorian Warren, a member of the Chicago Workers Rights Board who is a leader in the current campaign to keep WalMart out of Chicago, says, “Ella Baker’s life and all the lessons she has taught us—political lessons, organizing lessons, lessons on how to be socially just—are now the norm amongst today’s generation of student activists. We maybe take for granted a commitment to radical democratic politics which is not sectarian but also pragmatic; and egalitarian process-centered politics which takes into account the intersection of different types of oppression. This is all a legacy of Ella Baker.”

But not knowing the Ella Baker story, which means not knowing how all kinds of organizations that contributed to the black freedom movement concretely functioned and developed, has meant not knowing some of the important lessons of the seminal social movement of the last half of the 20th century in the US. How can Baker’s work help us think through our models for organizing and our conceptions of social change in Chicago today? Saket Soni, a community organizer now at the Organization of the Northeast (ONE) and formerly at the Coalition of African, Asian, European, and Latin American Immigrants of Illinois (CAAELII), says, “Emerging movements like the immigrant rights movement can learn from Ella Baker’s vision and her practice as we try to train and mobilize masses to confront power. This biography truly inspires those of us who work with the belief that tactical victories are not victories unless they grow the power of people involved in the political process.”

Ransby’s book contains the stories of many organizing efforts that confronted problems that are still familiar to us here in Chicago today. Baker’s first organizing endeavor began in Harlem in 1927 when she helped found the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League, which promoted the creation of buying clubs, grocery stores, and bulk distribution networks at a time of extreme economic hardship. Baker organized against police brutality and for quality education for black children in New York City before beginning her work with the national NAACP.

Baker would go on to use her NAACP position of Director of Branches in the 1940s to travel throughout the South to exchange political and organizing knowledge between herself and members of local NAACP branches. This sort of exchange would be central to the rest of her organizing career.

For myself, I cannot give this book enough praise because of the way it demonstrates the importance of organizing, of organizing with a “radical democratic” spirit, and of communicating and working across social boundaries. It details the realities of progressive social change and of how that change was brought about through the grassroots organizing efforts of the black freedom struggle. I am happy to have a chance to talk about this book with friends and colleagues at Roosevelt at a time when progressives, including myself, are trying to figure out the implications of the 2004 national elections. Whatever our take on the election, this book is a reminder that the future will ultimately shaped by what we are able to do on the ground over the long haul organizing people—in the tradition of Ella Baker.