Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement

Ella Baker is the focus of Ransby’s biography. She was born in 1903 to Anna Ross and Blake Baker, two middle-class black parents. She was raised partially in Norfolk, VA, and in Littleton, NC, and became involved in the black freedom movement after moving to Harlem at the end of the 1920s. From there she worked for the NAACP, helped found SCLC, and was a major influence at SNCC. She was an activist, an organizer, and an educator until her death in 1986.

Baker’s mother was active in her local church and raised her children to be respectable “race-ambassadors” for the black community.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a dynamic preacher from Atlanta who became a centerpiece of the civil rights moment of the 1950s and ’60s. He led marches for voting rights, became involved in local labor movements, and led the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, which drew an estimated 250,000 people to Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. He was one of the founding members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which Baker worked for from 1940 to 1946.

A gay black man, Rustin worked closely with Stanley Levison and Ella Baker in forming the In Friendship group. He was later integral to SNCC’s Freedom Rides movement. He faced immense discrimination not only as a black man but as a gay man too.

A Jewish lawyer drawn to the civil rights moment during and after World War II, Stanley Levison partnered with Baker and Bayard Rustin to form the In Friendship group, which funded poor activists and organizations across the South.

Founders of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), the Bradens were a liberal white couple and were frequently accused of being anti-American because of their left-wing views on trade unions and human rights. Baker worked closely with them to run Freedom Schools and the like in conjunction with SCLC and SNCC.

A Mississippi black woman, Fannie Lou Hamer was involved in direct voting rights action and was even shot at for exercising her right to register. She became an important figure in the movement, speaking at numerous Mississippi rallies and events.

Founders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), the Shuttlesworths were at the center of the fight in Birmingham and organized campaigns on voting rights and other matters. Baker worked with them in the early 1960s on civil rights hearings in the area. The Shuttlesworths faced frequent and intense violence, including a firebombing of their house on Christmas Day in 1956.

John Lewis is a politician and activist. He was one of the founding members of SNCC and one of the original Freedom Riders. He worked closely with both Ella Baker and Martin Luther King Jr. on the Selma voting marches in Alabama and on the Freedom Summer protests in Mississippi in 1964.

Head of the NAACP during Baker’s time, White had many disagreements with fellow black intellectual W.E.B. DuBois. White and Baker frequently butted heads over her field organizing work. He eventually wrote a memo in preparation of pushing Baker out of the organization.

Schuyler was a journalist who considered himself socialist, encountered critiques that made him reconsider, and then rejected the philosophy of socialism. He was in an interracial marriage with a white woman from Texas, Josephine, and their home was a gathering place for Harlem’s intellectuals for much of the time that Ella Baker resided there.

Ella Baker’s husband from around 1930 to 1958, Bob Roberts developed his own forms of activism but ultimately lived a quiet, low-profile life, so much so that the FBI had no idea Ella Baker was even married when they began watching her while she worked with the NAACP in the 1940s.

A young black college student in the 1960s, Nash became one of the founding members and central voices in the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee.

John Tilley was a Baltimore-based preacher who was brought in to head SCLC. He overextended himself in trying to maintain his pastorate in Baltimore and manage the organization. He resigned just a year later, and Baker picked up the slack from his failed attempts to organize the Crusade for Citizenship.