WOMAN’S HISTORY Mae Ebert Defender Contributing Writer Last issue we explained the term “paramour rights,” which writer Zora Neale Hurston had encountered in the timber camps of north Florida from Jacksonville to Pensacola. This unwritten law of the pre-Civil War South referred to the right of a white man to take a Black woman as his concubine and force her to have his children whether she was married or not. While not surprising during slavery, this practice continued well past the end of the Civil War, and became institutionalized in the Segregationist South, buttressed by Jim Crow legislation making miscegenation illegal, thereby removing any rights of a woman of African descent from suing her paramour for paternity-related issues of child support. This subject continues to follow us today as a frame of reference from which white men operate, giving them credence to act as they please, especially those in authority like the police. Another woman you should know took women’s rights seriously – Ms. Ella Josephine Baker, who was born December 13, 1903 and passed the same day 83 years later. She was a tireless advocate for human rights and especially rights for Blacks and women. While working alongside wellknown figures like W.E.B. Du Bois and A. Phillip Randolph, Baker mentored Diane Nash, Rosa Parks and other women. She worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Though she was revered in her time, few know of her today because she worked primarily behind the scenes as an organizer. She did not seek notoriety, fame or validation and she was not associated with the leadership. In her own words, Baker said, “You didn’t see me on television; you didn’t see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces, out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders.” Far from shy, Ella Baker spoke to the silencing behaviors experienced by women of color, though her work was often overlooked and underappreciated. The Black Panther Party and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were mostly comprised of or developed by Black women, yet history remembers the men who situated themselves as figureheads.
Ella Josephine Baker
An Organizer Ahead of Her Time Inclusion Instead
Of Exclusion
It’s not a tit for tat discussion, but rather one that we must still address, one of inclusion rather than exclusion. Even Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women addressed how she had to push her way inside the inner circle because the men did not invite her. This impulse to silence Black women continues today – especially in light of the recent Holtzclaw trial. Black women were targeted by the Oklahoma City police officer because he knew that their sexual history and membership in a marginalized community would taint their believability, creating a prejudice clouding their creditability by those in authority – and he was right. Sitting in the courtroom listening to the questions asked of the women, it was obvious that the victims of the assault were just as much on trial as was Holtzclaw. The final blow; the fact that he was found guilty of only 18 of the 36 separate counts indicates that the women were, in fact, not believed. Yes, he received a recommended sentence of over 200 years, but the truth remains that the jury still did not believe some of the women. Even though there was a guilty ruling, Holtzclaw still won. Be clear of the fact that his plan partially worked. He set out to take advantage of the perception of Black women, knowing that they’d be viewed skeptically – and they were. Ella Baker knew that if we are to empower people silenced by white supremacy, we must be intentional about doing the hard work of organizing.
04 Mar 30 - Apr 05, 2016 • THE CHICAGO DEFENDER
“Baker believed in empowering the common people with skills to make demands of the political establishment.” Baker often said, “The movement made Martin, and not Martin the movement.” Considering the era when she said it, these were radical statements about Martin Luther King. But Baker understood the importance of grassroots activism and she thought it important to highlight the fact that true power lies in organizing oppressed people for action. Strong willed and outspoken, Baker was ridiculed for her vocal and direct demeanor while she weakened old expectations surrounding female performance. But later, women in the Black Panther Party directly quoted Baker as an inspiration and began to imitate her tenacity, passion for serving, and drive to bring meeting ground to the fight for equality. Baker once said, “Even if segregation is gone, we will still need to be free; we will still have to see that everyone has a job. Even if we can all vote, but if people are still hungry, we will not be free…”
Baker’s strength was her clear understanding that to fight oppression, one must fight all systems simultaneously in which racism is intricately woven. Her greatest contribution might be the statement that, “the equity for which we fight must be inclusive, expansive, and always challenging the status quo.”
Imitating White Culture Ella Baker had a method of organizing that was both effective and revolutionary, and that completely dismissed the traditional paradigm of leadership that had plagued the Black community from its earliest history. Historically, we must note that Blacks imitated white culture, in particular, male dominance. This paradigm is demonstrated in the first institutions – family and the church. The Black church integrated white and Black isms. Emotionally, Blacks responded in the tradition of our African heritage, to charismatic masculine leadership based on the delivery of the message, which evoked the instinctual response from the congregation. The church followed the white paradigm. But Baker believed in empowering the common people – whether a sharecropper, teenager, or the illiterate man or woman – with skills to make demands of the political establishment. Baker believed that the real struggle evolved from and emerged out of the proletariat, or the working class people, who were closest to all that is wrong with the system and those who need the change the most. Ms. Baker believed that “people did not need fancy leaders with de-
grees and pedigree,” to tell them what was best for them. She said often, “The major job was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use, and it could only be used if they understood what was happening and how group action could counter violence.” Baker’s life work is a testament to the radical idea that educated elites were not the natural leaders of Black people. Baker concluded after serious reflection of her work with the NAACP that, “The leadership was all from the professional class, basically. I think these are the factors that have kept it from moving to a more militant position.” She didn’t stop there. She was just as critical of the self-assured Black preachers who appeared to have captivated their congregations with elevated rhetorical skill only to leave the actual work that had to be done to others. Ms. Baker was something of a rascal. She actually asked Dr. King directly why he allowed such hero worship, and he responded simply, that it was what people wanted. This answer did not satisfy Baker in the least. She described Dr. King as a pampered member of Atlanta’s Black elite who had the mantle of leadership handed to him rather than having had to earn it, a member of a coddled “silver spoon brigade.” Baker was well aware that the hypnotic trance of Dr. King’s richly textured cadence, coupled with a message of hope grounded in truth like music, moved touched and inspired Blacks for many reasons. Most were simply impressed by the ability of the Black preacher to speak the White man’s language with such ease and to articulate and relate messages that resonated with them. They perpetuated the same story that white men had been telling them all their lives. Baker offered a feminist approach to understanding Black American politics and the institutional Black church. Yet her political ideology was also fused with influences from the socialism of Max Yeargan, George Schyler and Marxist literature that she read in the 1930s, as well as the conservative philosophies of Washington, Du Bois, and Garvey. But it was her communal upbringing in rural North Carolina and her connection to her grandparents’ slave heritage that inspired her focus on mobilizing, organizing and empowering the masses. Through her mother, she inherited a sense of service and that combined with the organizational skill of the Black Baptist Missionary Movement with the intellectual urgency of W.E.B. Du Bois’s “talented tenth” philosophy. All of this provided her a perspective that was grounded in activism and economic equality. www.chicagodefender.com