Analysis Of The Ella Baker: A Long Civil Rights Movement

Several years before Jacqueline Dowd Hall would publish her influential call for a “long civil rights movement,” Payne warns us that the lack of context of the traditional civil rights narrative makes it hard to understand why the Black freedom struggle entered such a forceful phase in the 1950s and 1960s. Without understanding the new self-consciousness among African Americans during the World War II-period, the strategizing over a double victory campaign that Richard Dalifume called attention to as early as 1968, we literally fail to understand the importance of grassroots self-empowerment and activism that created the need for a national leadership in the first place. However, we should also keep in mind that some of these long-established

organizations provided the framework and the networks upon which the local activism could manifest itself, and in turn, the national organizations depended upon a broad local membership to gain the legitimacy and authority to make their voices count before the courts and in negotiations with the government.
Ella Baker was an incredibly inspiring activist. In more than one way, she, Septima Clark and others were several steps ahead of most of their contemporaries. However, Baker, like other civil rights activists, went through different stages of personal experience that ultimately shaped the way she approached issues of leadership by the 1960s. As Payne details at the end of his essay, the leadership of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. also evolved, and lead them to rethink central tenants of their activism and at least in part also their attitudes about the role of women in the movement. The fact that this transformation is hardly a topic in most conventional political narratives speaks volumes and points to the broader problems of a historical scholarship that simplifies complex human realities along lines of “good and evil” and thus needs to keep people affixed to certain roles. In some parts of his essay, Payne inadvertently recreates a moralistic narrative in which different leadership roles are judged more upon moral considerations than on the basis of an analysis that investigates the benefits and the drawbacks of the leadership styles in their “particular” realms, the local and the national level. Sometimes, it might be less a question as to who the most important actors were than to delineate how the different activists filled in complementary roles, or to analyze when and where they were successful and where and when they were not. As beneficial as Baker’s model of leadership had been to the different regional and local struggles, it would certainly have run into some major difficulties on the national level.
Theoretically, almost all people are able to become leaders; practically few people choose to do so.

Ella Baker is a case in point: she grew up experiencing strong female leadership, and by the time she helped to found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee she had a clear idea how a lasting strategy, one that not solely depends on the political positions of federal incumbents, be it in the administration or the judicial branch, needed to look. While Ella Baker forced leadership independent of existing notions on constraints of race, gender, and class, few people were ready to follow her lead in all of these aspects. This is still true today, as ideas of race, gender, class, and education still too often inhibit people’s ideas as to how a leader needs to look. Of no lesser importance is the fact that our society still idealizes a model that revolves around notions of excellence and merit that disguise how privilege is recreated across racial and social lines. Central to the issues that Ella Baker’s and others before and after her struggled to achieve was a mindset of lasting self-empowerment among people that would outlast volatile and ephemeral political coalitions on the national and the local level. This meant more than just teaching them how to write or read, so that they could pass the required literary test. Rather, it entailed a strong psychological component, a guidance to live one’s life in a self-reliant way: a long-term strategy to create a better humanity without barriers of race, class, gender, and religious views. The question we need to ask in this case is whether the U.S. and the rest of the world were ready for such a leadership or not. A question that is still relevant today as our political and economic system still thrive on the basis of guidance from “above,” as we continue to idolize and vilify

people.