1A REVOLUTION AWAKENSThe HBCU Revolts & Ella Baker
I didn’t break rules, but I challenged rules.
And I didn’t have senses enough not to do the speaking,
even to groups that were older than I.
ELLA BAKER
As I excavated history in search of a North Star to say, “there, there is where most of what I recognize today as the framework for civil disobedience, social activism, and community organizing,” where could I have possibly begun if not with an unflinching, tenacious Black woman?
A still but daring force.
A shoulder upon which I stand.
Whose warfare paved the way for the likes of me and the many generations of native and surrogate African Americans to become beneficiaries of the freedoms we walk in, day in, day out, without much thought.
Many could easily name a dozen Black men in a blink if asked about consequential leaders in the fight for righteousness.
You probably just did.
I’m sure Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Asa Philip Randolph, John Lewis, or Marcus Garvey came to mind. Or, perhaps, Thurgood Marshall or W.E.B Du Bois or Bayard Rustin.
But bolstering those voices was a firebrand.
A woman focused on bottom-up, people-powered campaigning.
An effective in-the-background strategist and changemaker.
A woman, who, after years of steering such leaders while in the shadows, would be crowned the mother of the civil rights movement.
Before Ella Josephine Baker charged generations of stalwart warriors, always intent on strong people not needing leaders, her grassroots efforts began when she was a teenager, whetting her voice as a student at Shaw University. And before that, growing up on a farm purchased by her once-enslaved grandfather in Littleton, North Carolina.
Ella is my starting point not because Black women are regularly erased from public memory or obscured from historical portrayals of resistance.
I begin with Ella because her approach, though powerful, was simple.
She used a pen to write letters. She used her restraint to say “no” when needed. She used her mighty voice to speak for those who couldn’t. She used her diplomacy to build communities. She used what was in her hands, what was available to her, within her reach.
It is this—Ella’s dignity and humility—that I believe resonated so powerfully with the leaders she helped grow. As the movement for a just civilization and parity for African Americans progressed, she started, influenced, and built organizations and people whose impact remains essential.
Focused on economic justice, suffrage, and education rights, Ella challenged leaders while uplifting women and children. She had a deliberate hand in several progressive movements of the twentieth century, from the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League during the 1930s Great Depression era to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the 1940s to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1950s to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Southern Conference Educational Fund, and the March on Washington in the 1960s.
To understand the woman she became, the circumstances Ella came up in is where we begin.
NOVEMBER 11, 1918. WORLD WAR I ENDS.
More than four years of war had gone by.
More than 16 million soldiers and civilians dead.
Alongside allies Russia, France, Britain, Italy, and Serbia, America found victory in the First World War over the Central Powers—Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire—ushering in a new way of life across the country, later labeled as a period of prosperity.
Soldiers returned with new philosophies and skills. Sweeping changes came to electricity, science, and technology, reforming societal and economic progress in consumerism and transportation. Businesses boomed, fueling the economy, heightening a sense of security.
In effect, the modern era of capitalism had kicked off.
The notion of social and cultural independence and voting also began taking hold for women. For Black Americans too.
Still, lynchings persisted in the racially segregated South, where Jim Crow laws enforced white supremacy and systemic discrimination against Black Americans in every aspect of public life, from voting to education. Black Americans also endured violence and intimidation from white citizens who acted with impunity. However, Black Americans began thriving economically and politically more than in any other decade, largely thanks to the Great Migration, when millions fled from the rural South to industrial cities in the North to find work and fill labor shortages created by the war in the auto, meatpacking, and steel industries.
This uplift, though, threatened the social order of Jim Crow, unsettling some white Americans. So much so, towns that feared racial integration began to make it known that Black Americans weren’t welcome in their neighborhoods, discouraging and threatening them with bigoted signs.
Cool Summers, Mild Winters, No Blizzards, No Negroes
Whites only after dark.
A Good Place to Live. No Negroes.
N*gg*r, don’t let the sun go down on you in this town.
Areas that existed under this blatant discriminatory housing covenant—which still exists in some parts of the South—were coined “sundown towns.” Death lurked if a Black person was caught in those places after dark. Black Americans were welcomed to work in these towns but could not live there. If they dared stay after sunset, they were beaten, terrorized, and arrested.
This outright threat of death, however, didn’t stop Black Americans from walking deeper into their unexplored freedom. With their increasing presence in Northern states came a surge in the visibility of Black culture. The Harlem Renaissance was particularly resonant. Music, marked by jazz and blues, formed a cultural movement of African Americans reveling in the postwar bliss with expressions of artistic dances like the cakewalk, the flea hop, the black bottom, and the Charleston. All expressed freedom through bodily movement. A symbolic physical signal that was wildly, deliberately antithetic behavior of their enslaved ancestors who were used to having their bodies routinely abused, observed, and handled.
The Renaissance’s popularity and its bold expressions of liberation propelled a rise in membership of the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan, which was already seeing a surge since the release of the 1915 film Birth of a Nation. Based on Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s 1905 anti-Black novel The Clansman, the film showed adorative brutality against African Americans (played by white men in Blackface) and gleeful violence against African American rights and freedom.
KKK members, many of them lower-middle-class Protestants who remained fearful that non-whites would strip traditional American culture of its values, were limited to the South upon the group’s formation in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee. By 1925, its membership had catapulted from the thousands during the post–Civil War Reconstruction South to two million nationwide.
The war, its end, and the mass migration Northward so solidified a new sense of self among African Americans, it culminated in what was later dubbed the “New Negro Movement.” Yet, despite facing discrimination in all aspects of life after migrating North, Black Americans encountered fewer barriers to employment and education compared to the South. Their expansion into the workforce only created more vitriol. This would later lead Asa Philip Randolph, a rising civil rights activist of this era, to form the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—the first labor union led by Black Americans. They called attention to the increasing abuse in hiring practices and working conditions for Black workers.
The move North also meant that Black workers began earning more and starting families, so they needed bigger homes. Yet another space for discrimination emerged, leading to the rise in urban ghettos—with traces that remain today—as Black Americans were excluded from housing in neighborhoods already populated by white Americans. These communities were considered safer, with better living conditions and resources from the federal government. It’s the kind of quintessential segregation and explicit racism that was already prevalent in the South and the kind that led to the Tulsa Race Massacre.
A microcosm of the prevailing racial tensions ignited the violence that erupted on that 1921 Memorial Day weekend: A white female elevator operator on South Main Street screamed at the sight of a Black man. The actual details and the sequence of events remain unclear, but the woman went on to allege sexual assault. And so ensued the deadliest racial violence in American history, as a white mob assembled and burned down the burgeoning Black Wall Street in Oklahoma’s majority Black Greenwood neighborhood.
These compounding events occurred nearly six decades after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all enslaved people in Southern states fighting in the Civil War were to be freed. This was also a time when Ella Baker’s grandparents had been enslaved themselves. And though her later years at Shaw Academy and University strengthened her resolve to drive progress for the Othered in society, as she fought for righteousness and parallelism, her school mobilizations weren’t what first stoked Ella’s fiery hunger for activism. That blaze was first lit by her ancestors.
* * *
We’re our ancestor’s wildest dreams.
When people invoke this maxim, it is to say the generation of old desired that future generations would be mightier, abounding in much, to be better than they were because they had tilled the soil, breaking through for their descendants. To say, and believe, that they’d softened the journey’s tread.
This was true for Ella.
Born on December 13, 1903, her crusade story begins with her maternal grandparents, Mitchell and Josephine Elizabeth Ross, who were both born into slavery.
Mitchell, who Ella once described as tall and lean, was of Cherokee and African descent, though she was never sure of which tribe for the latter. He was a Baptist minister who not only taught about God and faith but also about freedom and oneness. He was a principled man with foresight who in 1888—twenty-five years after Emancipation—purchased fifty acres of an old slave plantation by the riverbanks of Warren County, North Carolina, where he also built a church and school. It was the same property he and his wife once labored on when enslaved.
That was the beginning of Mitchell’s declaration of himself as more than a former slave.
An autodidact, Mitchell learned to read on his own. He saw knowledge as a prerequisite to social mobility. He so disassociated himself from the entrapment of slavery that he refused to eat, or allow his family to eat, foods from their enslavement, such as cornbread. He was always for his people but knew most were still ensnared in the ways of slavery, so he solidified himself as a leader of men. Mitchell’s social progress became a mark of what was possible.
“He established himself, sisters and brothers, cousins, on fifty- and sixty-acre plots,” Ella once recalled. “Out of it came sort of a community.”
Ella was a self-proclaimed talker who engaged Mitchell often as a child. She felt she did so because of her inquisitiveness and curiosity about the world around her. This led her to tag along with him often on his routes throughout the community and to church when her family moved between Norfolk, Virginia, and Warren County during summer months. “Grandpa would hitch his horse to the buggy,” she once said, “and I’d go wherever he was going.”
On his property, Mitchell also ran a farm complete with wheat and corn, cattle and chickens, and an orchard. It was a vital food source for the predominantly poverty-stricken community. “You’d start off with the early peaches, and then you’d have peaches all through the summer up until the fall,” Ella later remembered. “[Mitchell] had enough cows to have, say, ten or twelve gallons of milk a day, so if you came, there was plenty to eat … It was the business of good living. And nobody ever got turned away.”
When the river would overflow the land, destroying the crops, their neighbors’ needs would go unmet. As a result, Mitchell had to mortgage the property twice: once in 1889 and again in 1890. “This was the kind of background [he had],” Ella once said, “the fighting background, [it] exhibited in his attitude.”
This is where Ella spent her formative years: a hallowed home that defined her calling, her point of being, her why. There, she was bathed in advocacy, becoming acutely aware of what an unranked society could be. One that was rooted in communal improvement and egalitarian principles, where you could involve yourself with people and their needs.
There, she witnessed her family change their world inch by inch, person by person. She saw Mitchell defend civil rights before the term “civil rights” had been widely coined. He was a devoted defender of people, of equality, and of what was right.
As a little girl, Ella would join in and lend a hand to community members who came to the land to be fed, to relish in fellowship, to sing songs of freedom, to restore their faith. She watched her grandfather preach about salvation, God, His goodness, and a living hope for tomorrow—a better one with plenty.
That idea of expectancy was most resonant in his teachings.
She often remembered her grandfather asking his congregants one stirring question, “What do you hope to accomplish?” As freedmen, many former slaves struggled with the idea of freedom: what to do with it, how to become who they could be. Many remained in that in-between place. Mitchell knew this and tried to be an example to them.
He died and was buried on his property in 1909, when Ella was six. Yet his imprint on his granddaughter was enduring. “He always called me grand lady,” she said in a 1968 interview, “and he’d always talk to you as a person rather than as a child. My memory of him is pretty sharp, plus it has been accentuated by the stories that come out of the family. My mother was basically her father’s daughter to the extent that she emulated much of what he did.”
The foundation that Mitchell had laid in Ella flourished with his widow, Josephine. Sharing stories of resilience and resistance from her experiences of slavery, Josephine further bolstered their granddaughter’s sense of purpose and empowerment.
Copyright © 2024 by Rita Omokha
