Gerda Lerner, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, interviewed Ella Baker while researching her book Black Women in White America, published in 1972 (Pantheon Books: New York, pages 346-52.) The following text is an excerpt from the transcript of that interview with Baker.
In my organizational work, I have never thought in terms of my “making a contribution.” I just thought of myself as functioning where there was a need. And if I have made a contribution I think it may be that I had some influence on a large number of people.
As assistant field secretary of the branches of the NAACP, much of my work was in the South. At that time [1940s] the NAACP was the leader on the cutting edge of social change. I remember when NAACP membership in the South was the basis for getting beaten up or even killed.
I used to leave New York about the 15th of February and travel through the South for four to five months. I would go to, say, Birmingham, Alabama and help organize membership campaigns. And in the process of helping to organize membership campaigns, there was the opportunity for developing community reactions. You would go into areas where people were not yet organized in the NAACP and try to get them more involved. Maybe you would start with some simple thing like the fact that they had no street lights, or the fact that in the given area somebody had been arrested or had been jailed in a manner that was considered illegal and unfair, and the like. You would deal with whatever the local problem was, and on the basis of the needs of the people you would try to organize them in the NAACP. . .
My basic sense of it has always been to get people to understand that in the long run they themselves are the only protection they have against violence or injustice. If they had only ten members in the NAACP at a given point, those ten members could be in touch with twenty-five members in the next little town, with fifty in the next and throughout the state as a result of the organization of state conferences, and they, of course, could be linked up with the national. People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves. . . .
[Baker left the NAACP but continued to volunteer with the organization throughout the fifties in New York City while working as an activist within the community. After the 1954 Supreme Court order to desegregate schools, Baker was selected for the Mayor’s Commission on School Integration.]
I’ve never believed that people who control things really were willing and able to pay the price of integration. From a practical standpoint, anyone who looked at the Harlem area knew that the potential for integration per se was basically impossible unless there were some radically innovative things done. And those innovative things would not be acceptable to those who ran the school system, nor to communities, nor even to the people who call themselves supporters of integration. I did a good deal of speaking, and I went to Queens, I went to the upper West side, and the people very eagerly said they wanted school integration. But when you raised the question of whether they would permit or would welcome Blacks to live in the same houses with them, which was the only practical way at that stage to achieve integration, they squirmed. Integration certainly had to be pushed concurrently with changing the quality of education that the black children were getting, and changing the attitudes of the educational establishment toward the black community.
I don’t think we achieved too much with the committee except to pinpoint certain issues and to have survived some very sharp confrontations with the Superintendent and others on the Board of Education. But out of it came increased fervor on the part of the black communities to make some changes. One of the gratifying things to me is the fact that even as late as this year I have met people who were in that group and who have been continuously active in the struggle for quality education in the black communities ever since.
There certainly has been progress in the direction of the capacity of people to face this issue. And to me, when people themselves know what they are looking for and recognize that they can exercise some influence by action, that’s progress.
Come 1957, I went down South a couple of times in connection with the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference…. I stayed with the SCLC for two and a half years, because they didn’t have anybody. My official capacity was varied. When I first went down [to set up the Atlanta office], I didn’t insist on a title, which is nothing new or unusual for me; it didn’t bother me. I was just there in person. And then they were looking for a minister, a man, and I helped to find a minister and a man, and he stayed a while, and when he came I decided that since I was doing what I was doing, he was the director and I became, I think, co-director. And then there was nobody, and of course there was no money in those days, so I kept on until the summer of 1960. And prior to that, of course, the sit-ins had started, and I was able to get the SCLC to at least sponsor the conference in Raleigh. We had hoped to call together about 100 or 125 of the young leaders who had emerged in the sit-ins in the South. But of course the sit-ins had been so dynamic in the field that when we got to the meeting we had two hundred and some people, including some from the North. And out of that conference of the Easter weekend of 1960, which I coordinated and organized, we had a committee that came out of it, and out of that committee SNCC was born.
And after SNCC came into existence, of course, it opened up a new era of struggle. I felt the urge to stay close by. Because if I had done anything anywhere, it had been largely in the role of supporting things, and in the background of things that needed to be done for the organizations that were supposedly out front. So I felt it I had done it for the elders, I could do it for the young people. . . .
[Baker’s relationship to SNCC was purely voluntary, so she supported herself by taking a variety of positions with community organizations in Atlanta before moving back to New York after the 1964 elections.]
There are those, some of the young people especially, who have said to me that if I had not been a woman I would have been well known in certain places, and perhaps held certain kinds of positions.
I have always felt it was a handicap for oppressed peoples to depend so largely upon a leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a spot in the public limelight. It usually means he has been touted through the public media, which means that the media made him and the media may undo him. There is also the danger in our culture that, because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement. Such people get so involved with playing the game of being important that they exhaust themselves and their time, and they don’t do the work of actually organizing people.
For myself, circumstances frequently dictated what had to be done as I saw it. For example, I had no plans to go down and set up the office of SCLC. But it seemed unless something were done whatever impetus had been gained would be lost, and nobody else was available who was willing or able to do it. So I went because to me it was more important what was a potential for all of us than it was to do what I might have done for myself. I knew from the beginning that as a woman, an older woman, in a group of ministers who are accustomed to having women largely as supporters, there was no place for me to have come into a leadership role. The competition wasn’t worth it.
The movement of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s was carried largely by women, since it came out of church support groups. It was sort of second nature to women to play a supportive role. How many made a conscious decision on the basis of the larger goals, how many on the basis of habit pattern, I don’t know. But it’s true that the numbers of women who carried the movement is much larger than that of men. Black women have had to carry this role, and I think the younger women are insisting on equal footing.
I don’t advocate anybody following the pattern I followed, unless they find themselves in a situation where they think that the larger goals will be shortchanged if they don’t. From the standpoint of the historical pattern of society, which seems to assume that this is the best role for women, I think that certainly the young people who are challenging this ought to be challenging it, and it ought to be changed. But I also think you have to have a certain sense of your own value, and a sense of security on your part, to be able to forgo the glamor of what the leadership role offers. From the standpoint of my work and my own self-concepts, I don’t think I have thought of myself largely as a woman. I thought of myself as an individual with a certain amount of sense of the need to participate in the movement. I have always thought what is needed is the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership among other people. Every time I see a young person who has come through the system to a stage where he could profit from the system and identify with it, but who identifies more with the struggle of black people who have not had his chance, every time I find such a person I take a new hope. I feel a new life as a result of it.
Source: Jonathan Birnbaum and Clarence Taylor, ed., Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle. New York: New York University Press, 2000, pp. 467-71. Document 5.21.9