CENTER THE MARGINS for Ella Baker, perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project. You can purchase this design here.
Strong people don’t need a strong leader
“A woman taking the dignified and self-respecting manner that was a familiar feature of black family life into the rugged political domain was nothing short of revolutionary.” —Bob Moses, quoted in Barbara Ransby’s book, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, A Radical Democratic Vision
Ella Baker had a presence and commanded attention. She could maneuver effectively in all-male circles and all-white contexts. She entered every room as if she belonged there—which she did! In her most powerful years she appeared as an unassuming middle aged Black woman with her purse under her arm, with her hat on her head, and good southern manners. (Like many of my favorite perSISTERS she was very fond of hats.)
Ella Josephine Baker (December 13, 1903 – December 13, 1986) was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. She was a largely behind-the-scenes, grassroots organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and the South, she worked alongside some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century. She also mentored many emerging activists as leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Baker criticized professionalized, charismatic leadership; she promoted grassroots organizing, radical democracy, and the ability of the oppressed to understand their worlds and advocate for themselves. She realized this vision most fully in the 1960s as the primary advisor and strategist of the SNCC.
Biographer Barbara Ransby calls Baker “one of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement”. She is known for her critiques of both racism in American culture and sexism in the civil rights movement. (From Wikipedia)
Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the black freedom struggle. She was a national officer and key figure in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), and a prime mover in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Baker made a place for herself in predominantly male political circles that included W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King Jr., all the while maintaining relationships with a vibrant group of women, students, and activists both black and white.
Baker was a complex figure whose radical, democratic worldview, commitment to empowering the black poor, and emphasis on group-centered, grassroots leadership set her apart from most of her political contemporaries.
Ella’s most radical accomplishment was an approach that set aside the desire for bourgeois respectability, thereby vitalizing a movement for civil rights with energy sourced from previously marginalized sectors of the Black community: young people, poor people, and women. She turned the hierarchies on their heads.
Ransby describes Ella’s power during her prime years with SNCC:
“First, she encouraged a democratic practice and an egalitarian structure as an alternative to the normative presence of many undemocratic traditions in both the black and the white American institutions that the young people had been a part of, mainly schools and churches. Second, she gently nudged the students in the direction of embracing a class analysis of racism and injustice that allied them with those at the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy—those who were sometimes at the margins of mainstream societies, black and white, but who were central to resistance efforts.
Third, Ella Baker affirmed in her practice and her teachings a style of personal grassroots organizing that, while more common among women than men, was a part of a radical democratic humanist tradition that both men and women could lay claim to. With the subtle power of her presence, Baker offered a different model of gender relations and a broader spectrum of gender identities. Her own transgressive female identity was represented by her uninhibited occupation of predominately male political spaces, her refusal to be a conventional teacher, and her rejection of a social identification as someone’s wife. Her way of being a black woman challenged men in SNCC to rethink manhood and masculinity, just as it gave women in the movement a widened sense of their own possibilities as doers, thinkers, and powerful social change agents.
. . .
To say this is not to portray SNCC as an egalitarian utopia; it was not. However, Ella Baker’s leadership and presence helped fashion the practice and philosophy of the group in such a way that traditional norms of male dominance, white privilege, and class elitism were overturned in much of the day-to-day functioning of the group and in the public image it projected.”
Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement (Gender and American Culture) (p. 363-364). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.
SOURCES
I just love Barbara Ransby’s book, cited above.
Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker, a film by Joanne Grant , available for $5 on Vimeo here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/fundi This is really great to watch after reading Ransby’s book, because you get to see many of the luminaries mentioned. You also get to see Virginia Durr (my step-great aunt-in-law) sitting on her sofa with Ella Baker, talking about the old days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d_RulHh6_g April 24, 1968 Ella starts talking at 5:30. 8:40: “One must do what one’s conscience bids them do. And from no one, except yourself, expect applause.”
In 1889, Jane Addams created a space and community for social exchange, sympathetic knowledge, and the iteration of an ethics of care. I believe her physical disability probably had an effect on her perspective, but I haven’t seen anyone write about this aspect of her thought. She was a fabulous writer who published eleven books and hundreds of articles. Her influence was enormous—presidential candidates even sought her endorsement—and she was brilliant, but the profundity of her thinking is only now being acknowledged by the academy, probably now because there have been enough women philosophers expanding the field of ethics so that we can actually understand what Jane was doing. I listened to an audio book of her classic work from 1910, Twenty Years at Hull House, and I recommend this work to everyone. It is so well-written. This paragraph made an impression on me:
“We are slowly learning that social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty, and of this one could cite many illustrations. I was at one time chairman of the Child Labor Committee in the General Federation of Woman’s Clubs, which sent out a schedule asking each club in the United States to report as nearly as possible all the working children under fourteen living in its vicinity. A Florida club filled out the schedule with an astonishing number of Cuban children who were at work in sugar mills, and the club members registered a complaint that our committee had sent the schedule too late, for if they had realized the conditions earlier, they might have presented a bill to the legislature which had now adjourned. Of course the children had been working in the sugar mills for years, and had probably gone back and forth under the very eyes of the club women, but the women had never seen them, much less felt any obligation to protect them, until they joined a club, and the club joined a Federation, and the Federation appointed a Child Labor Committee who sent them a schedule. With their quickened perceptions they then saw the rescue of these familiar children in the light of a social obligation. Through some such experiences the members of the Hull-House Woman’s Club have obtained the power of seeing the concrete through the general and have entered into various undertakings.”
Template for a Woman Leader
Jane Addams lived from 1860 to 1935, mostly in Chicago. With Ellen Gates Starr she created the second settlement house in the U.S., based on an English model. Chicago’s Hull House was a place for educated, middle class, mostly women, to “settle” in a stressed immigrant neighborhood and improve conditions so that people could thrive. This community of service, inspired by early Christian communities—yet deliberately not “faith-based”—was an extension into the public realm of a template for women’s leadership in the home. Thus the work of the settlement house was “civic housekeeping,” the wider public becomes the family, and formerly private issues, like sanitation and children’s education, become the public sphere of women’s leadership, before women even had full suffrage in the U.S.
In this way Jane Addams was allowed to become the country’s mother, a woman of authority and a focus of respect in the Progressive era. However, she was later accused of treason, and the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover called her “the most dangerous woman in America” because of her peace advocacy during and after the First World War, and during the “Red Scare” of the 1920’s, because of her advocacy for labor rights. In 1931 she won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace. “Addams was a major synthesizing figure in the domestic and international peace movements, serving as both a figurehead and leading theoretician…” (W) It is interesting to see that once she stopped “staying in her lane” as a woman leader, and entered the realm of international affairs, she became “dangerous”. She was really getting at the systems of oppressions then. Her leadership style was noted by a co-delegate to the 1915 International Congress of Women in The Hague, “Miss Addams shines, so respectful of everyone’s views, so eager to understand and sympathize, so patient of anarchy and even ego, yet always there, strong, wise and in the lead. No ‘managing’, no keeping dark and bringing things subtly to pass, just a radiating wisdom and power of judgement.” (W)
A Woman Leader Created a Woman-Identified Space
“The reputation of the settlement rapidly grew, and women, primarily college-educated, came from all over the country to live and work at Hull House. Although Hull House was co-educational, it was a woman-identified space. There were male residents at Hull House, some of whom later became prominent leaders. However, the policies, projects, decision-making, and methodologies of the Hull House community were gynocentric—foregrounding women’s experience, analysis, and concerns. Furthermore, although a few residents were married, most were single, and some were in committed relationships with other women. Given the drastic shifts in sexual mores in the twentieth century, the contemporary understanding of what it means to be lesbian cannot straightforwardly be mapped onto the late and post-Victorian eras. Still, it can be argued that Hull House was a lesbian-friendly space. Addams set the tone for this identification with her own long-term intimate relationships with women…” (EP)
Social Work and Sociology
Hull House provided space and structure for social clubs, and child care, and the first playground and public swimming pool and gymnasium in Chicago, and classes in English and cooking, and lectures for adults, and art and craft instruction, and an art gallery, a theater program, and a museum of labor that showcased the traditional crafts of the neighborhood immigrants. Jane Addams’ mission was to promote the solidarity of the human race through conviviality and exchange. In the process she invented social work as a profession. Over time, from interacting with the local people on a personal level, the “settlers” developed an understanding that solutions to recurring social problems would need to be addressed through changes in systems and institutions. “… the work of Hull House residents would result in numerous labor union organizations, … tenement codes, factory laws, child labor laws, adult education courses, cultural exchange groups, and the collection of neighborhood demographic data.” (EP) The neighborhoods became an area of study at the same time that sociology became an academic discipline at the University of Chicago. Hull House members engaged in research and publishing, and public advocacy. Although she regularly taught courses in the brand new sociology department at the University of Chicago, Jane declined to become an academic because she wanted to maintain her independence and her political activism.
“Addams’ philosophy combined feminist sensibilities with an unwavering commitment to social improvement through cooperative efforts. Although she sympathized with feminists, socialists, and pacifists, Addams refused to be labeled. This refusal was pragmatic rather than ideological. Addams’ commitment to social cohesion and cooperation prompted her to eschew what she perceived as divisive distinctions. Active democratic social progress was so essential to Addams that she did not want to alienate any group of people from the conversation or the participation necessary for effective inclusive deliberation.” (EP)
Kickass Accomplishments
Jane “identified the political corruption and business avarice that caused the city bureaucracy to ignore health, sanitation, and building codes. Linking environmental justice and municipal reform, she eventually defeated the bosses and fostered a more equitable distribution of city services and modernized inspection practices.” (W)
“Addams led the “garbage wars”; in 1894 she became the first woman appointed as sanitary inspector of Chicago’s 19th Ward. With the help of the Hull House Women’s Club, within a year over 1,000 health department violations were reported to city council and garbage collection reduced death and disease.” (W)
“Hull House stressed the importance of the role of children in the Americanization process of new immigrants. This philosophy also fostered the play movement and the research and service fields of leisure, youth, and human services. Addams argued in The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) that play and recreation programs are needed because cities are destroying the spirit of youth.” (W)
“Along with her colleagues from Hull House, in 1901 Jane Addams founded what would become the Juvenile Protective Association. JPA provided the first probation officers for the first Juvenile Court in the United States until this became a government function.” (W)
Jane was a brilliant philosopher. She was always acting on many levels at once. “Addams did not intend to engage in philosophical narratives removed from social improvement, nor did she intend to pursue social activism without theorizing about the broader implications of her work. In this respect, through her integration of theory and action, Addams carried pragmatism to its logical conclusion through her integration of theory and action, developing an applied philosophy immersed in social action.” (EP)
“Addams’ ethical philosophy was guided by the notion of sympathetic knowledge that she described as ‘the only way of approach to any human problem’. Sympathetic knowledge is a mingling of epistemology and ethics: knowing one another better reinforces the common connection of people such that the potential for caring and empathetic moral actions increases. Addams not only theorized about this idea, but she lived it. Sympathetic knowledge underwrote Addams’ approach to the diversity and staggering poverty that she confronted in the immigrant neighborhood surrounding Hull House and allowed her to develop a precursor to contemporary feminist standpoint epistemology. Addams’ leadership among the American pragmatists in understanding the poor and oppressed resulted in a more radical form of pragmatism than Dewey and James, a social philosophy imbued with a class and gender consciousness.” (EP)
Great minds and change agents: So many amazing people are associated with Hull House, mostly women. It was kind of a feminist think-tank. Just some of these people include: Frances Perkins (Secretary of Labor); Florence Kelley (social reformer, political activist who defended the rights of working women and children, she fought racism); Alice Hamilton (founded the field of industrial medicine); Julia Lathrop (headed the Children’s Bureau, a federal agency); Rachel Yarros (physician and professor of medicine); Charlotte Perkins Gilman (author and scholar of gender and economics); Sophonisba Breckinridge. PhD, JD, social work educator; Edith and Grace Abbott (sisters and academics); Mary Kenney (labor organizer for the AF of L); Bessie Abramowitz Hillman (founded the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America); Alzina Stevens (headed the Dorcas Federal Labor Union).
Organizations she was there for from their beginnings
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the first 40 (NAACP)
American Civil Liberties Union, founder (ACLU)
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
“Addams worked with other reform groups toward goals including the first juvenile court law, tenement-house regulation, an eight-hour working day for women, factory inspection, and workers’ compensation. She advocated research aimed at determining the causes of poverty and crime, and she supported women’s suffrage. She was a strong advocate of justice for immigrants, African Americans, and minority groups by becoming a chartered member of the NAACP. Among the projects that the members of Hull House opened were the Immigrants’ Protective League, the Juvenile Protective Association, the first juvenile court in the United States, and a juvenile psychopathic clinic…. Addams’s influential writings and speeches, on behalf of the formation of the League of Nations and as a peace advocate, influenced the later shape of the United Nations.” (W)
“I respect poetry in the very same way that religious people respect religion.” (from an interview with Forugh Farrokhzad, quoted in A lonely Woman by Michael C. Hillman)
Forugh Farrokhzad (December 29, 1934 – February 14, 1967) was an Iranian poet (and filmmaker and actress) who remade the Persian poetic tradition from her position as a woman outsider to that tradition. Poetry has a very important place in Iranian culture, and its importance cuts across classes. In her poems Forugh was frank about sexual love, but this was not unusual in the Persian tradition. What was unusual was that she wrote from a woman’s point of view and as a particular person, not an anonymous self. She lived her life in an unusual way for her place and time. She married an older man when she was quite young, but this was at her own insistence. (It was common to marry young but the age difference was objectionable to her family.) She divorced her husband when she realized that as a housewife she could not devote her life to poetry—that poetry was her life—and she wanted to live as a self-defined person, and experience life as much as she could outside the constraints imposed on women. She was transgressive and unapologetic. “Why should I stop?’ she writes in Only the Sound Remains, one of her best poems. Her approach to life and poetry was personal and individualistic, and thus modernist, and her feminist effect was through the example of her life and work and not through joining in a social movement herself. Her radical work shows an idea of what Iran might have become, and her death is seen as a rupture in the development of freedom in Iran. She participated in the intellectual foment of her times, as Iran was “Westernizing” under the repressive regime of the Shah. She had several lovers over time and a longer relationship with a married filmmaker and intellectual. Her work was often discounted because of her scandalous life but time has proven the importance and beauty of her works. After she died in a car accident at 32 years old, her poetic achievements were more widely acknowledged by her contemporaries, although they tended to give outsized importance to the influence of her intellectual lover. Even though interrupted, her later work is seen as the fulfillment of modernism in Persian poetry. She takes a tradition that was tied to formal structures and teases it apart and uses that de-structured tradition to make something radically new and multi-layered, but still recognizably of the tradition. I find her poetry beautiful and powerful even in translation. But I know her command of rhythm, sound, and form must be just stunning in the original “mother tongue”. Forugh led a life of risk and sacrifice in service to her art. She felt that she was discovering herself or inventing herself through her poetry. She was forthright and often combative in conversation and would say what she truly thought, regardless of consequences. She would also go about with unkempt hair. So I like to think that Forugh was punk. If anyone could exemplify ”woman life freedom,” the cry of the feminist revolution in Iran now, it is Forugh Farrokhzad. (Written March 9, 2023)
SOURCES
Michael C. Hillman’s biography with translations is very good: A Lonely Woman, Forough Farrokhzad and Her Poetry
Another Birth and other poems by Forugh Farrokhzad translated with an introduction by Hasan Javadi and Susan Sallée.
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