Tag Archives: civil rights

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs

CENTER THE MARGINS for Ella Baker

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. 

(Above adapted from the description of Barbara Ransby’s book, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, A Radical Democratic Vision here: https://uncpress.org/book/9780807856161/ella-baker-and-the-black-freedom-movement/)

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.”

Shattering the myth of a leaderless movement, by Ransby:
https://colorlines.com/article/ella-taught-me-shattering-myth-leaderless-movement/

Cornell West, in his inimitable style, talks about Ella and not a “leaderless, but leaderfull” movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omyQ6P2SCzo

Student project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68U57yi9F1E

People who know Ella speak: https://vimeo.com/268463422

The Female Power Project supports the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights: https://ellabakercenter.org

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs

Question Categories for Pauli Murray

QUESTION CATEGORIES for Pauli Murray, a perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project

In a new documentary, Pauli Murray says that communication is at the center of everything she does. This thrilled me because I have for years been thinking about communication. Communication is fundamentally about the meeting of two persons, two subjectivities, and the bridging of differences. Differences are set up and perpetuated by social categories, most often binaries, and individuals are sort of tied in a web of these categories. Pauli Murray was a brilliant and perceptive human whose self was suspended in the threads between firm categories. I’m thinking of the categories of subject and object, not-white and white, female and male, heterosexual and homosexual. Binaries are distortions. She was capable of perceiving her situation, and effecting action upon it, long before we had (as a culture in U.S.) the language to talk about these things. She was like a grammarian to a language that had yet to exist. She had the astounding imagination to be able to sketch the landscape that Martin Luther King, Jr. could only partly see from his mountaintop. This is because he did not have people who were not heterosexual, or who were assigned female, standing there with him. Murray liked to say that she lived to see all her lost causes found. Many of them were. Many will be.

Ruth  (a poem by Pauli Murray)

Brown girl chanting Te Deum on Sunday
Rust-colored peasant with strength of granite,
Bronze girl welding ship hulls on Monday,
Let nothing smirch you, let no one crush you. 

Queen of ghetto, sturdy hill-climber,
Walk with the lilt of ballet dancer,
Walk like a strong down-East wind blowing,
Walk with the majesty of the First Woman. 

Gallant challenger, millioned-hope bearer,
The stars are your beacons, earth your inheritance,
Meet blaze and cannon with your own heart’s passion,
Surrender to none the fire of your soul.

Pauli Murray (November 20, 1910–July 1, 1985) was a poet, a writer of letters to powerful people, a lawyer, civil rights activist, women’s rights activist, organizer, professor, Episcopal priest, and a non-binary person. She was a Black person who had many white ancestors, and at least one indigenous ancestor. She was assigned female at birth but always felt that she was really a man, that there was some mistake in her body. She lived most of her life as a lesbian woman, after a short time presenting as a boy when riding the rails during the Great Depression. She never spoke publicly about her sexuality or sexual identity, but her voluminous archive does include many documents expressing them. She knew that she would be an object of study in the future—her archive includes photos and film from the 1930s!— and she did not hide her complex identity from us, here in the future, although she did destroy her letters with her greatest love. I am so grateful to whoever did not destroy this record of her non-binary self. I think we are ready to think about her as she really was in a way that was not possible while she lived. Maybe that’s why most people are only now discovering her.

Pauli Murray is not able to tell us explicitly which pronouns are hers. This choice was not available to her the way it is available to people now. I am using the third person pronouns she did use for herself. It is not wrong to use “they/them”. It is not wrong to use “he/him”. These are categories we can question FOR her. Another category we have now that I don’t think she had then is “non-binary.” This may have been the best home for her, but we just don’t know. That is why her power for us is to QUESTION CATEGORIES. As a lawyer, Murray questioned racial and gender categories and worked to show that laws discriminating against people based on these categories are arbitrary and unconstitutional. These laws are wrong at their core, not just in their implementation.  

In the same way it is not wrong to include her—someone who knew themselves to be a man—in a project about female power. If you have read this long, I am now going to tell you a secret (it was never a secret). Female Power is not just for females. My project is to expand the definition of power to include the power of females. We know that binaries are inadequate. Let’s imagine what replaces them.

I urge everyone to see the recent documentary called “My Name Is Pauli Murray” available at the link below. In it we hear Chase Strangio, an ACLU attorney, say, “We can’t comprehend legal movements for justice without understanding Pauli’s role in them.” 

There is too much to include in this small space, so I will make a condensed list of Murray’s ground breaking human rights work. In the last decade of her life she worked in ministry as an Episcopal priest, the first ordained African American woman in that church. She felt she wanted to work directly in communion with individual people. 

• In 1940, Murray sits in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus with a friend, and they are arrested for violating state segregation laws. They had been reading about Gandhian non-violent resistance. The NAACP drops her case when the charges are changed to disorderly conduct. This event fires her interest in Civil Rights law.

• In 1941 she enters Howard University Law School and stays at the top of her class. She writes a paper on a strategy to counter segregation and her reasoning is later used by Thurgood Marshall to argue Brown v. Board of Education. While at Howard she participates in sit-ins challenging discrimination at restaurants in D.C.

• Long before Kimberlé Crenshaw develops the idea of intersectionality, Murray uses the term “Jane Crow” to describe the special status of Black women as the targets of discrimination. She later criticizes the sexism of the civil rights movement, “It is indefensible to call a national march on Washington and send out a call which contains the name of not a single woman leader.”

• In 1950, Murray publishes a book surveying state racial segregation laws across the country. She continues her argument that lawyers should fight such laws as directly unconstitutional, instead of trying to make the separate accommodations more equal. Thurgood Marshall calls Murray’s book the “bible” of the civil rights movement. The text functions as a catalogue of laws for dismantling, similar to the Solicitor General’s list that RBG used.

• 1961–1964 Murray writes influential works on extending the developing civil rights law protections for Black people to women as well. Ruth Bader Ginsburg adds Murray as coauthor on her brief in her first case for the ACLU, Reed v. Reed (1971).

• In 1966, she originates the idea for, and then co-founds, the National Organization for Women (NOW), which she hoped could act as a NAACP for women’s rights. 

DESIGN NOTE

You might have noticed that the large titling typeface I used in this design is a “unicase font” (called Quinoa) in which upper case and lower case forms are combined into one case. In other words, this type is non-binary.

This print was published in October 2021.

SOURCES

Documentary: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B09DMPMWCP/

Artwork based on this Photo: Pauli Murray of New York, winner of Mademoiselle Merit Award for signal achievement in law, 1946. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

Wikipedia

https://www.indiewire.com/2021/10/pauli-murray-trailblazing-advocacy-shaped-the-world-1234669711/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/the-many-lives-of-pauli-murray

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/sep/17/how-is-pauli-murray-not-a-household-name-the-extraordinary-life-of-the-uss-most-radical-activist