Ella Baker
By 
Now that you’ve had your holiday fun, it’s back to work. Peter Dreier has a biographical piece on the great civil rights leader (and underrated great American) Ella Baker. You should read it. In part:
Baker bristled at the sexism and outsize egos of the ministers (including King) who ran SCLC and treated her as if she were the hired help. She was on the brink of resigning from SCLC when the student sit-in movement began in early 1960.
Baker wrote, and she and King cosigned, the invitation letter to SNCC’s founding meeting. Their letter explained that the purpose of the meeting was “to share experience gained in recent protest demonstrations and to help chart future goals for effective action.” They assured participants that although “adult freedom fighters” would be present “for counsel and guidance,” the conference would be “youth centered.”
Baker expected 100 participants to attend, but more than 300 activists showed up. She enlisted as key speaker James Lawson, a theology student at Vanderbilt University who had organized workshops on nonviolence for students in Nashville, Tennessee, and had helped lead the sit-ins in that city. During the conference, folksinger Guy Carawan introduced a new version of “We Shall Overcome,” which soon became the civil rights movement’s anthem. In her closing speech, “More Than a Hamburger,” Baker pushed the students to dream of how their sit-ins could develop into larger efforts to challenge racism in “every aspect of life.”
SNCC might have quickly disintegrated had Baker not nurtured it and helped the students learn to run the organization on their own. She resigned from SCLC and worked as a SNCC volunteer. The volunteer staff put out a newsletter, Student Voice, that helped give the new group an identity and spread the word. One of the first checks sent to help SNCC came from Eleanor Roosevelt.
As Baker guided SNCC’s young activists, she reminded them of her belief in radical democracy: “People did not really need to be led; they needed to be given the skills, information, and opportunity to lead themselves.” Reflecting on Baker’s talent for listening to everybody and then summarizing what was most important, former SNCC chair Charles McDew recalled, “Somebody may have spoken for 8 hours, and 7 hours and 53 minutes [of it] was utter bullshit, but 7 minutes was good. She taught us to glean out the 7 minutes.”