Children’s Book on Ella Baker: A SNCC Veteran’s Review
Reading by Judy Richardson
Editors Note: This article by SNCC veteran Judy Richardson offers not only a review of Lift As You Climb: The Story of Ella Baker, but also a lens with which to examine other books and curricula on Ms. Ella Baker and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
We hope that Richardson’s points will be considered in future books about Ms. Baker and in subsequent editions of Lift As You Climb. In the meantime, teachers and parents can reference what they learn from the article below and use it to supplement the narrative in Lift As You Climb when reading it aloud to young people.
As a former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staff worker who knew Ms. Ella Baker, I looked forward to reading the 2020 picture book, Lift as You Climb: The Story of Ella Baker by Patricia Hruby Powell.
Ms. Baker was a legendary organizer whose contributions to the Civil Rights Movement are hailed by Movement veterans and young activists alike. I hoped this new picture book would help share the power — and legacy — of her work with young people in a way that would help them understand the role they could play in movements for change.
Some of that comes through in this book. I appreciated the focus on Ms. Baker’s organizing among lower-income Black communities and her struggle against the hierarchical, sexist male leadership that existed in most of the major civil rights organizations.
Unfortunately, a child would not come away understanding Ms. Baker’s primary legacy (simplified for young readers, of course):
her incredible impact on young organizers then and now;
her grassroots, non-hierarchical organizing style; and
her belief that it is more effective to have many local leaders than one charismatic leader.
It is these organizing principles that she passed on to the young organizers in SNCC. More importantly, these concepts continue to influence social justice organizing today. There is a reason that SNCC folk always mention Ms. Baker as the person who grounded their work and their understanding of the world. There is a reason why young activists in the various Black Lives Matter groups know Ms. Baker’s name: her work provides lessons for current organizing.
Also the quotes she is most known for are clarion calls even today:
Give people light and they will find the way.
I believe the struggle is eternal . . . somebody else carries on.
Strong people don’t need strong leaders.
The book could act as an entry point for younger children, particularly if paired with other age-appropriate resources that give a better sense of Ms. Baker’s radical work and her impact on the Movement, particularly the student movement. For teachers, one such resource is the documentary website, SNCCDigital.org, a collaboration between the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Her profile page would be a good beginning.
I’ve listed below key points that might assist those who use the book. The page numbers in parentheses reference the pages in the book.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
(p. 28) She brought the students together at a conference at Shaw University. She wanted them to organize.
Yes, Ms. Baker brought the students together at Shaw University in 1960. However, this portrayal misses the main points about her incredible contribution to SNCC’s development.
Most important, after SNCC’s founding, Ms. Baker shared two key resources that would prove invaluable to the young organizers:
a) the network she’d developed, composed of adult organizers, like Amzie Moore in Mississippi, and
b) her organizing philosophy: that SNCC should focus on organizing those who had been most marginalized, and it was they who should be in the leadership and be the spokespeople for their communities.
Also, these local leaders should determine what issues were most important to them; they should set the agenda. She reminded the young SNCC organizers that they themselves were not the leaders. Rather, they were working with others in the community to identify and build strong local leadership that would remain, even after they’d moved on to organize elsewhere. Her organizing philosophy grounded SNCC’s work throughout the South… and continues to ground the work of the SNCC Legacy Project and the many young activists with whom it continues to work.
At that Shaw meeting, Ms. Baker makes sure that the students remain separate from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC): she wants the students to retain their autonomy and not be bound by the restrictions of the more conservative adult organizations. As a result, SNCC was the only national organization, working in the South, which was founded and led by young people, most of them hailing from historically Black colleges. This is one of the reasons SNCC — it’s organizing philosophy and structure — has such resonance today with young organizers.
At that 1960 conference, Ms. Baker — in her “more than a hamburger” keynote — calls the young people to think beyond sitting-in for a hamburger at a “whites-only” lunch counter. Instead, they should focus on the ability of the Black community to buy the hamburger. The issue of economic justice was a major part of Ms. Baker’s philosophy. She always emphasized the need to see beyond sit-ins to the deeper (systemic) issues that plagued all oppressed people. She wasn’t just railing against the Black elites.
(p. 30) Ella LISTENED and comforted them — brought toothbrushes and soap to their cells. She advised them — Lift as you climb.
The matronly image of Ms. Baker “comforting” and “bringing toothbrushes and soap to their cells” is not one that aligns with the Ms. Baker we knew. She was no-nonsense and did not suffer fools gladly. Although she usually hung back during SNCC meetings — letting the young organizers argue and reach consensus on their own — she would step in, usually by asking pointed questions, if she felt they were going too far off the track. In 1961, at a now-famous meeting at Highlander Folk School, SNCC almost split into two organizations over the issue of whether to continue focusing only on desegregating public facilities (direct action protests) or, instead, shift to voter registration work. The young people, through consensus, decided to remain as one organization… but only because Ms. Baker has guided them through hours of heated debate. It is she who helps them understand that this is not an either/or proposition… and that they are stronger together than they ever could be if they split apart.
Lack of Context for Her Grass-Roots Organizing
(p. 15) All over the South, Ella made speeches about freedom — voting — rights — words straight from her heart to the hearts of her audience. Then she’d ask, “What do you hope to accomplish?”
Ms. Baker was an incredible force within the modern Civil Rights Movement. However, she developed and helped galvanize a network of activists, North and South, who were often already working for justice. She was not the only person doing the hard, dangerous, long-term work of organizing for political and economic change.
Harriette and Harry Moore with their two daughters.
For example, it was good to see mention of the Moores in Mims, Florida. Of course, she stays with Harry and Harriette Moore, educators who were both fired from their jobs because of their Movement work — five years before their home was bombed in 1951. Mr. Moore was head of the state NAACP and, in that capacity, had for years been organizing for voting rights, economic rights (such as the teacher pay noted in the book) and against lynchings. It was not Ms. Baker who suddenly caused Mr. Moore – or the people he’d been organizing for years — to finally see the necessity to organize and to vote. It is not necessary to eliminate the work of others in order to highlight the amazing work of one. The focus on a single individual, as if she or he were the only one leading the fight, is exactly what she fought against.
Since young people know about the Montgomery Bus Boycott — if they know nothing else — why not mention the role Ms. Baker (and Bayard Rustin, before he becomes the chief organizer for the 1963 March on Washington) played in support of the Montgomery Bus Boycott? Further, Ms. Baker stayed with the Parks family when she traveled to and through Montgomery, talking strategy with the couple. According to The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis, Ms. Parks said of Ms. Baker: “She was a true friend — a mentor”.
One other Montgomery-related hook: Ms. Baker was manhandled by two white military police as they sought to remove her from a dining car on the train she’s riding from Jacksonville, Fla., back to the NAACP office in NYC. Ever dignified and assertive, she says to all in the car, “This man is overstepping his authority.” (See Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement by Barbara Ransby).
NAACP
(p. 13) The NAACP focused on finding members in the Negro elite — preachers, doctors, businessmen. But Ella had a different idea. She’d find a church. Get herself invited. Talk at Sunday service. Make friends with everyday people — middle-class maids, shop workers, and poor sharecroppers — not just the elite — and ask, “What do you hope to accomplish?”
It is true that the national NAACP was elitist and ashamed of the rural Southern membership (which provided a good portion of its membership dues). Harry Moore was fired from his NAACP position because membership in the Florida branches fell after the national office increased the dues. Fired even though he had, over the years, greatly increased the membership (and participation) of Black folks in the Florida chapters and was working tirelessly — and often successfully — on many fronts.
The NAACP leadership wanted to focus only on a judicial path and frowned on (I’m being gentle here) any form of activism or demonstrations. In fact, they also fired Medgar Evers, the incredibly effective NAACP Mississippi State Director, due, in part, to his work with young student activists like those from Jackson State (e.g. SNCC’s Joyce and Dorie Ladner). Evers had, fortunately, been re-hired by the time he was assassinated in 1963. His wife, Myrlie Evers, found him bleeding out at their front door. (I conducted an interview with Mrs. Evers in 1978, during the early stages of our Eyes on the Prize documentary series, that brought me to tears and almost caused me to break my semi-professional interviewer pose as she described his death).
(p. 17) They wanted fair treatment. But the Negro middle class resisted joining the NAACP — and getting the vote. Why anger their white bosses? Risk their jobs? Their comforts? Why risk being hungry?
The problem in the NAACP was the national leadership (and don’t get me started on Director of Branches, Glouster Currant). Also, it is simply not true to say that “the Negro middle class resisted joining the NAACP — and getting the vote.” Nor to pin resistance on a fear they’d “Risk their jobs? Their comforts?” Bottom line was: all folks, middle or working class, were risking not only their livelihoods, but their lives… and the lives and livelihoods of their family and community by getting involved with the NAACP or any Movement group.
This was a time when you could be killed if a white person (at any level) found an NAACP membership card in your possession. Black people used to hide their card in shoes in the back of their closet or under their clothes in a bureau.
Mississippi NAACP leader Herbert Lee was killed in 1961 by white state legislator E. H. Hurst, a neighbor who had grown up with Lee… and had even lent Lee money to help him with his farm. But when SNCC’s Bob Moses involved Mr. Lee in SNCC’s voter registration campaign, Hurst understood what the power of the Black vote could mean. . . and shot Mr. Lee to death. . . in Liberty, Mississippi.
In Mississippi, SNCC’s main concern was: how do you get Black folks registered to vote without getting them killed?
That’s what Black folks are risking – not just “comforts.”
But… back to Ms. Baker. It’s she who sent Bob Moses to her contact, Amzie Moore. Mr. Moore then passed Bob on to Mr. Lee and other local NAACP leaders like Mr. E. W. Steptoe, a Black Mississippi farmer.
Ms. Baker shared her network with SNCC and those contacts knew that anyone Ms. Baker sent to them could be trusted. . . oftentimes with their lives.
Sexism
The book makes a point of the sexism that permeated the movement and, of course, the rest of the world. (Though, I must say, less so among the young organizers of SNCC.) Ms. Baker had to fight sexism, most often, internally— as the book notes — among the hierarchical ministers of SCLC and the elitist national leadership of the NAACP.
However, in her organizing, she focused on helping to broaden the worldview and skills of men and women equally. In SNCC, she worked with Diane Nash and Ruby Doris Smith in the same way that she worked with Julian Bond in the same way she worked with James Forman or John Lewis.
(p. 25) His order came from the top down. Ella thought he should ask — not command. Still, she agreed — for the cause. For the Freedom Movement, she’d empower people to take action. She’d register voters.
When the book refers to Ms. Baker’s relationship with Dr. King, it does so absent what would have been her main concern. She would not have thought: “he should ask — not command.” What she did believe, however, was that everyone — whatever their position or gender — should be part of the decision making. That’s quite different. She believed in consensus decisions made by those whom the decisions would most effect.
Ms. Baker, like most SNCC folks, knew the importance of women in the Movement: it was their intellectual capacity, as well as their community-oriented skills, that grounded the Black Freedom Movement. (It’s the reason we have the photo of an Albany, Georgia, mass meeting — showing almost all women — as the cover for our anthology, Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC). However, Ms. Baker’s genius was rooted in the fact that she could work with any group of people, regardless of gender or perceived economic class.
She also knew how to handle sexism, even from SNCC men. Larry Guyot, a Mississippi SNCC project director, suggested at a mass meeting that some of the women step back and “let the men move in now.” The meeting included the mighty Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party squad of Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray, Annie Devine, and Unita Blackwell. At a subsequent meeting, he repeated the request and was taken aside by Ms. Baker, who told him: “You have proven that there are some men who can do a very good job but you have to learn to never, never make the mistake of substituting men in quantity for women of quality.” He said he never made that mistake again. (See I’ve Got the Light of Freedom by Charles Payne).
Allies
At a time when “woke” allies are coming forward, this book represents a missed opportunity to give at least a nod to the white allies whom Ms. Baker connected to the Black Freedom movement. White organizers like Anne and Carl Braden or Zilphia and Myles Horton at Highlander Center were important to the Movement. In fact, the only newspaper that covered that first SNCC gathering in April 1960 was the Braden’s newsletter, Southern Patriot. She also recruited Black and white young people through her work with the YWCA.
Other Concerns
(p. 8) At fourteen Ella set off for boarding school in Raleigh — high school and college at Shaw University — top of her class. Worked as a waitress to pay her way. After she graduated, Ella moved to New York City.
It wouldn’t have taken but a few words to give context to Ms. Baker’s life in New York City. It’s important that she’s not just going to NYC — she’s going to Harlem — during the 1930’s — where she’s reading books and soaking up different points of view from those thinking about what Black folks should do to move forward. It’s a hotbed of intellectual activity.
(p.18) Ella told this story — Across the tracks, the poor live in filth and get diseases. Those diseases hop those itty-bitty tracks and infect you. That made sense to the middle class. All Negroes were in this together. They’d have to risk angering their bosses.
Having Ms. Baker speak to the Black middle class about the possibility of catching diseases from “the poor,” as a way of showing them they need to unite with their poorer brothers and sisters, is so jarring that I wonder about the context within which it was said.
(p.41) The “Additional Information” at the end of the book does not mention her incredible work with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation to the Democratic Convention and the powerful, all-white Mississippi Senate and Congressional delegations.
Again, I’m glad we now have a book about Ms. Baker for young children. I just wish it had included a greater emphasis on the strong and enduring legacy of her life and work.
Judy Richardson was on SNCC staff in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama (1963-66). She was a founder of Drum & Spear Bookstore, once the largest African American Bookstores in the country, where she initiated its extensive children’s book section, and was children’s editor of Drum and Spear Press. She worked on the 14-hour PBS series, Eyes on the Prize as Researcher and Series Associate Producer and its education director. She co-edited Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC and co-directed two NEH 3-week teacher institutes at Duke University on “Teaching Grassroots Movements”. She is a member of the SNCC Legacy Project board, was a Visiting Professor at Brown University, and has an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore College.