[Rosa] Parks, an old schoolmate remembered, was “self-sufficient, competent and dignified” even as a child, a student who always wore a clean uniform, planned ahead, and never sneaked over to the boys’ side of the school like some of the other girls did. Even in defiance she was a perfect lady. When the Montgomery bus driver told her to give up her seat to a white man or be arrested, the petite, middle-aged seamstress calmly replied, “You may do that.” Later, when her husband begged her not to allow herself to be turned into a test case, she cooly went ahead… When she arrived for her court date, she wore a long-sleeved black dress with white cuffs and a small velvet hat with pearls across the top. “They’ve messed with the wrong one now,” cried out a black teenager, who turned out to be absolutely correct…
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The [Montgomery bus] boycott was not spontaneous. It operated on two levels: a public leadership of male ministers, headed by the charismatic young pastor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and an organization of women volunteers, who did the behind-the-scenes work. The women, although unsung, were not simply following directions from above. They had long ago thought up the idea for the boycott, and they had been preparing for it for almost nine years.
Ella Baker was well into middle age when the students started raising hell… It broke her mother’s heart, but after college, Baker left home and embarked on a career as a community organizer — a job that involved travelling by herself in an era when women were still expected to have a male protector when they were away from home. Baker joined a long and distinguished line of peripatetic American heroines…
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In 1941 Baker was hired as an organizer for the NAACP, and two things quickly became clear. The first was that she was brilliant at the job… Unlike the many male organizers who behaved like visiting superstars, Baker had what the Richmond leaders called a “wonderful and outstanding quality of mixing with any group of people.”
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Her second defining characteristic was a dislike of top-down leadership. “She had an interest in the power of people,” said Lenora Tait-Magubane. “She never gave answers. Miss Ella would ask questions: What about this? Have you thought about so & so? And then let you fight it out… She felt leaders were not appointed but they rose up. Someone will rise. Someone will emerge…
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Baker became one of the founders and acting director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was meant to keep alive the spirit of the Montgomery bus boycott. But the SCLC was defined by Dr. King’s charismatic leadership, and since Baker did not believe in charismatic leaders, she and King never hit it off. She was not offered the permanent directorship…
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Baker’s response was to form a charismatic leader-free organization that would reflect her ideas of what the civil rights movement should be all about. She threw her lot in with the students, helped them organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee… Unsurprisingly, SNCC was more open to women’s leadership than any of the groups that had gone before. Its heyday lasted only a few years, but while it did, SNCC was not fighting only fighting for civil rights but also struggling to create, within itself, a “Beloved Community” in which blacks and whites, men and women, poor and middle class, lived and worked together as equals…
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But Baker’s vision was far more demanding than a simple sharing of power. She was suspicious of quick fixes such as the lunch-counter sit-ins, or any strategy that involved appealing to the federal government to save black Americans from white racists. “People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves,” she said.
These women and their fellows — Septima Clark, Dorothy Height, Fannie Lou Hamer, all the rest — were not adorable plaster saints, they were heroic warriors.
Book Chat: When Everything Changed (Week 3)Post + Comments (37)