Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement

Chapter 2 picks up with Baker’s move to Raleigh, NC, to attend boarding school and then college at Shaw Academy and University, a historically black college in the South. At Shaw Baker honed her voice and her activist philosophy, supporting it with formal education. Her education there was classical in nature, mirroring the curriculum found at white universities at the time. Shaw was at once socially conservative and openly progressive. It was founded by white Baptist missionaries who wanted to provide classic liberal arts and religious education to newly freed black people in the South. They followed much of W.E.B. DuBois’s philosophy of the “talented tenth”—which contended that a classic liberal arts education for the smartest blacks was vital to the liberation of blacks as a whole. As a result of this Christian background, the university’s rules and philosophies were considered by some—even then—to be old-fashioned and socially conservative. Rules governing interaction between genders were strictly enforced, for example.

But the rigid environment did not stop Ella Baker from becoming a firebrand. She was mentored by Professor Benjamin Brawley, who coached the school’s debate team. He impressed her with his emphasis on academic excellence and encouraged her to think for herself. She also began working on several projects during her time there, such as protesting against the administration at Shaw for specific requirements that were viewed as unfair and unacademic. In one such instance she petitioned the school to relax its dress code for women to allow them to wear silk tights, as were the fashion at the time. Later she helped lead a protest against a Bible class requirement, the testing process of which was viewed as deeply unfair. She likely felt restricted from asking questions in class; she felt the rote memorization demanded by the religion classes failed to grasp the whole of the work and preferred to ask questions about theology rather than history.

Despite her clashes with the administration, Baker graduated Shaw in April 1927 as valedictorian of her class. She gave a speech that reflected both her own faith background and her hope for the future of her people, declaring that we must “resolve that for the welfare of the whole, for the good of all, for the uplift of the fallen humanity, for the extension of Christ’s kingdom on earth […] there shall be no turning back. […] We will strike against evil” (62).

After graduating from Shaw, Baker sought to go where the movement was. In the late 1920s that meant going to Harlem. Her mother had a cousin there who had room for Baker, so she picked up and went, beginning her lessons in radicalization and protest that would shape her for decades to come.

Harlem at the time was the home of the black intellectual experience. Debates about the black position in society, the best mechanism for protest, and the engagement of black art were happening in every corner club and community center. In particular, the 135th Street Library and the local YWCA became centers of black intellectual development and debate. When Baker first moved there, a year before the Great Depression, she had trouble finding work and eventually took small jobs as a waitress. Having grown up comfortably middle class, Harlem was Baker’s first true exposure to the lives of working-class blacks; it put a face to real struggles she knew of but had not experienced before. With the sheer diversity of people in Harlem, she encountered ideas that her conservative Baptist upbringing had not exposed her to. In one such instance she met and had a conversation with a Russian Jew while on break from a waitressing job, and ended up reading Karl Marx as a result, discovering philosophies that prioritized the voices of the working-class poor.

An unorthodox academic, Baker spent her time in conversation with other intellectuals, joining the 135th Street Library’s Adult Education Committee and subsequently writing a history of the library. Just three years after that she joined the library full time as staff, creating and managing a local consciousness-raising effort called the Young People’s Forum. During this time she witnessed the effects of the Great Depression, which caused black families across Harlem to lose their homes and led her to co-author a seminal article on the racial impact of the Depression called “The Bronx Slave Market.”

During her time at the library Baker also became executive director of the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League, which pulled black-owned businesses into a cooperative membership and encouraged Harlem residents to buy local and buy black. After that project folded from lack of financial support, Baker moved on to the Worker’s Education Project, which sought to teach workers about their labor rights. She used her time there to raise questions about the possibilities of equality under capitalism, joining the ongoing debates about communism as a viable alternative. Though she never considered herself a communist, she maintained friendships with many who did join the burgeoning Communist Party, a move that would greatly affect her relationship with the federal government.

During this time she married her college sweetheart, T.J. “Bob” Roberts, though she kept her own name, which was a deeply unusual move. Bob was a quiet man who kept to himself, though he had his own pet projects. Their marriage seemed to be one of convenience to support each other, and they never had children. Bob Roberts kept such a low profile that the FBI, when surveilling Baker years later, didn’t even realize she had a husband.

Most importantly, Baker’s time in Harlem, struggling alongside her black peers during and after the Depression, taught her to give up the middle-class values with which she’d been raised. She viewed herself as part of the working class rather than a probable benefactor. This solidarity with the poor influenced her politics from that time on.