Drawing from activist Bob Moses, the sociologist Charles Payne has argued that the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s actually contained two distinct traditions. One he labels “the community-mobilizing tradition,” which was “focused on large-scale, relatively short-term public events.” Payne sees this lineage as “best symbolized by the work of Martin Luther King,” and he includes in it such well-remembered events as the March on Washington and the famous campaigns in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. The second is a tradition of community organizing. This is a lineage, Payne writes, “with a different sense of what freedom means and therefore a greater emphasis on the long-term development of leadership in ordinary men and women,” and it is a tradition best epitomized “by the teaching and example of Ella Baker.”
Ultimately, both dramatic mass protest and long-term organizing were essential to the gains of the civil rights movement. But in retellings of what it took to secure change, the latter work is too often forgotten.
Baker herself had a diverse set of talents and a commitment to social justice that was rooted in her earliest experiences. Born in 1903 and raised in Virginia and North Carolina, she grew up hearing the stories of her maternal grandmother, a former slave who had been whipped for refusing to marry the man chosen for her by the plantation owners. A sharp debater and accomplished public speaker from a young age, Baker graduated as valedictorian of her class at Shaw University in 1927. Moving to upper Manhattan during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, she immersed herself in community affairs and served on the staffs of two local newspapers.
Although she had long embraced the role informally, Baker officially assumed a position as an organizer when she served for much of the 1940s as a field secretary for the NAACP. She was eventually promoted to national director of branches. The work involved constant travel as she formed new organizational chapters and revived dormant ones. Representative John Lewis, himself a towering civil rights figure, writes that Baker “single-handedly organized dozens of youth chapters of the NAACP throughout the South”—although “single-handed” does not aptly describe how Baker thought of her craft.
Her organizing was about building relationships—about forming deep ties with people who had not necessarily considered themselves part of a political movement before. She instilled in people a belief in their self-worth and ability to lead, and she cultivated their capacities for independent action. This is what Baker called the “spadework” of movement-building, less glamorous than giving a speech to a crowd of thousands or participating in headline-grabbing protests, but just as critical to generating social change, if not more so.