This week we had a community conversation about race and policing in my city, Spokane, Washington. I have a couple take-aways. Our mayor and police chief are nice people. But as blacks on the panel spoke about the dangers of living-while-black in Spokane, city leaders spoke about what they've been doing to improve the situation and how, yes, they need to increase those efforts. They showed no understanding of the need for structural change. They showed no understanding of white privilege. One point brought up several times by the local leader of the NAACP, is the need to understand our history. To create structural change and a just future, we need to be clear about our past. I jumped right on that. You know I believe this. That is a huge part of why I write this blog. One city that demonstrates this need to recognize that history matters and why structural change is needed: Tulsa, Oklahoma. If you've heard of the 1921 "race riot" in Tulsa, wipe your mind clear. It was a massacre. Human Rights Watch released a 66 page document this past week demanding reparations for survivors and descendants of those caught in the 48-hour reign of terror in Tulsa. Reign of Terror In segregated, Jim Crow Tulsa, the Greenwood district, known as "Little Africa" grew into one of the most economically vibrant black communities in the U.S. Thriving businesses lined its streets: banks, movie theaters, hotels, beauty shops, grocery stores, restaurants, as well as the offices of lawyers, realtors, doctors and other professionals. Known across across the country, as "Negro Wall Street", the entire 35-square blocks including more than 12-thousand homes burned to ashes in two days, May 31-June 1, 1921. An estimated 300 black people were killed. The murder and devastation was deliberate, sparked by accusations that a black man assaulted a white woman. According to witnesses, white mobs looted black homes and businesses before setting them ablaze. “They tried to kill all the black folks they could see,” survivor George Monroe, recalled. Law enforcement did nothing to stop the violence. In fact, witnesses say some officers participated in the looting and killing, including members of the Oklahoma National Guard. Survivors told of seeing black bodies dumped into the Arkansas River and disposed of in mass graves. “Many of the survivors mentioned bodies were stacked like cord wood,” says Richard Warner of the Tulsa Historical Society. The fires left 10,000 homeless, subsisting in tents provided by the Red Cross. Incredibly, the black community of Greenwood regrouped, rebuilt, and restored their neighborhood by 1938. That despite the fact that insurance companies refused to compensate home owners and business for their losses. Not a single person was ever held responsible for the murders and property damage. White Tulsans chose to pretend it never happened, actively suppressing the truth. Even privately, they did not speak of it. Newspapers of the time grossly under-reported the death tally, claiming 36 blacks died. Textbooks omitted this history completely. Then after 77 years, evidence of the massacre started to surface. The Oklahoma Legislature appointed a commission to establish an historical record of the event. The commission brought in an expert to investigate possible sites where black bodies might have been buried. Clyde Snow liked to say bones make good witnesses, never forgetting and never lying. Before his death in 2014, Clyde Snow was one of the world's foremost forensic anthropologists. He helped identify the remains of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele and confirmed the identification of President John F. Kennedy after his assassination. He aided in the determination that more than 200 victims found in a mass grave in Yugoslavia had been killed in an execution style of ethnic cleansing. In Tulsa, Snow investigated ground that had been a potters field in 1921. It was the suspected site of a mass grave where black bodies might have been buried after the massacre. Using ground-penetrating radar, the forensic anthropologist discovered an aberration in the earth, which the commission report stated "all the characteristics of a dug pit or trench with vertical walls and an undefined object within the approximate center of the feature." In addition, a witness came forward, a white man named Clyde Eddy who'd been 10 at the time of the massacre. Eddy remembered seeing men dig a trench and prepare to bury wooden crates containing remains of black victims. Clyde Snow drew parallels between the violence in Tulsa and state-sponsored killings he investigated in other countries. The commission's evidence led him to believe the so-called Tulsa "riot" was an act of ethnic cleansing facilitated by the Oklahoma National Guard. In 2000, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission made a number of recommendations for moving forward, including further investigation of possible mass grave sites and cash reparations to survivors (149 were alive at the time) and descendants of those killed and of survivors. The only action taken was by the State of Oklahoma which issued survivors decorative medals. Now, twenty years later it's possible Tulsa can begin to address its racist history. This last December archaeologists discovered further evidence of possible mass graves at two sites in the city. Excavations were to have started in February, but have been postponed due to COVID-19. And coincidentally with nationwide "Black Lives Matter" protests, Human Rights Watch issued a news call for reparations for blacks in Tulsa. Human Rights Watch is a non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights around the world. “No one has ever been held responsible for these crimes, the impacts of which black Tulsans still feel today,” says the report, titled “The Case for Reparations in Tulsa, Oklahoma: A Human Rights Argument.” “Efforts to secure justice in the courts have failed due to the statute of limitations. Ongoing racial segregation, discriminatory policies, and structural racism have left black Tulsans, particularly those living in North Tulsa, with a lower quality of life and fewer opportunities.” The community has higher rates of poverty and police brutality. Black Tulsans are subjected to physical force by police — tasers, police dog bites, pepper spray, punches, and kicks — 2.7 times more than whites, according to Human Rights Watch. Today, the area once known as Black Wall Street is marked by a mural painted on the side of Interstate 244, which bisected the neighborhood in 1970. While traffic roars through on the interstate, gentrification creeps into Greenwood. There's a minor-league baseball stadium, an arts district marketed to millennials, and a high-end apartment complex with a yoga studio and pub. City Councilor Vanessa Hall-Harper says gentrification of the neighborhood is driven by the same greed that fed the fire of white violence 100 years ago. "There was economic jealously that caused them to destroy Greenwood...The stadium is like building a Whole Foods at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing." "This is sacred ground," Hall-Harper said. "As developers are making decisions about the Greenwood district, the history is being ignored, and I think it is intentional. They want to forget about it and move on." Not only forget, but whitewash. Near the baseball stadium's entrance, the mural is signed "Tulsa Race Riot 1921." Someone has crossed out "riot" and written "massacre." Someone else has crossed out "massacre" and left a scribble of black spray paint. livia Hooker, the last known survivor of the 1921 racist attack in Tulsa, died two years ago at 103. She was six 6 when the violence erupted, but never forgot how her mother told her and her three siblings to hide under their dining room table. "She said, 'Keep quiet, and they won't know you are under here.' The [whites who came in her house] took everything they thought was valuable. They smashed everything they couldn't take," Hooker said. This past week, Oklahoma offered a panel discussion on race, facilitated by Governor Kevin Stitts and his wife. Black leaders criticized the governor for stacking the panel with folks who would not challenge him on his racial beliefs and biases, calling the event a "superficial show of solidarity." Two of the four panelists were law enforcement officers. There were no women, no Latinx or indigenous Oklahomans, no millennials, and no recognizable black activists or leaders from social justice groups. At the panel in Spokane, the police chief made a point of saying his officers are good, caring people, and that George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, not here.
What he fails to understand is that "good" isn't good enough. Being "not guilty" of killing a black man is not good enough. Claiming not to be a racist is not enough. That's why we're hearing the term anti-racist. Being anti-racist requires recognition of the privilege bestowed on us simply because we were born with white skin, reckoning with the fact that racism is systemic and taking action. We can't sit on one side of the scale of justice and expect it to level on it's own. We must involve ourselves intentionally in day-to-day efforts to dismantle the racist structures in our schools, our cities and our country. If not engaging, we are automatically, by default, perpetuating the problem. Sources: https://thislandpress.com/2011/06/11/what-lies-beneath/ https://abcnews.go.com/US/tulsa-marks-grim-anniversary-1921-race-massacre-protests/story?id=71010791 https://ktul.com/news/local/tulsas-dark-secret-the-mass-graves-of-the-1921-race-riot https://theblackwallsttimes.com/2020/06/08/bwstimes-gives-gov-kevin-stitt-2-out-of-10-on-race-conversation/ https://www.sapiens.org/news/tulsa-race-massacre/ https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/12/us-how-abusive-biased-policing-destroys-lives https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/tulsa-mayor-reopens-investigation-into-possible-mass-graves-from-1921-race-massacre/2018/10/02/df713c96-c68f-11e8-b2b5-79270f9cce17_story.html This month marks the 50th anniversary of the day the National Guard fired on a student anti-Vietnam War demonstration at of Kent State University in Ohio. For people of a certain age in America, May 4, 1970, was one of those days you never forget. Fewer people remember the equally horrific attack on college students eleven days later in Mississippi. At Jackson State College, May 15, 1970, Jackson City Police and Mississippi State Troopers fired on a group of students, killing two and injuring 12. That week more than 500 colleges across the country had been shut down as students protested the killings at Kent State, where the Ohio National Guard shot four and injured nine. The shootings at Jackson State, now Jackson State University, erupted after a bottle smashed in the middle of the officers who had marched onto campus in riot gear. Steve Vernon Weakly was shot in the leg. “So, the bottle is in the air; it’s as if it’s suspended in the air like forever." Weakly says, "It floated down and came in from behind [the police] and hit right in the middle of them and it burst,” says Weakly. “It was as if they just went crazy from there… they started shooting the guns immediately – immediately – and it was like all hell broke loose.” Students at the school, now Jackson State University, an historically black university in Jackson, Mississippi, experienced repeated harassment by whites. The night before the shootings, white people had riled students by driving through campus shouting racist insults at black students and sexual slurs against black women students. Black students had responded by throwing rocks. The next day students grew more agitated when a false rumor circulated that Charles Evers, the brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, had been killed. Then, a non-Jackson State student set fire to a dump truck in the area, bringing fire-fighters and police to the scene. A group of young people threw stones at the police, as they advanced through campus. Steve Weakly was hanging out with fraternity and sorority friends outside of the girls’ dorms when gunfire exploded. “The carnage on that side of the street was just incredible,” he says. “The kids trying to get in [the dorm], everybody was screaming, and all of a sudden everything got eerily quiet. Then it started back again. It was like 10 times louder than it was before. People were screaming, girls were fainting, blood was everywhere.” Police and state troopers fire 140 rounds in thirty seconds. Two young black men died in the barrage of bullets. Philip Lafayette Gibbs, a political science student in his junior year, had planned to go to law school. The 21-year-old man was the father of an 18-month-old son. Also killed, James Earl Green, a 17-year-old track star who was still in high school. The boy had planned to go to the University of California at Los Angeles. He was shot and killed behind the line of law enforcement officers. While the shootings at Kent State topped the news around the nation, word of the twelve students shot and injured and the two killed in Jackson did not travel far and wide. “There is always a different narrative to how the American media treats black activists and survivors versus how they treat white activists and survivors,” says C. Leigh McInnis, professor of creative writing at Jackson. Even today, American opinions differ on whether the deaths at Kent State increased opposition to the Vietnam War, or merely increased disillusionment with the power of protests to end the war. Black Americans have less trouble understanding what happened after the shootings at Jackson State. “Black folks did what black folks always do; they simply kept living,” says McInnis, “Returning to JSU in the fall for classes even with the bullet holes still fresh in the buildings, because ‘success’ and ‘revenge’ for black folks has always been survival, especially survival through education and self-determinism.” It might be some progress to see a nationwide outcry at the murder of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia this week. But still sickening that Ahmaud was shot, and that the the shooters were arrested two months after the killing, and only because a video of the event surfaced. Let's add the faces of Philip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green to the conversation, two young men who's killers were never held accountable. And let's remember the many students in the line of fire that night in Mississippi who went on to graduate, raise families, succeed in careers. They were young black people in a long line of African Americans who have continued on, survived and thrived in spite of obstacles white Americans cannot truly comprehend. Sources: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/kent-state-jackson-state-survivors-talk-student-activism-629402/ https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/03/us/soundtracks-kent-state-jackson-state-orangeburg/index.html https://www.wyso.org/post/remembering-what-happened-jackson-state-college-1970 https://libcom.org/history/jackson-state-shootings-1970 They Called 1919 The Red Summer. Much of the trouble in the summer of 1919 revolved around people trying to get decent work for a living wage. But underneath boiled and bubbled rampant white supremacist ideals and corporate greed. Here's a look at conditions pervading the United States at the time.
Both black and white veterans went looking for jobs in a post-war economy. Employment couldn't be found in cities or rural America. Labor strikes turned bloody when wartime price controls lifted and industrial companies tried to preserve wartime profit levels, often hiring blacks from the south to break strikes. You know that story if you've read my book Fannie Never Flinches. At a time when most unions denied African Americans membership, Fannie was one of the few labor leaders to welcome blacks. And she became one of the hundreds of Americans to die that bloody summer. Fannie Sellins was shot to death late in the summer of 1919, when Allegheny Coal and Coke hired armed guards to badger strikers and provoke violence. This year, to mark the 100th Anniversary of Fannie Sellins' death, folks in Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia will gather to remember her love of working people, her courage and the ideals for which she gave her life. See News & Links below for my speaking schedule at these events. Warning: Graphic images accompany the article below. The Red SummerThere was no justice for Fannie's killing. Authorities and jurors agreed she died as a result of a "riot" perpetrated by union strikers. Even more atrocious—hundreds of black Americans killed in cold blood that summer—their killers never facing charges or trial. Their deaths blamed on "race riots" supposedly started by the blacks themselves. Major clashes between whites and blacks broke out in more than three dozen cities and towns across America, from Chicago to Washington D.C., from Bisbee, Arizona to Syracuse, New York. See a map of the deadly violence here... In separate incidents, white supremacists lynched at least 100 African Americans. All this, with no repercussions for the killers, in fact they were sometimes aided in the murders by local law officers and U.S. Army troops called in to police the violence. Civil rights activist and author James Weldon Johnson called the time period Red Summer but the wanton killing went on from early 1919, through the spring, summer, and early autumn of that year. The episodes of deadly violence often lasted for days. In Chicago, the killing and destruction of property in black neighborhoods went on for a week, as mobs tried to drive African Americans from industrial jobs and white neighborhoods. Often the excuse was the need to “protect” white women against the alleged assaults of black men. Denied protection of the law, African Americans took up arms to defend themselves. Especially in Chicago and Washington D.C., newly returned black veterans of World War I organized and carried out armed resistance against the white mobs. This added fuel to the false accusations of "race riots" instigated by blacks. The most heinous attacks, a racially-motivated massacre, took place over several days in Phillips County, Arkansas. In the area of cotton plantations, blacks, mostly sharecroppers, outnumbered whites ten to one. African American sharecroppers attempted to unionize. When several whites showed up to harass a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. Debate remains over who fired first, but a white man was killed and the deputy sheriff injured. The next morning, a posse formed to arrest suspects in the shootings. Up to one-thousand white men from surrounding counties and as far away as Mississippi and Tennessee gathered in Elaine, Arkansas. The armed force met little opposition from the blacks in the county, but hysteria and an imagined black insurrection swept through the group. The mob started indiscriminately killing black men, women and children, and ransacking their homes. Federal troops were sent in to "put down the rebellion" and joined the killing spree. An unknown number of African Americans were killed, though the black community estimated at least 240 dead in the largest known massacre of blacks in American history. White newspapers reported the insurrection of blacks had been brought to heel with the deaths of five whites and approximately one-hundred blacks. That's the way it happened with all the violence involving blacks and whites that year. White newspapers blamed the victims for starting the violence and reported false stories to justify the murders. Image shows newspaper report following the massacre of blacks in Phillips County, Arkansas. Similarly, 1919 headlines misrepresented legitimate labor strikes as crimes against society, conspiracies against the government and plots to establish Communism. And so, history was written. The truth of what happened in Arkansas has only begun to be reported accurately in the last decade. And a look at most any U.S. history textbook, if it mentions the events of 1919 at all, calls the mob killings of blacks "race riots" and distorts the truth, giving short shrift to racism and efforts by African Americans to defend themselves, framing the violence as the fault of "both sides." Looking clearly at our history is necessary to understand current events and to end the echoing of the dangerous words that twist the truth and manipulate us. Sources: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/the-red-summer-of-1919-explained https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-ushistory/chapter/the-transition-to-peace-1919-1921/ https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=56186312471f47eca8aff16a8a990aa8 https://www.zinnedproject.org/if-we-knew-our-history/remembering-red-summer The stories of individual people make history real in our imaginations. Norm Haskett strives to preserve those stories on his website The Daily Chronicles of World War II. Norm has kindly agreed to help us remember D-Day, June 6th, a day that should live in our consciousness as an critically important military victory that came at a staggering human cost. Norm gives us a brief overview of D-Day through photos and captions, and the story of the young men from Bedford, Virginia, part of the first wave of the historic invasion. Allied Naval forces crossed the English channel overnight June 6, 1944. Soldiers started landing at 6.30am on the coast of Normandy, France. Below: Coast Guard-manned flatbottom boat, better known as a Higgins boat, carries one of the first companies of U.S. solders to invade Omaha Beach. As the boat approaches, smoke on the bluff-restricted shore most likely emanates from seagrass set on fire by naval shells. Below: “Into the Jaws of Death” is the description of this image taken by Chief Photographer’s Mate Robert Sargent of the United States Coast Guard. Taken at 7:40 on the morning of June 6, it is one of the most widely reproduced photographs of the D-Day landings. It shows troops of Company E, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division departing their landing craft and wading through waist-deep water towards the “Easy Red” sector of Omaha Beach. Earlier, U.S. Eighth Air Force heavy bombers were supposed to hit German defenses, and leave bomb craters to form instant foxholes, on the stretch of exposed beach, but the 13,000 bombs missed their target by 3 miles. The battle-hardened U.S. 1st Infantry Division joined by the untested 29th Infantry Division, advanced up Omaha Beach into 4 batteries of artillery, 18 antitank guns, 6 mortar pits, 35 rocket launcher sites, 8 concrete bunkers, 35 pillboxes, and 85 machine-gun nests. The two divisions suffered some 2,000 killed or wounded on Normandy beaches. Two-thirds of Company E, the soldiers seen in Sargent’s photograph, were among the casualties. German forward units reported to headquarters that the invasion had been halted at the water’s edge, though by 12:30 p.m. there were 18,772 men on Omaha Beach with thousands more arriving each succeeding hour. Among those soldiers in the first wave of the murderous assault on Omaha Beach were thirty-five young men from rural Bedford, Virginia. The men from Bedford had enlisted in the Virginia Army National Guard. When their unit was mobilized into the regular army the men were assigned to the untested U.S. 29th Infantry Division, Company A. Only nineteen Bedford Boys survived as the first wave hit the beaches that dreadful day. Three lost their lives later in the campaign. Thirteen sons of Beford survived the war to come home to their small town after the war. This is kind of personal story that helps us understand the war better, and that Norm shares on his website. Here he tells us how he the project started. After thirty years as a history teacher and a technical writer, in retirement, freed of workplace demands, I chose to begin researching and writing on a subject that had long interested me: World War II. My carrier aircraft designer father and his two brothers who served in the U.S. Army were part of that “greatest generation” who answered their country’s call and gave us the world we live in today. Other people of that generation, in this country as elsewhere, lost their lives or survived, though millions were scarred mentally or physically by their wartime experience. Heroes, average Joes, victims, and villains—all these people had stories to tell us from the period—some still do. I decided I wanted to be a part in sharing them. On my website, The Daily Chronicles of World War II, I strive to preserve the stories of those who lived through that watershed era. Every day of the year I share a different story from a different theater of war and year, stories heroic or tragic or both. Of course heroism and tragedy can commingle in the same narrative. The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice by Alex Kershaw, showed me a perspective on heroism I’d never considered before. He quoted the sister of one of the thirteen Bedford survivors: “People say the men who died on the beach were heroes. I think the heroes are the ones who came back and had to live with it for the rest of their lives.” Soldiers who survived the Omaha beach landing faced 4 batteries of artillery, 18 antitank guns, 6 mortar pits, 35 rocket launcher sites, 8 concrete bunkers, 35 pillboxes, and 85 machine-gun nests. George A. Taylor, commanding the 16th Infantry Regiment on Omaha Beach, encouraged his men, most of them traumatized crossing the killing ground, to move up on to the bluffs where the German positions were, stating perhaps the obvious: “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach—the dead and those who are going to die.” Below, assault troops of the 3rd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, U.S. 1st Infantry Division survived, gaining the comparative safety offered by the chalk cliff at their backs. Here they take a breather before pushing inland. Toward evening on D-Day itself the Omaha beachhead bustled with activity, having been reported safe for wheeled and tracked vehicles. Kitchens were set up and served beans and wieners and hash browns to the survivors of the nearly 40,000 men who were landed there that day. D-Day was the largest seaborne invasion in history. More than 4,100 landing craft and ships were deployed to Omaha and the other four assault beaches that stretched across a forty-mile front. By D+26 the vessels had delivered one million troops, 566,648 tons of supplies, and 171,532 vehicles. Below: With the beaches secured, badly needed tanks, heavy equipment, artillery, rifles and ammunition come ashore at Omaha Beach at low tide on D+3. Barrage balloons overhead were meant to deny German aircraft low-level airspace. Many people who lived through World War II waited until their senior years to tell their stories; sadly, most of them took their stories to their graves, having shared little if anything beyond telling at the most a few people.
Like Kershaw and other students of history, I desire to rescue as many stories of World War II as I can by discovering and recording them and then playing them back to a new audience on my website. My twin goals are to inspire this generation and caution its members about their responsibility to preserve and honor these legacies. It’s this desire that drives and energizes me every day. Thank you, Norm! I really appreciate the way you tell events day by day, including pieces from different perspectives and sources, all in one place. His website includes maps and photos, videos and books, as well as succinct snippets about the major campaigns and battles of the war. Click here for a map and overview of Operation Overload, which went down in history as the D-Day invasion. What if I told you there was a civil rights leader who mentored Rosa Parks years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott? Who spent the early 1940s in small towns across the south, calling on barber shops, beauty parlors, grocery stores, churches, talking with sharecroppers, talking about how black people could fight Jim Crow. And who convinced Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that blacks needed a civil rights base in the south like the NAACP in the north, but more activist. And urged an initially reluctant King, then a young minister, to capitalize on the momentum of the bus boycott and expand protest throughout the south. You are probably guessing this is a woman. And you would be right. Ella J. Baker was known as a difficult woman. She didn't care. Working for the NAACP 1940-1946, she encountered men who doubted women's capabilities and who wanted to hold tight to their hierarchical structure and middle-class membership. Ella wanted to involve poor blacks and women, and she believed ordinary people could organize and lead themselves and change unjust structures in society. She also didn't care that her accomplishments went unnoticed. She worked behind the scenes helping people empower themselves, saying "Strong people don't need strong leaders.” In her years of grassroots work for the NAACP, Ella admitted the seemly endless small church meetings could often be “more exhausting than the immediate returns seem to warrant, but it’s a part of the spade work....Give light and people will find the way.” By 1946, Ella had become so fed up with the NAACP for it's resistance to grassroots organizing and lack of inclusion, she quit. Though she still participated in the local chapter where she lived in New York. Ella Baker, standing third from the right with a group of girls at a fair sponsored by the NAACP, early 1950s, courtesy New York Public Library. After the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a group of sixty black ministers gathered for a conference and founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to coordinate civil rights protest activities across the South. It was Ella's idea. Not to sound like a school kid, arguing about who had an idea first, but leaving Ella out of the story of the SCLC is like forgetting you have a backbone. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is lauded by everyone as the SCLC's first president. Google its founders and you'll find the names of Bayard Rustin, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth and others. And others is Ella Baker. In 1960, when the Greensboro Four staged a sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter, Ella had served two years as SCLC Executive Director. She saw the energy and commitment of the students staging sit ins. She saw their potential and wanted to support them. Within three months she organized a conference of hundreds of college students.“[I] felt there had to be some contact between the various student groups which had sprung up, or they might peter out of a lack of the nourishment of ideas and sustenance of morale that come from such contacts.” Diane Nash attended. “We felt a real kinship with the students who were working in other cities, to bring about the same things that we were.” Ella urged the students to see the sit-in movement as “bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized coke....[But as a movement to scourge America] “of racial segregation and discrimination – not only at lunch counters, but in every aspect of life.” From this gathering of students sprouted the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, pronounced "Snick." Built from the bottom up, SNCC turned the tide of the Civil Rights Movement to direct action. To protests, sit-ins, the Freedom Rides against segregation, the 1963 March on Washington and Freedom Summer voting registration drives in Mississippi. Martin Luther King had wanted the students to become become an arm of the SCLS, but Baker urged them to form their own group, and to include women and the poor. She clashed with King, pushing for more voices to be heard, and for more people to be empowered. "To be very honest, the movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement." Ella said once. "This is not a discredit to him. This is, to me, as it should be." Scholar Cornel West says Ella was like a jazz musician. "She's antiphonal, call and response, she's in conversation. She's not pontificating from above, she's having conversation on a horizontal level." “I wasn’t one to say yes, just because [an idea] came from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was not an easy pushover," Ella said. "It’s a strange thing about men,… if they haven’t ever had a woman say no to them, they don’t know what to do sometimes.” Andrew Young articulated the feelings of the male leaders about Ella Baker. "The Baptist church had no tradition of women in independent leadership roles, and the result was dissatisfaction all around." Ella resigned from the Southern Leadership Council to work with the SNCC young people, shock troops in the battle for equal rights. “The young people were the hope of any movement…They were the people who kept the spirit going," Ella said, "the average Baptist minister didn’t really know organization.” Perhaps the influence of Ella's enslaved grandmother helped her speak up and believe in fighting for equality. Her grandmother was offspring of a slave and master. And because of that, the day after her birth the jealous mistress of the plantation poisoned the newborn's mother. Ella listened to her grandmother's stories of resilience and bravery, of being raised in slave quarters and put to work in the big house. "But at the point at which she was of marriageable age...the mistress wanted to have her married to a man whom we knew as Uncle Carter. He was also light. And she didn't like Carter. And so when she refused to concur with the wishes of the mistress, the mistress ordered her whipped, but the master, who was still her father, refused to have her whipped." Instead of the whipping, Ella's grandmother was forced to plow in the fields. When plowing began each year February, it was so cold she'd have to stop work to warm her hands on the horse's belly. Ella said, "I've heard her say that she would plow all day and dance all night. She was defiant." The SNCC flourished with Ella Baker's guidance and encouragement. It grew quickly in the fertile soil of all that spade-turning Ella had done in the 1940s. Diane Nash, (in photo) explained how Ella inspired her. “I could count on Miss Baker being truthful and she would explain many things very honestly to me, and I would leave her feeling emotionally picked up dusted off and ready to go.” Another young woman who was there at the founding of SNCC, Bernice Johnson Reagon, took Ella's words and set them to music. Struggling myself don’t mean a whole lot I come to realize. That teaching others to stand up and fight is the only way my struggle survive The anthem of freedom, Ella's Song, recorded by "Sweet Hone In The Rock" still rings true today. We who believe in Freedom cannot rest until it comes Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons Is as important as the killing of White men, White mothers’ sons. People called Ella Baker by the nickname Fundi, a Swahili word for someone who teaches a craft to the next generation. She continued to work for civil rights until her death on her 83rd birthday in 1986.
The more recent civil rights groups Occupy and Black Lives Matter Global Network embrace Baker's organizational ideals. Both have been criticized for their lack of leadership. Patrisse Khan-Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter responded by saying, "We are not a leaderless movement, we are a leaderfull movement." We shortchange ourselves when we overlook the leadership of Ella Baker. Yes, because she is an example of a powerful black woman, and a woman who maneuvered her way through gender stereotypes, but also because the work of her life demonstrates that successful enterprises need various kinds of leadership, that investing in a charismatic leader without cultivating a leadership base may jeopardize the cause. Tell me what you think! Did you know all this about Ella Baker? Leave your comment below. I'm sure glad I stumbled on her name and dug deeper. It gives me pause now, to think how often I've longed for a charismatic leader to pull Americans together to work for justice, and to take climate change seriously. Sources: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/long-lasting-legacy-great-migration-180960118/ https://snccdigital.org/people/ella-baker/ https://ellabakercenter.org/about/who-was-ella-baker https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/baker-ella-josephine https://ncwomenofcivilrights.wordpress.com/ella-baker/the-sclc-and-the-birth-of-sncc/ |
I'm fascinated to discover little-known history, stories of people and events that provide a new perspective on why and how things happened, new voices that haven't been heard, insight into how the past brought us here today, and how it might guide us to a better future.
I also post here about my books and feature other authors and their books on compelling and important historical topics. Occasionally, I share what makes me happy, pictures of my garden, recipes I've made, events I've attended, people I've met. I'm always happy to hear from readers in the blog comments, by email or social media. Archives
September 2023
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