Ella Baker's Catalytic Leadership

A Primer on Community Engagement and Communication for Social Justice

Patricia S. Parker

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520972094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Kommunikationswissenschaften

Ella Baker (1903–1986) was an influential African American civil rights and human rights activist. For five decades, she worked behind the scenes with people in vulnerable communities to catalyze social justice leadership. Her steadfast belief in the power of ordinary people to create change continues to inspire social justice activists around the world.This book describes a case study that translates Ella Baker's community engagement philosophy into a catalytic leadership praxis, which others can adapt for their work. Catalytic leadership is a concrete set of communication practices for social justice leadership produced in equitable partnership with, instead of on, communities. The case centers the voices of African American teenage girls who were living in a segregated neighborhood of an affluent college town and became part of a small collective of college students, parents, university faculty, and community activists learning leadership in the spirit of Ella Baker.

1 Translating Ella Baker’s Legacy of Social Justice Leadership into Everyday Praxis

I have always thought what is needed is the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership among other people.

Ella Baker (1972, p. 352)

When then presidential candidate Barack Obama was preparing for the 2008 Democratic primaries in South Carolina, Anton Gunn, “a self-confident young community organizer,” told Mr. Obama’s campaign strategists in Chicago that if they wanted to win in South Carolina, they should enlist the “ ‘[Ms.] Mary’s,’ older women who were centers of good will and polite gossip in the black churches, who had a hand in every charity event and Bible-study group” (Remnick, 2015, p. 26). The strategists heeded that advice. Candidate Obama went on to win the primary by a landslide over challengers Hillary Clinton and John Edwards (“Election 2008,” 2016). I do not mean to suggest that Black women were the only reason Obama won in South Carolina, but they were certainly a factor, as they have been in more recent political races (Bowerman, 2017). But Gunn’s reference to the “Ms. Marys” in a community does speak to the organizing tradition of bridge leadership in Black women’s history, a historical tradition of organizing that can be traced (at least) back to antiracist resistance to chattel slavery in the United States and that found traction during the twentieth-century movements for education reform, civil rights, and protections against sexual violence (Robnett, 1996). It is a tradition of leadership that has been passed on through carriers, such as Ella Baker and others throughout the world, who believed, as exemplified in the opening quote, in the development of social justice leadership in other people (Baker, 1972; Parker, 2004; Payne, 1995/2007).

This chapter translates Ella Baker’s philosophy into everyday praxis. It connects Black women’s bridge leadership to critical organizing concepts advanced by the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). In her comprehensive biography of Baker, Barbara Ransby made a similar comparison. Her intent was not to somehow legitimize Ella Baker’s ideas by likening them to those of a European philosopher, as some critics have alleged (Ransby, 2003).¹ Rather, she argued persuasively that such comparisons necessarily write Black women’s intellectual thought back into the academic canons that have erased and ignored them. Positioning Black women’s intellectual history within the context of other ideas, Ransby observed, subverts the tendency to “essentialize and isolate black thought from parallel ideologies” (2003, p. 419). It also expands intellectual thought. Antonio Gramsci was born only twelve years before Ella Baker, making them contemporaries at the height of his political engagement: Gramsci in southern Italy in the 1920s and 1930s, under Mussolini’s fascist regime, and Baker in Depression-era Harlem, New York, later in the Jim Crow South, and finally in global antiracist movements. Gramsci died as a political prisoner at a relatively young age and therefore was unable to fully test his ideas in the field.² Over more than fifty years, from 1929 until her death in 1986, Ella Baker was able to experiment with and develop a social justice praxis that was similar in theory and practice to Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis. As Ransby has suggested, centering Ella Baker’s approach within the Gramscian tradition might provoke new ways of thinking about now-familiar Gramscian concepts.

Here I advance Ransby’s analysis to illustrate how Ms. Baker’s praxis illuminates, racializes, and extends several of Gramsci’s ideas (see also Wilderson, 2003) and applies to bridge leadership in community organizing.³ The chapter then discusses three commitments that underlie Ella Baker’s catalytic leadership approach. Those commitments are translated into the context of organization-community partnerships and the corresponding communication practices that people can use to tackle problems as they work together for social justice (see table 1).

Ella Baker has been called a Gramscian “organic intellectual” (Ransby, 2003). Gramsci understood organic intellectuals as people who are “in the know” about how power circulates to create inequity in civil society (analytics) and who can translate everyday knowledge within oppressed communities into a collective political narrative to advance social justice (mechanisms for popular education).⁴ Baker also has been called a “radical whose genius was her ability to develop democratic and activist political organizations and communities” (Omolade, 1994, p. 164). These two descriptors, organic intellectual and organizing genius, are both good ones for Ella Baker’s praxis, and they also convey key connections between Baker’s and Gramsci’s philosophies, although there are differences as well. Both Baker and Gramsci emphasized the necessity of analyses that define how oppressive power is working in the current historical moment as well as concrete mechanisms for social justice change tactics that flow from those analytics (see also Hall, 1987; Kipfer 2008). From this perspective, not all “Ms. Marys” in a community are organic intellectuals, but those who are have the potential to educate and catalyze others to build social movements. Often they are the well-informed carriers of indigenous traditions of organizing. What “bridge leaders” mostly have in common is knowledge about who is in the community, the history of the community, and the dynamics of “what’s going on,” to recall Marvin Gaye’s popular phrase, and how these arrangements of “goings on” produce culture.

Bridge leaders inside a community are not “informants” in the usual ethnographic sense; rather, they are community experts, with various levels of consciousness about organizing strategy, who become allies in discovering and defining catalyzing questions or social change problems. They work closely with allies outside the community to mobilize resources to carry out the research or social justice action. Often organic intellectuals come from outside the community to connect with and provide the space to develop their full potential for those who are already, or in the process of becoming, organic intellectuals.

Ella Baker was an organic intellectual allied with people in communities; like Gramsci, she believed that organic intellectuals existed within the spaces where people are living through oppression. She gained that perspective at a young age from people living in her community of origin. Raised in rural Littleton, North Carolina, in the Jim Crow South of the early 1900s, her activism was anchored within the Black freedom struggle, born out of “a political analysis that recognized the historical significance of racism as the cornerstone of an unjust social and economic order in the United States” (Ransby, 2003, p. 5). Baker’s historical analysis informed a working theory of broad social transformation based on the idea of exposing the bankrupt claims of White supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. She saw those systems as the often-uninterrogated root causes of economic exploitation, marginalization from the political process, and other oppressive conditions faced by African Americans and other groups in the United States and around the world. From her enslaved grandmother, whose personal resistance to White terror got her demoted from the “big house” to the “fields,” to her mother’s activism through the Black church, Baker’s family and community instilled in her a tradition of questioning and resisting those systems in many ways and at many levels.

Gramsci’s questioning of oppressive political systems emerged out of strife and struggle in ways that distinguished him from other prominent European philosophers. He was born in the backwoods of Sardinia in southern Italy but later attended the University of Turin on a scholarship for poor students from his area (Buttigieg, 1972/2011 Vol. 1, p. 66). He struggled his entire life with a debilitating illness, exacerbated by political persecution. Though he is now among the most noted continental philosophers, Gramsci is the only one among them with that distinctive background (Ekers et al., 2012). From a young age he honed a socialist analysis and Marxist critique of the rich and powerful; later, while in college, he was impressed by the mass participation of peasants in political life. In the late 1920s, he was just beginning to gain traction in testing out a praxis to integrate political and economic action with popular cultural activity when illness and political imprisonment intervened. He died in 1937 after years of what biographer Buttigieg described as “excruciating physical deterioration, devastating loneliness, and profound anguish” (1972/2011, Vol. 1, p. 2).

Gramsci was never able to fully test his method for an antidogmatic philosophy of praxis, which he developed while writing from his cell as a political prisoner under Mussolini’s fascist regime. However, like Baker, Gramsci has inspired activists around the world who seek a praxis of concrete, community-based knowledge and historically informed strategies for social justice.

• • • • •

Baker’s and Gramsci’s analyses are unified especially in their attention to two questions: Under what conditions do people in vulnerable life situations develop consciousness and agency against oppression, and relatedly, what histories of knowledge production about social change should guide those who attempt to ally with these people?

In addition to the concept of the organic intellectual, other Gramscian concepts undergirding these questions are subalternity, hegemony and manufacturing consent, and common sense (senso commune) and good sense (buon senso). Each of these concepts resonates in Baker’s philosophy. If you are working as a social justice activist or planning to do so, consider how these concepts and their application might translate to your work.

Like Gramsci’s, Baker’s vision of a radical plural democracy remained tenaciously inclusive of the concrete, lived experiences of masses of people living under the heels of oppression. Gramsci’s concept of the subaltern is the idea that historical, economic, political, and cultural contexts are continually shaping people’s lives, exiling some to the margins of civil society. Within these subaltern spaces Gramsci saw both the workings of oppressive power and resistance to it (Golding, 1992). Likewise, Baker understood the importance of subaltern spaces to creatively resist power. However, unlike Gramsci’s organizing philosophy, Baker’s was informed by her lived experience with White supremacy as it permeates communities of color. A Bakerian theory of subalternity, I argue, recognizes White supremacist-capitalistic-driven terror as a root cause of many different kinds of oppression. Baker’s analysis centered on community expertise and people’s capacities to name that terror in sociocultural political terms and fight for a new social arrangement rooted in liberty for all. She explained her philosophy thus: “In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning—getting down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising a means by which you change that system” (quoted in Ransby, 2003, p. 1).

Like Baker, Gramsci was concerned with the roots of power. He saw the capitalist state as a hegemonic (dominant) power made up of two overlapping spheres of ruling relations: a political society and a civil society. A political society is ruled through the enforcement of laws, policies, and regulations. In contrast, a civil society is ruled through everyday norms reproduced in cultural life—for example, through the media, universities, and religious institutions. Gramsci understood that hegemony was most effectively reproduced via cultural life, wherein the state could “ ‘manufacture consent’ and legitimacy” (Heywood, 1994, pp. 100–101). Oppressive hegemonic power is at the height of its effectiveness when civil society reproduces “commonsense” norms that lead people to unwittingly defend the very systems that are oppressing them and others.⁵

Like Gramsci, Baker understood that oppressive hegemony could be reconfigured as a liberating hegemony, converting common sense into good sense through an interrogation of the root causes of economic exploitation and marginalization from the political process. However, she understood that that interrogation needs to be grounded in the concrete, and it must be informed by the historical context of people’s lives. Baker was a staunch believer in the creation of “free spaces” where people could have the openness and safety to question commonsense understandings. Free spaces may begin in the places where people tend to gather out of cultural habit: at beauty shops, at church functions, or after school. However, the introduction of critical pedagogy—a workshop on protection against violence, citizenship education, or a call to historical memory through arts activism—can transform that beauty shop into a space for building a liberating hegemony.

For example, Baker played a role in the formation of cooperatives in the 1930s, “freedom schools” in the 1960s, and the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party in the 1960s and into the 1970s (see figure 1). These are all examples of her lifelong commitment to the importance of free radical spaces in a plural democracy (see Ransby, 2003). She was able to elaborate the critical art of finding the adequate practical form of her theory (Barge, 2006). Baker differed from Gramsci because she shared the lived experience with the people with whom she worked, as a raced and gendered body. This is not to minimize Gramsci’s experience and suffering. Imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime for over a decade, he witnessed firsthand what happens to people who are incarcerated, the “molecular changes” that they themselves often do not notice. Gramsci did notice that those changes were happening to him. He gave “losing the ability to laugh at myself” as one example (Gramsci, 1993, p. 233). But at the same time, that knowledge of the lives of the incarcerated did not seem to be central to Gramsci’s ideas about common sense. I think there is something to the notion of empathizing with the common sense already existing in a collective that allows us to lead a critique of that common sense. That capacity to empathize with, and simultaneously critique, common sense is what I think Ella Baker had, and it was a quality that she never lost. She never lost sight of the practical form of the theory that could lead to a radical knowledge of how history was determining the present. This legacy lives on in a community power–based, catalyzing approach to leadership.

Figure 1. Ella Baker addressing Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates at boardwalk rally during Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, NJ, August 10, 1964. Photo from 1976 George Ballis/Take Stock.

Crehan has cautioned, however, that coming to terms with a subaltern existence, and the good sense/buon senso that emerges out of that process, should not “gloss over the complicated dialectical relationship between ‘precepts of folk wisdom’ and developed and coherent political philosophies” (2016, p. 48). Both Gramsci and Baker understood that not all responses to subalternity would contribute to transformative change to radical democracy. Instead, both were skeptical about any forms of organizing based on the premise that existing hierarchical power relations were the only ones possible. “Strong people don’t need strong leaders” (Cantarow, 1980, p. 53) was Baker’s critique of oppressive state power, and it was also a critique of a kind of charismatic leadership that relied on individual personalities. She advanced those critiques in her professional associations with social movement organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Founded in 1909, the NAACP is one of the oldest and most influential civil rights organizations in the United States. Significantly, throughout the 1940s, when Baker was serving as a field secretary and later as director of branches, the NAACP grew exponentially. In 1946, it had nearly 600,000 members (NAACP, n.d.). In that year Baker left the organization, frustrated that her criticism of th...