Description
Read all of Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” About 5 pagesRead all of “The Bronx Slave Market” by Marvel Cooke and Ella Baker from The Crisis. The story begins on page 330, continues on the next page, and then concludes on page 340. Read the excerpt copied and pasted into the “Week Fives Readings” doc from Ula Taylor’s The Veiled Garvey, about 6 pages. Finally, read the first 7 pages of Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, to note 275. Please refer to the following prompts for today’s response. As always, you are free to make your own connections and draw your own interpretations, but consider these questions:Explain the connection between the “New Negro” Movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and radicalism in the 1930s. Consider the politics and ideology of Garveyism and its relation to Hughes’ argument that, “we younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.” Then, consider how this period set the stage for the political environment Ella Baker encountered in 1930s Harlem.Analyze the sexual and gender politics of the “New Negro” Movement. How does Amy Jacques Garvey’s activism change our understanding of the UNIA? How did Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke engage questions of race, class and gender in their work in Harlem?Explain the different artistic and creative mediums of the radical mobilizations of the 1920s and 1930s. Specifically, what role did the Black press play in raising the issues that animated the Harlem Renaissance and the radicalism of the 1930s (EG Garvey’s Negro World, Randolph and Owen’s Messenger, the NAACP’s The Crisis, and Cooke and Baker’s investigative reporting)?What does Hughes say about class? How does this relate to his analysis of race? Compare and contrast the “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” and “The Bronx Slave Market.” How does Hughes’ piece foreshadow his later interest in Marxism?Compare and contrast Ella Baker and Amy Jacques Garvey. How did their politics differ? What political movements did they engage with? What were their legacies?Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
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3: Harlem During the 1930s: The Making of a Black Radical Activist and Intellectual
[Harlem] is the fountainhead of mass movements. From it flows the progressive vitality of Negro
life. Harlem is, as well, a cross-section of life in Black America — a little from here, there and
everywhere. It is at once the capital of clowns, cults and cabarets, and the cultural and
intellectual hub of the Negro world.
Roi Ottley, 1943
… a hotbed of radical thinking.
Ella Baker, 1977
When Ella Baker arrived in New York City in 1927, she walked up and down the streets of Harlem in sheer
amazement. The intoxicating sounds of jazz floated in the air, competing with police sirens, domestic
arguments, and soapbox speakers. The congestion, intensity, and excitement of urban life were all around her.
At every turn Baker realized that she was further from home than she had ever been before: away from the
South, from the sheltered confines of the Shaw campus, from her protective hometown community, and from
the restrictive authority of her mother.236
Unlike others who had consciously chosen to move to Harlem because of its reputation as a center of modern
African American cultural life, Ella Baker arrived there somewhat by chance. Her original plan when she
finished college was to attend the University of Chicago, one of Professor Brawley’s alma maters, to pursue
graduate studies in sociology or medicine in preparation for a career as a medical missionary. She was all
“gung ho”
for the idea, but her family’s finances were limited, and the Ross-Bakers had no relatives in Chicago to
cushion the transition, either financially or socially. Anna Ross Baker was also reluctant to let her elder
daughter get too far away from her supervision or at least from the watchful eye of someone she trusted. In
New York there was cousin Martha Grinage, a woman slightly older than Ella, whom Anna had helped raise
in North Carolina. This familial connection provided assurance that even if Ella did not find a job right away,
she would at least have a roof over her head and food in her stomach, not to mention a respectable home to
shelter her from the vices of the big city.
Ella got a taste of the real world the summer after she left Shaw and before she landed in New York. That
summer she worked at a New Jersey resort hotel, what she termed a “roadhouse,” that served food and
provided entertainment for guests. She especially enjoyed the camaraderie of her fellow workers. For her, the
job was temporary, but for some of her co-workers it was the only kind of job they could look forward to.
This introduction to the world of work broadened Ella Baker’s perspective. She recalled that she did not
hesitate to stand up for herself: “If something came up that I didn’t like, I’d react to it. I retained what I called
my essential integrity … I neither kowtowed nor felt the need to lord over anyone else.”237
The hotel employees were from diverse backgrounds. “We were all mixed up in nationality,” Baker was to
recall.238 The mix also included show business types, aspiring actors, black and white students, and some
Europeans. “That particular summer I met a very interesting group of young people,” she commented years
later.239 This wild and irreverent crew in no way resembled the model of respectability that her parents and
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teachers had tried to cultivate. The owner was a wealthy eccentric who enjoyed mingling with the guests,
whom Baker mockingly called the local “royalty.” She took a liking to Ella because she was talkative and
friendly. “I had to wait on the table of the owner of the place…. She wanted me to wait on her table because
she had these royalties at the table and I talked. I’m not the court jester but one of the court’s better spoken
servers.”240 This summer job may have represented only a moment of youthful adventure, but it took Ella
Baker far from home and brought her into contact with a colorful and eclectic group of people. Although the
political culture was very different, it resembled the bohemian communities she would soon encounter in
Greenwich Village and Harlem.
There was another development in Ella Baker’s life at this juncture that likely did not please her mother.
During her last year of college at Shaw,
after an impressive academic career with few distractions other than an occasional protest, Ella had fallen in
love with a smart, gentle-spirited, handsome young man named T. J. Roberts (also known as T. J.
Robinson).241 The relationship progressed rapidly, and by the time Baker was due to leave North Carolina
for New York, it was quite serious.242 But her romantic interest in one man was not enough to lessen the
seductive lure of the big city. By all indications, Roberts himself was looking for a way to move north, and
the two lovers would soon be reunited.
When Ella Baker did finally arrive in New York, she was seduced, not by Harlem’s fiery nightlife, but rather
by its vibrant political life. During the late 1920s and the 1930s, Baker came of age politically and began to
formulate the worldview and theoretical framework that influenced her organizing work for the next fifty
years. In this historic decade, she evolved from an idealistic and tentative young rebel into a sawy and
determined organizer committed to achieving justice through radical social change. In Harlem, Baker debated
passionately with left-wing men and embraced a community of dynamic young women whom her friend
Pauli Murray later described as black feminist foremothers.243
Ella Baker was among the tens of thousands of African Americans who migrated to the North during the
1920s. Hopeful migrants followed their dreams of a better life to such urban hubs as New York and Chicago,
contributing to one of the most dramatic interregional migrations in this nation’s history. Although few of
those who participated in the Great Migration found the promised land they were looking for, they
dramatically transformed the social landscape they encountered, forging a new sense of community, creating
a dynamic culture, and developing new strategies for resistance to racial oppression and economic
exploitation.244
What emerged in the African American capital of Harlem during the decades following World War I was a
discourse and practice based on the politics and vision of fundamental social transformation, that is, a
semiautonomous black left. The development of this heterogeneous political community was fueled by
several factors: the rise of a black intelligentsia consciously critical of conservative accommodationism,
liberal uplift ideology, and narrow black nationalism; the influx of blacks from the diaspora who helped to
internationalize and radicalize the ideas and politics of U.S.-born blacks; and finally, the increasingly
independent voice of black women activists, artists, and writers.
Ella Baker’s new-found community was now a distinctly international one. Harlem’s new residents came not
only from the farms and fields of the
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U.S. South, but also from Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, Guyana, Trinidad, and, in smaller numbers, various
parts of Africa. By 1930, 55 percent of all foreign-born blacks in the United States lived in Harlem. Among
them were W. A. Domingo, Claudia Jones, Cyril V. Briggs, Otto Huiswood, Grace Campbell, and Richard
Moore, all of whom became key forces in shaping Harlem’s black left community from the 1910s through the
1930s.245
Baker recalled fondly that Harlem during the years of the Great Depression was “a hotbed of radical
thinking.”246 The political and cultural rumblings of the late 1910s and early 1920s had infused a new spirit
of resistance and intellectual energy into the community. The cultural revolution known as the Harlem
Renaissance, the black pride movement led by the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, and the agitation and
education carried on by a small group of black socialists known as the Harlem radicals had effectively recolored and revitalized Harlem’s political and cultural landscape a decade before Ella Baker’s arrival. These
developments, coupled with the economic suffering caused by the onset of the depression in 1929 and
socialist rumblings increasingly heard around the world, laid the foundation for the “unprecedented explosion
of protest activity” that occurred during the 1930s.247 For Ella Baker and many others, Harlem was a
politically and intellectually invigorating place to be. Intense political debates raged everywhere, spawning
militant protests in the streets. There were rent strikes, picket lines, marches, street corner rallies, and the
famous Harlem riot of 1935, which was triggered by an incident of alleged police brutality. Looking back
during the late 1970s on the vibrant and volatile political climate that she had encountered in Harlem almost
fifty years before, Baker remarked that “I was filling my cup”; “I drank of the ‘nectar divine’.”248
THE EDUCATION OF A RADICAL INTELLECTUAL
Ella Baker’s first task in New York City, after her summer stopover in New Jersey, was finding a job.
Searching for work that paid enough to enable her to support herself provided her with a radically new kind
of education, even before the depression was in full swing. Baker quickly realized that, as a black woman, her
career options were sorely limited. Even her coveted college diploma was not much help. On her arrival in
the city, Ella moved in with her cousin Martha and worked at whatever odd jobs she could find.249 She
knocked on the doors of employment agencies all over town and was unable to find work. She was even
turned down for a job addressing envelopes
because there were so many others competing for the low-paying job.250 Baker’s situation was not unusual.
African American women in general were concentrated at the bottom of the economic hierarchy.251 This
discovery came as a shock to the wide-eyed young woman. Baker had left North Carolina with great
ambitions and high hopes, believing that great opportunities awaited her.252 The reality she encountered
shattered her naive optimism. She had only seen glimpses of the world beyond her sheltered childhood
community and the gated campus of Shaw, but in New York City, largely on her own, she confronted the
harshness of the larger society head-on.
One of the first full-time jobs Ella Baker found in the city was waitressing at New York University’s Judson
House restaurant in Greenwich Village. The work was hard and the pay low, but the job offered other
rewards. Since she worked only the busy lunch and dinner hours, Ella could spend her free time exploring the
neighborhood. Like Harlem, the Village was a vital center of political and cultural activity during the late
1920s. Left-wing meeting places, coffeehouses, and bookstores in Greenwich Village provided almost as
much stimulation for Baker as did the black intellectual and arts community uptown. During her afternoon
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breaks, she would visit the public library or stroll through Washington Square Park. She especially enjoyed
the spring, when the park was being groomed for the summer season; the smell of freshly plowed soil
reminded her of the farm community of her youth.253 It was in Greenwich Village that she first heard about
the ideas of socialism and communism.
Still as eager as she had been as a child to engage strangers in conversation, Ella would meet people on the
streets of New York and begin a discussion. Quite by accident one day, she struck up a conversation with a
young man who, she quickly learned, was a Russian Jew eager to exchange ideas about the Bolshevik
revolution and socialist movements in general. As she recalled the encounter, “I was just standing there
looking at pigeons or whatever else and this chap starts talking and he began to try to recruit me into one
party or the other.”254 They talked for what seemed like hours. Baker was fascinated. She didn’t join his
party because she “didn’t have the burning need to just jump into an organization,” but she became curious
about socialism, Marxist theory, and subjects she “had not heard of before.”255 But the chance meeting in the
park had sparked her interest, and she began to read more about radical ideas on her own. According to one
friend and co-worker during the 1930s, “Ella Baker was a student of Marx and we used to debate that
often.”256
Baker had an insatiable urge to learn as much as she could about politics and world affairs, so she took
advantage of every opportunity to attend lectures and engage in discussions about these subjects. Two vital
Harlem institutions became important intellectual training grounds for Baker and her friends. One was the
135th Street library, later renamed the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the other was
the Harlem Branch YWCA (close in proximity and function to the YMCA). Both institutions were teeming
with political activity, hosting regular forums on issues ranging from socialism to segregation. They became
key gathering places for many young Harlem artists, intellectuals, and activists. On his arrival in New York in
1921, the poet Langston Hughes recounted: “I came up out of the subway at 135th and Lenox into the
beginnings of the Negro Renaissance. I headed for the Harlem YMCA down the block, where so many new,
young dark… arrivals in Harlem have spent their early days. The next place I headed to that afternoon was the
Harlem Branch Library just up the street.”257 These two institutions were the dual pillars of Harlem’s
intellectual and political life for over two decades.
Her intellectual curiosity and growing passion for politics led Baker to spend more and more time at the
Harlem library, where she met and befriended white librarian Ernestine Rose, twenty years her senior.
Beginning in 1925, Rose oversaw the founding and expansion of the Negro Division within the library and
mentored a young interracial staff to maintain the collection.258 At the library, Baker helped establish the
first Negro History Club, which met regularly to discuss historical and contemporary events relevant to
blacks. The group routinely sponsored forums and other educational events for the Harlem community.
Sometimes heated discussions would spill over into the street; interested discussants would gather around an
able orator perched atop a crate, or standing on a stepladder, as she or he preached about colonialism, the
class struggle, or American racism. The library occasionally even paid some soapbox speakers for their
oratory, a political tradition that was imported to Harlem by Caribbean immigrants.259 Baker recalled, “If
you hadn’t stood on the corner of 135th and & 7th Avenue [protesting and debating]… you weren’t with
it.”260 There is no evidence that Baker herself ever climbed on one of these makeshift stages to display her
oratorical abilities, but in May 1936 she helped organize a street-corner discussion on lynching sponsored by
the library.261
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Baker joined the library’s Adult Education Committee around 1933. The Harlem Adult Education
Experiment, as it was called, sponsored forums, lectures, and debates on a wide range of topics.262
According to Elinor Des
Verney Sinette, who wrote a history of the Harlem library, it was “especially innovative in the character and
breadth of its activities. In addition to the traditional library services, the Harlem Experiment used the library
and its resources to offer courses in the graphic and performing arts, to sponsor lectures and book discussions
for local residents and to make its facilities available for community forums.”263 Baker’s involvement in the
Adult Education Experiment was evidence of her profound interest in African American social and political
history and of her commitment to spreading that knowledge to as wide an audience as possible. Up to this
point in her life, knowledge had been a source of personal empowerment; now, as she became more political,
she came to see education and knowledge as tools in the struggle against oppression. From her perspective,
reading, discussions, forums, and lectures were as important to a movement for social change as mass
protests, boycotts, and strikes.
Baker became an employee of the Harlem branch library in January 1934, when she was hired to coordinate
an educational and consciousnessraising program for Harlem youth and young adults, aged sixteen to twentysix. She “organized and developed the Young People’s Forum (YPF) in 1936 and later worked with the adult
Education Committee on its summer programs for mothers in Colonial and St. Nicholas Avenue Parks.”264
According to Baker’s supervisor, she “successfully formed an active organization, which she brought in touch
with other youth groups in the neighborhood and city.”265 As early as the 1930s, Baker served as a catalyst
linking together different sectors of the black community, breaking down generational barriers and
facilitating exchanges of skills and resources. In the YPF, she introduced Harlem teenagers to an impressive
roster of prominent speakers, emphasizing the need for active participation by the youth themselves. As
Baker exposed many young people to the world of books and ideas, she sought to instill in them a sense of
their own power to think critically, analyze events, and articulate their opinions and beliefs. The YPF
included discussions about “social, economic, and cultural topics,” as well as library-sponsored debates on
various controversial issues of the day.266 In her work with the YPF and in many other contexts, Ella Baker
was a teacher without a traditional classroom. The belief that education and the exchange and dissemination
of ideas could make a difference in people’s lives was to remain central to her life’s work.
The 137th Street YWCA was another important gathering place, attracting many strong-minded, young,
single women who were seeking the excitement, intellectual freedom, and the cultural stimulation that only
Harlem
could provide. Pauli Murray, who later became a prominent civil rights lawyer, religious leader, and feminist
poet, rented a room at the Y in 1929. Murray described the Harlem YWCA as a focus of political and social
activity, and a “heady” place to be at that time. On its staff were such bright and determined black women as
Dorothy Height, later the head of the National Council of Negro Women, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the
YWCA’S membership secretary, Viola Lewis Waiters, and Margaret Douglass; all went on to illustrious
careers as professionals, public figures, and political activists.267 According to Murray, “None of these
women would have called themselves feminists in the 1930’s, but they were strong independent personalities
who, because of their concerted efforts to rise above the limitations of race and sex, and to help younger
women do the same, shared a sisterhood that foreshadowed the revival of the feminist movement in the
1960s.”268 Baker spent many hours in the Y cafeteria and meeting rooms. In this thriving community of
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black women, she found the inspiration and intellectual challenges that aided her in defining her own
personal and political identity.
Pauli Murray, Ella Baker, and the friends who congregated at the YWCA represented a new model of black
womanhood in this era. Untrammeled by attachments to either birth families or husbands, these women were
adventuresome, educated, and ambitious. The social climate of the times and the abysmal conditions of
suffering created by the depression helped to channel much of their energy and ambition into radical political
activity. Some of them worked with the Communist and Socialist Parties but many more of them were
“fellow travelers” in a loosely connected circle of oppositional forces. If there was a rally about the
Scottsboro case to defend young black men against trumped-up charges of raping two white women on a
train, they called up one another and went as a group. If there was a picket line organized by the “Don’t Buy
Where You Can’t Work” campaign, which used consumer boycotts to persuade stores with black customers to
hire black employees, leaflets would be dropped off at the Y for distribution. This was a loose, informal
network of women activists, many of whom did not join or pledge allegiance to any of the organized left
factions but were actively engaged with a wide range of issues.269
Women were integral to Harlem’s political life, both as individuals and in organized groups. Some
organizations, such as the Harlem Housewives League and the Domestic Workers Union, represented
collective action around the common interests of women. In her study of African American women’s political
activism, the historian Deborah Gray White argues convincingly
that “seldom did African American women organize across class lines.”270 In the unique political
environment of depression-era Harlem, however, such cross-class unity was indeed attempted and
occasionally achieved. Maids, cooks, and unemployed workers bonded with leftist, middle-class teachers in
adult education classes. Ordinary Harlem residents worked with journalists and other professionals in the
cooperative movement. And the library, the YMCA and YWCA, and the street corners were democratic
public spaces where community members, either formally educated or self-taught, gathered, debated, and
collaborated. In all these venues, women were central participants.
Pauli Murray stood out among this group of smart and spirited young women. She was articulate, well read,
witty, and fiercely interested in politics and social justice. She and Ella Baker became fast friends. Their lives
had interesting parallels. Both women grew up in North Carolina; both migrated to Harlem around the same
time; and both obtained jobs in the Workers Education Project of the Works Progress Administration. Both
were involved in the Jay Lovestone political faction during the 1930s and affiliated with the (Lovestoneinfluenced) Liberal Party during the 1940s and 1950s. Years later, when Baker was working for the NAACP
and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Murray lent support and sang the praises of her old
friend.271 After she left Harlem, Murray attended Howard University Law School, taught law at Yale and
Brandeis, eventually entered the ministry, and wrote four books. The two women remained in touch off and
on for over forty years.
Baker’s political awakening was stimulated by the lively social and intellectual community she encountered
in Harlem, and her close comradeship with other women activists such as Murray nurtured her political
maturation. Her development as a radical intellectual took place through a systematic educational process that
went on both inside and outside cultural institutions. Baker later described herself as one of the “ignorant
ones” when she first arrived in Harlem with her college degree in hand.272 In retrospect, she felt that she had
gained a clearer understanding of the world around her and of how to go about changing it through her
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political education by activists, many of whom had less formal education than she. In lauding Baker’s
credentials in a 1932 article in the NAACP’S magazine, the Crisis, her mentor, George Schuyler, underscored
the learning process that occurred through Baker’s participation in the low-wage work force. “By force of
circumstances,” he observed, “her ‘post graduate’ work has included domestic service, factory work and other
freelance labors, to which
‘courses’ she credits her education.”273 Baker learned many valuable lessons about history, politics, and
people through her experiences as a political organizer, journalist, worker, and teacher, as well as through her
discussions and interactions with other activists in a wide array of settings.
The streets of Harlem provided a cultural and political immersion like no other. At no other time in twentiethcentury African American history was there a more vibrant black public sphere than in Harlem in the 1920s
and ’30s, infused as it was with the exciting intellectual rhythms of the black diaspora. The serious exchange
of ideas, cultural performances, and political debates flowed out of classrooms, private homes, meeting halls
and bars onto the neighborhood thoroughfare of Lenox Avenue.
As historian Irma Watkins-Owens writes: “From World War I through the 1930’s, the unclaimed terrain of the
Harlem streetcorner became the testing ground for a range of political ideologies and a forum for intellectual
inquiry and debate.” These self-styled orators are sometimes described as “soapboxers,” but because of their
choice of political platform Watkins-Owens calls them “stepladder speakers.”274 Among them were wellknown Harlem radicals like Baker’s friend Frank Crosswaith of the Harlem Labor Center and Hubert
Harrison, a socialist and onetime Marcus Garvey supporter. Women participating on the stepladder circuit
included Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, Grace Campbell, Williana J. Burrroughs, and Elizabeth
Frederickson. The struggle to determine Harlem’s public culture was as much a class and ethnic struggle as a
struggle over which speakers and ideas would predominate. Respectable Harlemites saw the sometimes
raucous crowds that gathered as a source of embarrassment; preachers looked down on the crude language
that was sometimes expressed; and police actually arrested several speakers for disturbing the peace. Still, the
tradition continued.275 Streetcorner discussions were an informal site of Ella Baker’s political education in
the 1930s, but there were more formal courses of study as well.
In 1931, Baker spent a semester at the Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York. There she had an
opportunity to learn about theories and models of social change, as well as the history of working people.
Brookwood, where Pauli Murray had also spent time, was established in 1921 by a group of socialists and
pacifists in order to offer union organizers and other progressives a socially relevant curriculum.276 It was
one of a number of worker education schools set up around that time to train labor organizers. The teachers at
Brookwood went far beyond their stated mission.
They were radical, not only in what they taught but also in how they taught, experimenting with new teaching
methods and encouraging students to think and speak for themselves. In her book on the Brookwood
educators and their cohorts, the historian Susan Kates describes how these teachers sought “to enact forms of
writing and speaking instruction incorporating social and political concerns in the very essence of their
pedagogies.”277 This was Baker’s first encounter with an open, democratic approach to formal education.
She saw enormous transformative potential in democratic and nontraditional learning environments like
Brookwood. She took ideas, theoretical paradigms, and philosophies seriously, and she spent much of her
adult life mastering ways of how to pass that knowledge on to others and empower them in the process.
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Ella Baker’s political work from the late 1930s onward was consistent with a worldview that she constructed
from the wide range of ideologies and traditions she had engaged with over the years. She combined the
black Baptist missionary values of charity, humility, and service with the economic theories of Marxists and
socialists of various stripes who advocated a redistribution of society’s wealth and a transfer of power from
capitalist elites to the poor and working classes. Added to the mix was Baker’s popular democratic pedagogy,
which emphasized the importance of tapping oppressed communities for knowledge, strength, and leadership
in constructing models for social change.
In many respects, Baker herself was what Gramscian theorists refer to as an “organic intellectual.” Her
primary base of knowledge came from grassroots communities and from lived experience, not from formal
study. She was a partisan intellectual, never feigning a bloodless objectivity, but always insisting that ideas
should be employed in the service of oppressed people and toward the goal of social justice. In the 1930s,
New York was her classroom, and Baker was both student and teacher.
In his biographical study of Ivory Perry, a St. Louis activist, George Lipsitz offers a useful definition of an
organic intellectual in practice:
Traditional intellectuals can distinguish themselves purely through the originality of their ideas
or the eloquence of their expression, but organic intellectuals must initiate a process that involves
people in social contestation…. Organic intellectuals try to understand and change society at the
same time…. Organic intellectuals generate and circulate oppositional ideas through social
action. They create symbols and slogans that expose the commonalities among seemingly
atomized experiences,
and they establish principles that unite disparate groups into effective coalitions. Most significantly, they
challenge dominant interests through education and agitation that expose the gap between the surface
harmonies that seem to unite society and the real conflicts and antagonisms that divide it.278
This description characterizes much of the public intellectual work that Ella Baker did, beginning with the
Harlem Adult Education Experiment and the Young People’s Forum and continuing with the Young Negroes’
Cooperative League and with the Workers Education Project later in the decade. By the time she was thirty,
she had become a radical intellectual committed to teaching and learning from the people in movements for
social change, an approach that would continue to distinguish her political work.
THE YOUNG NEGROES’ COOPERATIVE LEAGUE AND THE DREAM OF A NEW SOCIAL
ORDER
In the early 1930s, grim economic realities, the looming threat of a second world war, and the rise of
European fascism had a strong, sobering effect on the young activists and intellectuals Ella Baker associated
with. Their debates about politics, economics, and social change took on timely relevance and had concrete
implications for the lives of the masses of black Harlemites. The historic backdrop of the depression era
imbued their exchanges with a new sense of urgency.
The Great Depression hit Harlem hard. Forced evictions of entire families in the dead of winter were
common sights, as were the hungry faces of poverty-stricken children and long lines of desperate job-seekers.
Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who was on the staff of the Harlem YWCA that Baker frequented, recalled:
With the financial collapse in 1929, a large mass of Negroes was faced with the reality of
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starvation and they turned sadly to public relief. A few chanted optimistically, “Jesus will lead
me, and Welfare will feed me,” but… meanwhile men, women and children searched in garbage
cans for food, foraging with dogs and cats. Many families had been reduced to living below
street level… in cellars and basements that had been converted into makeshift flats. Packed in
damp, rat-ridden dungeons, they existed in squalor not too different from that of the Arkansas
sharecroppers.279
Seeing black people living in southern-style poverty in the North’s most modern city shook many Harlemites’
assumptions about which pathways would lead to progress for the race. These scenes of suffering had a
tremendous impact on Baker’s evolving political consciousness.
Baker’s political journalism reveals her responses to the depression. An article she coauthored in 1935 with
African American communist Marvel Cooke, vividly describes the abysmal plight of black New Yorkers.
Titled “The Bronx Slave Market,” the article highlights the connections among wage labor, slavery, race, and
sex. Baker documented the humiliating experiences of black domestic workers who huddled together on
designated street corners in the early morning hours, waiting for white middle-class women to look them over
and choose a lucky one to hire for the day. Baker, who, according to a friend, had worked briefly as a maid
herself, posed as a job seeker in order to get an insider’s view of what these women were going through. The
humiliation that such self-exposure entailed was compounded, so Baker found, by the desperate act that some
women were driven to: that of selling their bodies to the highest bidder:
The Simpson Avenue block exudes the stench of the slave market at its worst. Not only is human
labor bartered and sold for slave wage, but human love also is a marketable commodity…. Rain
or shine, cold or hot, you will find them there — Negro women, old and young, sometimes
bedraggled, sometimes neatly dressed — but with the invariable paper bundle, waiting
expectantly for Bronx housewives to buy their strength and energy for an hour, two hours, or
even for a day…. If not the wives themselves, maybe their husbands, their sons, their brothers,
under the subterfuge of work, offer worldly-wise girls higher bids for their time.280
Baker and Cooke’s vivid account of these scenes illustrates how deeply both women were affected by the
depression and its dehumanizing impact on poor black women.281
“The Bronx Slave Market” reflects Ella Baker’s lucid assessment of the complex realities of race, gender, and
class in the lives of African American women. The women Baker observed on Simpson Avenue were
victimized by their position as blacks, as workers, and as women. Baker’s description meshes these analytical
abstractions together in the intricate web of lived human experience. Although poor black women were
sexually exploited as women, there was no magical, raceless and classless sisterhood between them and the
white female employers, who were just as eager to use them for their muscle as their husbands were to use
them for their sexual services.
The economic rigors of the depression had intensified all forms of oppression, pushing many black women
from the lower rungs of the wage labor force back to day work and even into occasional prostitution. When
Baker and Cooke wrote their article, the modern concept of feminism was still a foreign notion to most
Americans, black and white. Yet the black feminist notion of intersecting systems of oppression as a
cornerstone of black women’s collective experience was an observable reality, and in their article Cooke and
Baker came close to articulating it as a theory.282
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Ella Baker and Marvel Jackson Cooke traveled in overlapping political and social circles. They knew one
another by reputation and through mutual friends but had not formally met until they were asked by an editor
at the Crisis to coauthor an article on the plight of poor black women in the Bronx. Over the course of several
weeks, as the two women researched, discussed, and wrote their story, they got to know one another and
gradually became friends. After the publication of “The Bronx Slave Market,” Baker and Cooke were on a
few panels together and saw one another from time to time at social and political events in Harlem.283 They
developed a mutual respect and admiration for one another that, according to Cooke’s recollections decades
later, continued despite their political differences. Ella Baker spoke quite fondly of Marvel in an interview as
late as the 1970s.284
Marvel Jackson Cooke, the daughter of black Debsian socialists from Minnesota, came to New York in 1927,
the same year that Baker did, and quickly landed a job as W. E. B. Du Bois’s secretary and assistant. Her
mother had known Du Bois previously and thus helped her to secure the job. Du Bois introduced Marvel
Jackson (later Marvel Cooke) to a whole array of political ideas, and according to his biographer, David
Lewis, also may have made unwanted sexual advances toward the naive young woman.285 She made other
political and personal connections on her own, and she eventually chose to join the underground section of
the Communist Party (CP). She became a “mainstay” of the “popular front” publication the People’s Voice
and grew to be very close to Paul and Essie Robeson and other well-known CP members and sympathizers
who congregated in Harlem. Cooke lived in the popular 321 Edgecomb Avenue apartment building that was
at one time or another the home of George and Josephine Schuyler, the journalist Ted Poston, and NAACP
executives Walter White and Roy Wilkins.286 Her sister’s marriage to Wilkins could have connected Cooke
to a wider network of people, but she and her brother-in-law were at odds politically; so the relationship was
never close. Cooke’s clandestine party membership circumscribed her involvement in
other political activities, a fact that she regretted many decades later.287 Her closest friends were, for the
most part, her party comrades.
The differences as well as the connections between Baker and Cooke are revealing. The two women were
close in age, lived nearby, and shared a left-leaning political orientation and passion for ideas. Yet their social
and political lives were not analogous. While Cooke associated primarily with other members of the
Communist Party, Ella Baker’s circle was much broader and more eclectic. She maintained close relationships
with some CP members, and she worked with many others on particular campaigns. Baker did not confine her
associations to people of a single ideological stripe or political party. In the early 1930s, she admittedly had
more questions than answers. She sought out people with whom she could study social conditions and
political strategy and places where wide-ranging discussion and debate flourished. This curiosity inescapably
brought Baker into contact with not only communists and socialists but also the followers of Marcus Mosiah
Garvey, who were a visible and vocal force on the Harlem political scene, despite Garvey’s deportation the
year Ella Baker arrived there. A Jamaican immigrant and admirer of Booker T. Washington, Garvey arrived
in Harlem in 1916 and began recruiting members to his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
His message of African pride and economic self-sufficiency for blacks, coupled with his flamboyant
pageantry, won him thousands of followers and the ire of both the federal government and black political
leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois, who saw his politics as escapist and self-promoting. Ella Baker’s close friend
William Pickens, an NAACP official, was one of Garvey’s most ardent critics. But UNIA’S popularity piqued
Ella Baker’s interest: she regularly read the organization’s paper, the Negro World, and, according to Conrad
Lynn, even attended public forums organized by the group.288 Baker spent much of her early years in
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Harlem in public venues soaking up the culture, the politics, and the intellectual fervor. She even enjoyed
dining at the restaurant run by Father Divine’s organization on occasion, because it was another lively site for
political and intellectual engagement with ordinary Harlem residents.289
For most of the 1930s, however, Ella Baker’s closest political ally was the iconoclastic writer and activist
George Schuyler, a socialist, philosophical anarchist, and critic of Soviet-style communism. He became a
mentor to Baker, and through him and his wife, Josephine, a young, white artist from Texas, Baker was
absorbed into a lively community of writers, artists, and radical intellectuals from across the nation and
around the world who were
living in Harlem at the time. Baker and Schuyler were introduced to each other by a mutual friend, L. M.
Cole, a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American, and the two hit it off right away. Schuyler was a smart,
creative, provocative, and critical thinker who, according to Baker, impressed her because he “would raise
questions that weren’t being raised.”290
Baker soon became a regular member of the circle that gathered at the Schuylers’ home, which was large,
lively, and exceptionally open, as Marvel Cooke recalled. People would bring friends or acquaintances
without a specific invitation from the hosts.291 In this setting, Baker found others who were grappling with
the same moral, philosophical, and political dilemmas that she was wrestling with at the time. She enjoyed
their company, but, she later recalled, she “didn’t care as much about the socializing as the exchange of ideas,
or at least being exposed to the debate.”292 The Schuylers’ apartment, like the YWCA cafeteria, the forums
at the library, and the public parks and street corners of Harlem, was a site for an animated discourse that
helped define African American public life. In these venues, politics and culture were debated and areas of
consensus were formed and reformed.293 The activists, writers and artists who convened regularly at the
Schuylers’ apartment had a certain romantic appeal about them. They were young, creative, bold, witty, and
cosmopolitan. Some were known to be pretty “snappy dressers,” too.294 Their spirited conversations often
lasted until dawn, and participants left intellectually energized and physically exhausted. Ella Baker took part
in many of these late-night parlays, enjoying the stimulating company, provocative conversations, and elegant
hospitality. The Schuylers resided at one of Harlem’s more prestigious addresses, in the “Park Lincoln
Apartments on Edgecomb Avenue on what Harlemites called the upscale area of ‘Sugar Hill.’” A reporter
described the building as one “where a rich canopy runs out to the sidewalk, and where a liveried footman in
gold braid must announce a visitor before he is permitted to go up in the automatic elevator.”295 In other
words, the group’s criticisms of capitalist decadence were made in very comfortable surroundings.
Despite this obvious material contradiction, most members of Schuyler’s circle were not simply armchair
radicals; they were organizers as well. Schuyler was as much of a doer as he was a talker and a writer. By all
indications, he was genuinely committed to improving the conditions of the poor, even though he had
managed to secure a fairly cushy lifestyle for himself.
A belligerent and colorful character in Harlem politics during the 1920s and 1930s, Schuyler became even
more controversial thereafter.296 Born in
Providence, Rhode Island, in 1895, he served in the army during World War I and then settled in New York
City. In 1923 he joined the staff of the Harlem-based socialist magazine the Messenger, working alongside
Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph; the latter became one of the country’s best-known labor leaders as
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head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and then as a founder of the Congress of Industrial
Organizations.297 Schuyler became contributing editor of the magazine after Owen’s departure in the winter
of 1923. As a protégé of Randolph, Schuyler was pulled into a circle of black radical intellectuals that
included Frank Crosswaith, a black labor leader; Robert Bagnall, an NAACP official; and J. A. Rogers, a
journalist and self-taught historian. These Harlem leftists were united by their opposition to the separatist
nationalism of Marcus Garvey. Under the banner of the short-lived organization the Friends of Negro
Freedom, the group met weekly at Randolph’s apartment to discuss contemporary politics, history, and
philosophy. Those Sunday gatherings made quite a strong impression on Schuyler, who recalled that nothing
“escaped the group’s probing minds and witty shafts.”298 By the late 1920s, the Messenger had ceased to
exist, the group had disintegrated, and Schuyler had begun writing a popular column, “Views and Reviews,”
for the nationally circulated African American newsweekly the Pittsburgh Courier. The column surveyed
domestic politics and race issues and occasionally commented on foreign affairs.
Ella Baker and George Schuyler became very close friends despite their very distinct personalities. Schuyler
was an arrogant, irreverent, and sometimes ostentatious young writer, who took particular pleasure in
intellectual sparring matches with worthy opponents. He was a close friend and admirer of the iconoclastic,
white editor of the American Mercury, H. L. Mencken; in fact, he was sometimes referred to as the black
Mencken.299 Schuyler took great delight in ridiculing groups and individuals that he deemed corrupt,
backward, or inept. His targets covered the gamut from black ministers and petit bourgeois black
entrepreneurs to Communist organizers. According to his longtime colleague A. Philip Randolph, Schuyler
took few things seriously.300 In contrast, Baker was pensive and unassuming. Despite her wit and goodnatured humor, she took everything seriously, and, as one friend recalls, she always “seemed mature beyond
her years.”301
By the early 1930s, Ella Baker was no longer a devoutly religious person, but she still appreciated the
cohesive role of the church as a spiritual and material resource for black people.302 In contrast, Schuyler was
an
avowed and outspoken atheist who saw Christianity and religion as stumbling blocks to black progress. At
times, his criticisms of the black church were so ruthless and relentless that anyone who was uncritical of
organized religion on some level would have been unable to work closely with him. Presumably, Baker had
developed her own doubts and criticisms of the church as an institution by this time.303 Her doubts later
evolved into a more developed critique of the mainstream black church in general and of the black clergy in
particular. Yet, despite or perhaps because of their contrasting characteristics, Schuyler and Baker were the
best of friends and the closest of comrades for several years. They complemented each other in their joint
political endeavors, with Baker guaranteeing that business matters were taken care of and Schuyler serving as
a figurehead and spokesperson for the cause. In her relationship with Schuyler, Baker took on a role she
continued to play for much of her political life, that of a behind-the-scenes organizer who paid attention to the
mechanics of movement building in a way that few high-profile charismatic leaders did, or even knew how to
do.
Ella Baker was frequently a resource for the Schuylers in personal as well as political matters. When the
Schuylers’ daughter, Phillipa, was born in 1932, George was, as usual, away on business, and he asked Ella to
assist his wife. Ella stayed with Josephine for a few days after the baby was born. keeping her company and
helping her with chores around the apartment.304 Ella and Josephine became very good friends. Baker
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recalled that the wives of many of Schyler’s black colleagues disapproved of his interracial marriage, which
was quite uncommon in those days, and did not welcome Josephine into their social circle.305 For Baker,
that was simply not an issue.
But there were other issues in the Schuylers’ marriage that caused her some difficulty.306 Much later, Baker
hinted that George may have had extramarital affairs and further intimated that she had kept George’s
philandering a secret from his wife. Her disapproval and silence reflected Ella Baker’s complicated and often
conflicted relationship with black men in leadership positions. She was close enough to their day-to-day lives
to witness the backstage drama, the character flaws, the sexism, and the contradictions between their high
ideals and their imperfect, even duplicitous actions. Although she was often critical, her criticism may have
been muted by the political goals she shared with her colleagues. Baker acquiesced to the permeable and
artificial divide between the personal and the political only with regard to sexual matters.307 She was aware
that Schuyler, and later some of her colleagues in the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, were cheating on their wives and professing moral rectitude according to conventional standards,
but she did not expose their behavior or frame it in political terms, even though she clearly viewed it as an
expression of male sexual privilege, an option not socially acceptable for their wives or, for that matter, for
Baker herself. Despite George Schuyler’s male chauvinism and adulterous behavior behind closed doors, Ella
Baker was still willing to work with him politically.308 Many years later, she revealed his secrets, but even
then she was not explicit: “Of course George was male and had opportunities to exercise his maleness by
traveling. I wouldn’t claim that George was a saint and all.”309 Still, she accepted him as a flawed person, yet
a reliable colleague.
The idea of forming black consumer cooperatives as a strategy to combat the economic devastation being
wreaked by the depression and to educate black people about socialism galvanized the group of intellectuals
and activists that gathered around Schuyler. He proposed the idea in his column in the Pittsburgh Courier and
received a positive response from readers. In the spring of 1930, Schuyler issued a call to young blacks
interested in the “economic salvation” of the race through cooperative economics to come forth and establish
a new organization for the purpose of studying the idea and “carrying the message to all corners of Negro
America.”310 He emphasized that the young recruits had to be “militants, pioneers, unswerved by the
defeatist propaganda of the oldsters, and the religious hokum of our generally… parasitic clergy.”311 By
November, he had only received a handful of responses. Undeterred, Schuyler joined forces with Ella Baker
and called a meeting of those who were interested in the idea. The Young Negroes’ Cooperative League
(YNCL) was formed in 1930. In October 1931, the group held its first annual conference at the YMCA in
Pittsburgh, with Robert Vann, publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier, delivering the introductory remarks. The
event was attended by thirty delegates “who paid their own carfare to come” from as far away as Washington
D.C. and South Carolina.312 Despite the small number of official delegates, the conference’s opening session
drew a capacity crowd of over 600 people. Baker shared the speaker’s platform with Schuyler and Vann,
addressing the important role of black women in the emerging cooperative movement. Schuyler became the
first president of the YNCL, and Baker was unanimously elected to serve as its national director.313
The YNCL was a coalition of local cooperatives and buying clubs loosely affiliated in a network of nearly
two dozen affiliate councils scattered throughout the United States. Each council functioned independently
but
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contributed funds for the national office, which was based in New York City. The YNCL circulated a
newsletter, served as a clearinghouse for information, attempted to bolster the cooperative concept through
national publicity efforts, and offered workshops and training sessions for co-op leaders. In her capacity as
executive director of the organization, Baker staffed the national office and traveled around the country
consulting with local council leaders and promoting the value of cooperative ventures, for which she received
a salary of $10 a week.314 As the masthead of the group’s stationery proclaimed, its principal purpose was to
“gain economic power through consumer cooperation.”315 Baker emphasized her own commitment to that
mission in 1932, when she stated: “We accept with zest the opportunity which is now ours to prove to
ourselves and others that the Negro can and will save himself from economic death.”316
The founding statement of the YNCL reflected many of the principles of grassroots democracy and groupcentered leadership that Ella Baker advocated for the rest of her political life. The coalition pledged itself to
the full inclusion and equal participation of women. An explicit emphasis on gender equality was unusual for
any political organization, black or white, during this period; this commitment suggests that Baker’s remarks
about the vital role women could play in the cooperative movement were well received, and it certainly
underscores the group’s inclusive and egalitarian orientation. The YNCL took steps to ensure the full
participation of its rank and file in decision making and leadership. Since membership in individual co-ops
had to be purchased through the buying of shares, larger shareholders could conceivably have wielded greater
influence in determining the priorities of the co-ops than smaller shareholders. To avoid such inequalities, the
YNCL adopted the position that each member was allotted only one vote, regardless of the number of
cooperative shares he or she owned. In a pamphlet titled “An Appeal to Young Negroes,” George Schuyler
declared the organization’s commitment to grassroots democracy: “We are ultra democratic and all power
rests in the hands of the rank and file. All officers serve only during the pleasure of the electorate.”317 This
emphasis on participatory democracy is all the more significant in a political climate where the major
organizations trying to organize among blacks — the NAACP, the CP, and the UNIA — were under fire for
elitist, authoritarian, or messianic leadership styles.
Another founding principle of the YNCL was that young people should be in the forefront of the struggle for
social change. If the energy, optimism, and rebelliousness of youth could be harnessed and directed into
constructive
political channels, the black movement would be revitalized. The YNCL restricted its membership to young
adults thirty-five years old and younger. Older adults could be admitted only after a two-thirds vote of
approval by the local membership. The group’s founder, George Schuyler, was already thirty-five years old
when the organization was established; Ella Baker was twenty-seven. Schuyler commented at the time, “This
measure is designed to keep the control of the organization in the hands of young people. We consider most
of the oldsters hopelessly bourgeois and intent on emulating Rockefeller and Ford on a shoestring
budget.”318 To ensure that its autonomy would remain uncompromised, the YNCL refused to accept
financial support from churches or charitable foundations.319
While Ella Baker and the other leaders of the YNCL held no great reverence for older, established leaders,
they did not assume that the mantle of leadership should pass to them automatically because of their youth. In
the tradition of the young intellectuals known as the Harlem radicals in the 1920s, a group to which Schuyler
had belonged, the YNCL placed great emphasis on internal discussion and education among its members.
The founding statement declared that “each council should follow a wellplanned educational program,
emphasizing at all times the inclusiveness and far-reaching effects of Consumers Co-Operation on the
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Negro’s social and economic status.”320 Rank-and-file members were offered an analysis of the cooperative
movement as it related to larger national and international issues as part of their orientation to the cooperative
movement. The organization’s founders insisted “we must be trained before trying to lead people” and that
therefore in the first year “each council [will be] engaged in extensive educational work.”321 The key role of
mass education in grassroots organizing was another principle Baker pushed for time and again in the
decades that followed.
In 1930, the YNCL envisioned an ambitious five-year plan, which, according to Schuyler, was inspired by the
Bolsheviks’ five-year economic plan. It included the goals of training 5,000 co-op leaders by 1932,
establishing a cooperative wholesale outlet by 1933, and financing an independent college by 1937. Although
most of these heady plans were never realized, the YNCL’s membership did grow steadily in its first few
years. Starting with a core group of thirty in December 1930, the organization boasted a membership of 400
two years later, with local councils in some twenty-two cities from California to New York.322 Two of the
more successful ventures were a grocery store employing four full-time workers and “doing a business of
$850 a week” in Buffalo, New York, and “a co-operative newsstand and stationery store” in Philadelphia.323
The organization faced financial difficulties from the outset. In January 1932, Ella Baker, as executive
director of the organization, oversaw the kick-off of a three-month “Penny a Day” campaign urging YNCL
supporters to set aside a penny each day to invest in cooperative projects in the hope of revitalizing the
cooperative movement and saving the fledgling national office of the YNCL. The campaign was timed to
coincide with three dates of historic significance: Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, Negro History Week, and the
signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The second annual conference was held in Washington, D.C., in
April 1932. By September of that year, however, the national office was forced to close because of the lack of
financial support from local councils. Without any guarantee of steady income, Baker continued to serve as
unpaid executive director of the YNCL, answering correspondence, accepting speaking engagements, and
coordinating weekly meetings of the New York council, which were held at the offices of the Urban
League.324 At the height of the organization’s financial crisis, Baker urged her comrades to remain
optimistic: “remember, every movement has started as our movement has started.”325
Ella Baker’s determination in the face of such formidable obstacles was due, in large part, to her having
begun to develop a long-range view of political struggle. The founders of the YNCL had a vision of social
change and racial uplift that extended well beyond the immediate benefits resulting from the establishment of
buying clubs and cooperative enterprises. They viewed the cooperative movement as much more than a
survival strategy to ameliorate the suffering of a handful of black participants; it was a vital, practical proving
ground for the socialist principles of communalism and mutual aid. To them, the concepts of cooperation and
collective action were the ideological pillars on which this larger movement was to be built. The cooperative
movement was thus a microcosm of a new social order and embodied the idealistic vision held by many of its
proponents.
Cooperatives offered an alternative to the cut-throat, unbridled competition that many felt had led to the 1929
stock market crash and the ensuing depression. In describing the mission of the cooperative movement, Baker
declared: “Ours is an unprecedented battle front. We are called upon to… be in the vanguard of the great
world movement toward a new order.”326 An article distributed by the YNCL explains the mission of the
more radical wing of the 1930s cooperative movement as follows: “The consumer coop is
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an evolutionary movement, whereby the people… hope to obtain full control of the supply and distribution of
the necessities of life, thereby eliminating the profit motive from trade…. Consumer cooperation is
revolutionary, for its ultimate aim is to create a better social structure by making unnecessary the present
form of government which is operated by and for the privileged class.”327
Baker and her idealistic young comrades saw the building of cooperative economic institutions as the first
step toward a peaceful transformation of society from capitalism to a more egalitarian, socialist alternative.
Buying cooperatives would, they hoped, demonstrate on a small scale the efficiency of collective economic
planning and simultaneously promote the values of interdependency, group decision making, and the sharing
of resources. As sociologist Charles Payne points out, this vision echoes the memories Baker treasured from
her childhood in North Carolina during the early 1900s. She often spoke fondly of a time when mutual
obligation and shared resources were the ties that bound small southern black communities together and
brought out the best in the individual members of those communities.328 The plan of the organization was
that all profits earned by shareholders would be “used for the common good”; profits were to be reinvested in
“clinics, libraries, and cooperative housing to combat slums.”329 In a 1935 article for the Amsterdam News,
Baker articulated her hope that the new cooperative ventures would be harbingers of “the day when the soil
and all of its resources will be reclaimed by its rightful owners — the working masses of the world.”330 In
her 1935 view of the world, a redistribution of wealth had to be a part of any radical reorganization of society.
The YNCL was not formally linked to any socialist or communist party, and its founders were harshly critical
of the weaknesses of much of the organized left. Yet the YNCL’s leaders had their own vision, however
elusive, of how their efforts could transform society and eradicate capitalism. George Schuyler was firm and
outspoken in his condemnation of the evils of modern capitalism, and Ella Baker shared that critique. This
conviction was central in Schuyler’s call for the formation of consumer cooperatives. In a 1930 column,
Schuyler identified capitalism as the cause of much of the suffering experienced by African American people.
He responded sharply to an anticommunist critic:
[W]hen the best minds of the age are questioning how long an economic system can last that
exploits its slaves and does not even protect
them from hunger and the elements; when we see capitalistic governments advocating many policies that
were suggested by Socialists 50 years ago, and finally, when capitalism has been the greatest factor in the
ravishing of Africa and the degradation of her transplanted sons and daughters, it sounds strange to hear a
smug little Negro editor criticize other Negroes because they have the intellectual courage, ability and vision
to study socialism and bolshevism.331
Linking economic exploitation, enslavement, and colonialism, Schuyler proclaimed that only a left-wing
analysis could adequately address the problems facing the race. The progress of the race depended on a
clearsighted critique of the class dynamics of American capitalism. Schuyler outlined the YNCL’s long-term
objectives in terms that stressed the group’s unique combination of revolutionary goals with an evolutionary
process of social transformation:
Co-operative democracy means a social order in which the mills, mines, railroads, farms,
markets, houses, shops and all the other necessary means of production, distribution and
exchange are owned cooperatively by those who produce, operate and use them.
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Whereas the Socialists hope to usher in such a Utopia society by the ballot and the Communists
hope to turn the trick with the bullet, the cooperator (who is really an Anarchist since the triumph
of his society will do away with the state in its present form — and I am an Anarchist) is slowly
and methodically doing so through legal, intelligent economic cooperation or mutual aid.332
Schuyler claimed to be an anarchist in part to be provocative. He identified with a freer form of radicalism
that rejected the strictures of a Soviet-style state or the centralized hierarchy of a Bolshevik-type vanguard
party. He seems to have embraced socialist ideals, not socialist or communist parties.
Baker did not share all of Schuyler’s views, but she did share his optimism about the cooperative movement,
proclaiming that “from economic planning must spring our second emancipation.”333 For the rest of her life
she challenged the inequities inherent in a capitalist society. In an article published in 1970, for example,
Baker argued that “only basic changes in the social structure of the country will be adequate to the needs of
the poor, both black and white,” given that “in the midst of such great wealth, millions are impoverished.”334
The YNCL and the concept of economic cooperation enjoyed a very broad
base of support that spanned the spectrum of African American political thought during the early 1930s. Such
moderate black leaders as newspaper publisher Robert Vann, Howard University president Mordecai
Johnson, and Benjamin Brawley of Shaw, expressed support for the organization, although none of them
were socialists, much less philosophical anarchists. These unlikely associations suggest two things. First,
cooperative economics was rooted in the long-standing tradition of black self-help, mutual aid, and uplift, so
it had wide appeal to both small entrepreneurs and socialists. Cooperatives could be viewed as a way of
navigating the racist stumbling blocks within American capitalism; alternatively, they could be seen as a
direct challenge to its legitimacy. Second, in a time of systemic economic crisis, many small business people
were eager to try any methods they could, however unorthodox, to keep their businesses afloat. For blacks in
particular, the repertoire of survival strategies included the pooling of resources and a willingness to at least
temporarily substitute cooperation for competition.
Baker and Schuyler were heirs to a long tradition of mutual aid in the African American community, and
many black organizers had seen cooperatives as an avenue for economic improvement. During the 1920s and
1930s, several organizations and leaders, including, most notably, W. E. B. Du Bois, advocated similar
strategies. According to historian Manning Marable, Du Bois’s commitment to all-black cooperative ventures
was consistent with his deepening socialist vision and simply took into account the reality of American racial
politics in the Jim Crow era. Du Bois, in Marable’s words, “firmly believed that the Negro middle class could
lead black workers to a moderate socialist program. In a series of articles in the Pittsburgh Courier, Du Bois
explained that the entire working class could ‘make one assault upon poverty and race hate.’ But to begin this
process, black Americans had to build their own separate organizations along cooperative lines.”335 Du Bois
held the view, Marable concludes, that “the rise of black cooperativism would ultimately establish a unity
between workers of both races.”336 In other words, African Americans had to initiate a transitional strategy
toward socialism that made political sense within the confines of Jim Crow. Toward this end, Du Bois
“supported the development of black cooperatives.”337
Varied political tendencies can be identified under the rubric of the cooperative movement. Du Bois
represented one strain, while Father Divine represented quite another. A flamboyant and controversial
messianic religious leader who professed no socialist aspirations whatsoever, Divine
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adopted cooperative methods and rhetoric in building his religious empire. He organized soup kitchens,
stores, and nurseries by calling on his followers to pool their meager resources and labor together under the
banner of self-help. Divine’s cooperative enterprises did help many poor black people to survive during hard
times. Contrary to the YNCL’S policy of channeling profits into community projects, however, Divine
siphoned off a good chunk of the excess to support his own lavish lifestyle.338 Some supporters of
cooperatives had more straightforward, pragmatic goals. Many small business people entered into
partnerships and joint, bulk-buying arrangements to minimize their costs and maximize their profits.
Although advocates of “black capitalism” supported cooperatives, most of them strongly disapproved of the
YNCL. For example, in 1933 the YNCL was sharply criticized by the conservative Colored Merchants
Association and the National Negro Business League. Schuyler predictably reacted with biting criticisms of
his own.339
The YNCL was a short-lived experiment in collective black self-determination. Like many economic
cooperatives, it was unable to survive the concrete pressures of a dominant social and economic system
antithetical to its aims or to sustain a mass base of committed supporters. It proved especially difficult to
hammer out a daily practice to implement the group’s long-term goals. The organization was plagued by
monetary woes from its inception and eventually collapsed under the weight of financial obligations that
could not be met. Schuyler’s biographer, Michael Peplow, attributes the failure of the YNCL not only to the
lack of capital and financial support but also to the fact that Schuyler’s inflammatory remarks about the black
church and the black middle class had made him too many enemies.340
Rooted in the idealism of the utopian socialist communities of the nineteenth century, cooperatives held out
the illusory hope of creating an oasis of economic democracy in the midst of a capitalist society, an objective
rife with pitfalls and contradictions from the outset. Schuyler traveled to England and met with organizers of
the famous British cooperative movement to garner lessons to ensure the longevity and stability of the
YNCL, but the odds were against the venture.341 Cooperatives needed capital, which few black people had
even during the best of times. In the depths of the Great Depression, the minimum funds required to sustain
stable buying coops were simply unavailable. Cooperatives were not a short-term solution to economic woes;
they needed considerable time to demonstrate progress. In such urgent and uncertain times, most people were
not confident or
patient enough to allow them to work. The co-ops that did succeed were absorbed into the dominant
economy.
Still, the cooperative movement held a special appeal for Ella Baker. Given the range of political
organizations based in New York City during the early 1930s, why did she choose to dedicate her efforts to
the YNCL? One reason is that the cooperative philosophy resonated with many of the ideals that were
instilled in her as a child. She brought her memories and ideals of community solidarity in the rural South to
bear on the predicament in which she found oppressed black people in the urban North.
Judging from the political views that the mature Ella Baker articulated during the 1960s, there are other ways
in which the YNCL must have appealed to and influenced her as well. Baker’s political philosophy called for
challenging the laws and institutions of society in order to eliminate discrimination and inequity, but at the
same time she felt strongly that any movement for social change must transform the individuals involved —
their values, priorities, and modes of personal interaction. Baker expressed this viewpoint as early as the
1940s, and it remained a constant theme in her politics thereafter. The cooperative movement offered
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organizers a way of working with people on a protracted, day-to-day basis. The process of setting up co-ops,
establishing common priorities for those involved, solidifying democratic methods of decision making, and
building communications networks encouraged people at the grassroots to engage in social change and
transformation, changing themselves, each other, and the world around them simultaneously. Unlike such
singular events as voting on election day or attending a political rally, involvement in cooperatives and
buying clubs enabled people to redefine the ways in which they related to neighbors, friends, and co-workers.
For Baker, political struggle was, above all, a process, and she insisted that the structure of political
organizations had to allow for the process of personal and political transformation to occur.
In many respects, the YNCL experiment foreshadowed a very similar organization with which Baker would
be closely affiliated some thirty years later, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Both
organizations were decidedly independent of more moderate black leadership. Both embraced the concept of
leadership at the grassroots as opposed to a top-down model. And both focused on youth as a cutting-edge
force for social change. The two groups certainly had different goals and emerged from distinctly different
historical contexts. But parallels are clear: both the YNCL and SNCC were distinguished from other
contemporary organizations
by their focus on grassroots education, democratic decision-making, and a step-by-step, transformative
process of working toward long-term goals. The connection between the YNCL and SNCC in Baker’s own
life history illuminates the carryover of strategies for resistance and change, which were passed on through
conduits like Ella Baker from generation to generation. Since the YNCL was so crucial in shaping Baker’s
own political thinking, she presumably drew on many of the lessons and mistakes of that experience in the
efforts to launch and sustain SNCC during the early 1960s.
Her years in the YNCL left Baker with a wealth of political experience, but her lack of any real material
wealth took its toll. Throughout the depression, she suffered bouts of unemployment and was in a perpetual
state of financial instability. Her predicament was shared by many other educated people, both black and
white, but her commitment to voluntary political organizing kept her poorer than some. To make ends meet,
Baker took short-term jobs whenever they were available, often finding them through friends. In the summer
of 1934, she worked with the World’s Fair Boosters and Friends of Africa, in their offices on 135th Street, to
promote black attendance at the fair and coordinate the Negro exhibits. She worked briefly, along with John
Henrik Clarke, on the Youth Committee of 100 against Lynching; with Lester Granger at the New York
Urban League; with Harlem’s Own Cooperative; and with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.342 Some
of this was volunteer work, and some provided her with a nominal salary. She also did freelance writing for a
wide variety of periodicals and worked as office manager for the National News, a short-lived publication
edited by Schuyler that was geared toward a black readership. Finally, Les Granger told her about job
openings at the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Baker immediately “went down and signed up.”343
THE WORKERS EDUCATION PROJECT
In October 1936, Baker began working as a consumer education teacher for the Workers Education Project
(WEP) of the WPA, based initially in offices on Broadway across from City Hall and later on 14th Street in
lower Manhattan.344 Her experience in coordinating and conducting education programs in the cooperative
movement qualified her for this assignment. The WPA was one of numerous New Deal agencies set up during
the depression by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to combat massive unemployment through the creation of
government-funded jobs. Employment programs designed specifically for educated workers aimed to use
their talents for the
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public good: artists created murals and sculptures for public buildings; the Federal Theatre hired actors and
directors to stage plays for popular audiences; the Federal Writers Project compiled guides to states and
collected historical documents. Black leaders close to the Roosevelt administration made sure that black
artists, writers, and teachers were not denied access to employment programs for educated workers, and some
projects documented and supported African American culture.345
The WEP consisted of 1,000 teachers nationwide who were sympathetic with the militant forces within the
burgeoning trade union movement, specifically the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The project’s
official purpose was to “cooperate with union officials and community leaders in organizing and conducting
classes in workers’ and consumers’ problems.”346 WEP teachers held classes in settlement houses, union
halls, churches, and workplaces, and discussions ranged from practical questions about the social security
program to the growth of fascism abroad.347 The New York City office had a staff of about eighty and was
supervised by Isabel Taylor, “a mild-mannered woman whose background included settlement house work in
the tradition of Jane Addams, and working with coal mining families in Pennsylvania.”348 Initially,
according to Baker’s friend and WEP co-worker Conrad Lynn, “the government felt we [in the WEP] should
be neutral in the struggle between capital and labor… but we won the right to study the history of the labor
movement,” which soon became a primary focus of the group’s work.349 Lynn recalled how prolabor WEP
teachers tried to infuse radical politics into their classes. “We ferreted out instances of exploitation of
workers, educating them about instances such as the famous Triangle Shirtwaist fire in which dozens of
workers were killed due to the unsafe conditions they were forced to work under.” Such lessons, Lynn
admitted, were intended to motivate workers to join the growing trade union movement.350 Baker’s longtime friend Pauli Murray, who also worked with the WEP, made the case for partisanship even more strongly
in a 1938 report on how to improve the project’s efforts. In her view, teachers needed to bolster workers’
confidence so that they would not be “satisfied with things as they are.” She felt that the WEP should
encourage black workers, in particular, to overcome feelings of “inferiority and timidity” and to “see the
world as theirs and from which they have a right to take what rightfully belongs to them.”351
Ella Baker was recognized as a successful educator within the WEP. Soon after joining the WPA, she was
promoted to assistant project supervisor in the Manhattan office of the WEP. There, Baker coordinated and
conducted
workshops on consumer issues for church, labor, and community groups. She was also the author of several
publications, including a study guide on consumer issues that was distributed nationwide.352 Like Lynn and
Murray, Baker strove to politicize the content of her work and radicalize her students by linking the problems
of consumers with larger issues of inequality and the need for social change. A flyer announcing one of
Baker’s consumer education workshops read: “Some consumers organize to save money, others to save the
world — what does consumer education mean to you?”353 Her syllabi posed such questions as “Why so
much poverty in so rich a country as America?” and “What role can organized and dynamic consumer action
play in issuing in a new social order?”354
Baker undertook concerted efforts to make consumer education available and accessible to black Americans,
who might otherwise not have seen WEP programs as relevant to them. She conducted workshops in Harlem,
holding classes in old storefronts and at workplaces, and created an educational exhibit on consumer issues in
Harlem Hospital to accommodate hospital employees, especially nurses who might not have otherwise
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attended.355 Pauli Murray shared Baker’s goal of making the WEP more accessible to black workers and
supported her efforts, praising Baker’s work in Harlem and urging the office to lend more publicity to the
work.356
The WEP provided a serious political education for the teachers it employed. “We had few guidelines and we
learned as we taught, pooling our experiences,” recalled Murray. “We also had to familiarize ourselves with
the immediate problems of clothing workers, Pullman car porters, domestic workers, transport workers, sales
clerks, the unemployed, or whatever groups we were assigned to. We had to be well informed on
contemporary social, economic and political issues to satisfy the demand among workers for discussions of
political events.”357 The WEP teachers learned from their dialogues with adult students and from their
debates with one another. They studied, argued, and grappled on a day-to-day basis with the most pressing
economic and political problems of the time. Looking back decades later, Conrad Lynn was convinced that he
had encountered “some of the best political minds collected under one roof” while working there.358 In the
WEP, young radical intellectuals hammered out together new approaches to social change.
The WEP was host to virtually every sector of the American left, from proponents of labor union organizing
and independent socialists to members of the Communist Party. Baker recalled their passionate debates with
pleasure: “You had every spectrum of radical thinking on the WPA. We had
a lovely time…. Boy it was good, stimulating.”359 In this intellectually dynamic environment, where theories
were tested against the experiences of working adults as well as against alternative points of view, many of
the amorphous ideals that had attracted Baker to the YNCL were challenged and refined. The YNCL had
introduced Baker to progressive politics; in the WEP, her ideas were forged into a coherent political analysis.
Baker also studied and taught in the workers’ education program at the Rand School for Social Science,
located on East 15th Street in Lower Manhattan. In 1936, while she was working for the WEP, Baker
attended classes at the Rand School, and by 1937 she was teaching consumer issues at the school’s weekly
afternoon classes for women.360 Founded in 1906 by members of the American Socialist Society and funded
by Carrie Sherfey Rand, a wealthy Iowa radical and former abolitionist, the school offered courses on
socialist theory, economics, and labor history and hosted such notable intellectuals as John Dewey, Bertrand
Russell, and Charles Beard. By the 1930s the school’s cafeteria, classrooms, and bookstore were hangouts for
an interracial crowd of young radical thinkers and activists.361 Her experience as a student and teacher at the
Rand School was another part of Baker’s deepening involvement in and exposure to leftist politics in New
York City.
In the WEP office where Baker worked, there were constant debates and discussions about such topics as the
future of socialism, the relationship of the communist movement to the struggle for Negro rights, how to
structure organizations democratically, the rise of fascism in Europe, and the future of colonialism in Africa.
Her coworkers included Conrad Lynn, a lawyer for the Young Communist League; Agnes Martuoucci, a
member of the Socialist Party; and Pauli Murray, who supported the independent socialist faction led by Jay
Lovestone. “You had every splinter of the CP,” Baker recalled, as well as a variety of socialists and
independent radicals. In describing the backgrounds of her co-workers at the WEP, Baker remembered that
many of her white colleagues were so-called red diaper babies who had been brought up in leftist families,
but who “had become disillusioned with the bringing in of the socialist order through the CP, and yet who
couldn’t leave the idea.”362 They were actively looking for socialist alternatives. Lynn echoed Baker’s
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assessment: the WEP staff “were men and women committed to the cause of labor, and they represented
every party and tendency of the left. For the first time Trotskyists, Lovestoneites, Stammites, Socialists,
Anarchists, and Henry Georgeites mingled with orthodox Communists.”363
In this new environment, Baker clarified her thinking about class, and began to put her ideas about education
and social change into practice. The philosophy of education that she expressed during her work for the WEP
reflects some key features of her larger political vision. One of the main goals of workers’ education,
according to Baker, was to provide the worker with “a more intelligent understanding of the social and
political economy of which he is a part.”364 For Baker, consumer issues were not apolitical matters that
affected everyone regardless of their economic position. She pointed out that although “everyone is a
consumer… here, we are primarily concerned with the wage earner whose income fails to satisfy the needs
and desires of himself and his family… and who can find small comfort and little hope in our present
economy.”365 In describing her approach to consumer education, Baker insisted that “the aim is not
education for its own sake, but education that leads to self-directed action.”366 Consumer politics were one
aspect of a larger class struggle between the haves and have-nots. Baker saw consumers as workers at the
other end of the production process and struggle over consumer power as analogous to the struggle for
workers’ power on the factory floor. As she put it in her syllabus: “All work is but a means to the end of
meeting consumer demands. The ‘real wage’ is what the pay envelope will actually buy. The wage-earner’s
well-being is determined as much at the points of distribution and consumption as at the point of
production…. Since recurrent ‘business slumps’ and the increased mechanization of industry tend to decrease
the primal importance of the worker as producer, he must be oriented to the increasingly more important role
of consumer.”367
In other words, organization at the point of consumption was potentially as important as the Marxist strategy
of organization at the point of production. By acting collectively as consumers and as workers, ordinary
people could influence the economy and improve the condition of their lives. In her WEP course syllabus,
Baker raised fundamental questions about the economic injustice of American capitalism and suggested that
an independent, aggressive consumer movement had an important role to play in changing that system.368
She clearly saw her work as a part of a bigger process of social and economic change along socialist lines.
The WEP exposed Baker to the entire spectrum of leftist political ideologies and factions. She was a careful
observer and critic of the left and had many close friends in opposing organizations and parties. In her
opinion, the Communist Party “was the most articulate group for social action. [It] may not have been well
organized all the time, but it was articulate.”369
Charles Payne points out that Baker also admired the localized “cell structure” of the CP, which could be
interpreted any number of ways, but, given the trajectory of Baker’s politics after the 1930s, it is likely that
she simply valued the localized process of intensive small-group discussion and planning that a “cell”
structure composed of small units that worked closely together would allow for.370 Baker respected the CP’s
leadership in organizing white and black industrial workers during the 1930s, and its white members were
some of the staunchest antiracists around. However, her criticisms of the party, which she did not write down,
seem to have outweighed her praise.371 Baker’s relationships with CP members were not governed by the
politically expedient notion of “live and let live.” Rather, she constantly struggled with her friends and
comrades around points of disagreement. Conrad Lynn, one of her closest CP friends, recalled that Baker
often “shoved reading material under my nose critical of the Communist Party.” Yet the two remained
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lifelong friends.372 Even though Baker was more closely associated with the socialists, rather than the
communists, in Harlem, she never endorsed the “militant anticommunism” of some of her friends, such as A.
Philip Randolph, who, according to historian Mark Naison, took the position that “communism represented a
‘Fifth Column’ in American life that had to be destroyed at all costs.”373
Among all the various and competing leftist organizations active in New York during the 1930s, Baker was
particularly sympathetic to the Lovestonites, an independent socialist faction named after its leader, Jay
Lovestone, who had split from the Community Party during the late 1920s.374 In interviews, John Henrik
Clarke and Conrad Lynn agreed about Baker’s Lovestonite affiliation.375 The fact that one of Baker’s closest
friends, Pauli Murray, supported Lovestone adds weight to Lynn’s and Clarke’s recollections.376 Lovestone
and his followers were critical of the Communist Party’s view of the Bolshevik revolution as a virtual
blueprint for socialist revolutions worldwide. As proponents of a brand of American exceptionalism, they
believed that the United States had to follow its own path toward socialism. Lovestone had been general
secretary of the Workers (Communist) Party during the late 1920s, when the so-called Negro question was
being hotly debated within party circles. Before he was ousted in 1929, Lovestone and his black and white
allies within the party opposed the notion of black self-determination founded on the idea of a southern-based
Negro “nation within a nation,” which was introduced at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International
in Moscow in 1930. Lovestone had little confidence in organizing in the agrarian South and thought that the
party should urge blacks to migrate to the industrial North instead.377 Lovestone advocated interracial
organizing on the basis of common class interests. One of his strongest black supporters within the party was
Lovett Fort-Whiteman, who coauthored an internal party document that called for the abolition of the partyrun American Negro Labor Congress on the grounds that it unfairly segregated black workers coming into the
party. Those on the other side of the debate countered that critics of the American Negro Labor Congress and
the self-determination position were minimizing race and suggesting that it was marginal to the class
struggle.378 Lovestone recognized that racism was a problem within the party as well as in the nation as a
whole, and he maintained that the party should fight “white chauvinism” and upgrade “Negro work.”379
According to historian Paul Buhle, the Lovestonite faction, after its expulsion from the Workers (Communist)
Party, encouraged “a rethinking of communist policies in a more open fashion” while promoting an
aggressive agenda, including the development of a Worker’s School headed by Bertram Wolfe.380 The group,
in Buhle’s assessment, maintained a “small but vital intellectual following” in the early thirties.381 Baker
may have been drawn to the Lovestonites’ lively intellectual debates and emphasis on radical education. The
group’s interracial composition and its commitment to understanding the connections between racial injustice
and class inequality would also have appealed to her. Whatever the attraction to the controversial group,
Baker’s affiliation with Lovestone was a loose one at best.
Baker was well informed about left political theory and questioned all the viewpoints. She read and debated
Marxist ideas regularly with her coworkers in the WEP, but she was never known to toe a “party line” of any
type. Indeed, she was a vigorous opponent of sectarianism, regarding organizational splits over abstractions
as destructive to organizing for change. Baker’s interest in Marxism was an extension of her open-minded
exploration of a wide spectrum of political views. According to some of her friends, she was fairly
promiscuous in her political associations during and after the 1930s. It did not matter whether she dealt with
communists, Lovestonites, socialists, or ardent Garveyites; she was eager to engage them all. This openness
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to diverse political views and ideologies characterized much of her political life. Anyone concerned with
social and economic justice, civil rights, and human progress was a potential ally — or at least worthy of a
hearty debate. Even at this early stage of her political career, Baker was a catalyst for bringing people
together. She was a common denominator among the varied and often contentious segments of Harlem’s
progressive political community. “Characters of all the various political stripes would drop by Ella’s
apartment, just for the political challenge of it. She would argue her point one day,” John Henrik Clarke
recalled, “and see you on the street and hug you the next. Principled disagreements were not a basis to shut
anybody out.”382
INTERNATIONALISM AND THE BLACK DIASPORA
Moving from the provincial South to metropolitan Harlem opened Baker’s eyes to the variety of black
diasporic cultures and politics. One of the things Baker loved about New York was its global character, a
multinationalism that permeated the political and cultural life of the city. Baker marveled that “if ever there
was any ferment across the ocean in terms of social action and development of political parties like
communist, socialist, etc., New York became the place where it birthed and blossomed most.”383 During the
1930s, Baker, like many African Americans, took a greater interest in world affairs and U.S. foreign policy.
As John Henrik Clarke put it, “black took on a bigger meaning and freedom took on a global character.”384
In 1932, Baker worked as a reporter for the West Indian News and familiarized herself with Caribbean
politics and culture; she also became acquainted with the Caribbean socialist Richard Moore.385 In January
1937, when England sent troops to suppress a strike by oil workers in the British colony of Trinidad and
Tobago, Baker took a stand in support of the striking workers. She had lengthy conversations with her friend
Conrad Lynn about the incident, firing him up so much that he disrupted a meeting of the New York City
Committee of the Communist Party by demanding that they funnel aid to the embattled black strikers.386
The CP committee refused, and Lynn walked out of the meeting threatening to resign his membership in
protest. Lynn recounted this dramatic incident in his autobiography, There Is a Fountain, but only years later
did he mention that his conversations with Ella Baker were the impetus for his actions.387
During 1934-35, when the Italian dictator, Mussolini, moved to annex the African nation of Ethiopia,
thousands of Harlemites mobilized to protest the violation of Ethiopia’s autonomy and to support the
Ethiopian resistance. Ella Baker lent her voice in support of this international campaign, marching in
demonstrations, attending meetings, and circulating petitions under the organizational banner of the
American League against War and Fascism.388 The league held a major march through Harlem on
August 3, 1935, which brought out nearly 25,000 people.389 Baker’s close relationship with one of the key
leaders of the Ethiopian aid campaign, Rev. William Lloyd Imes, suggests that she may have played more of
a role in this effort than extant documents indicate.390 In “Light on a Dark Continent,” an unpublished article
on the richness of African history written by Baker in the late 1930s, she directly challenged the bias of
Eurocentric histories, pointing out that, in fact, the so-called Dark Continent of Africa was the birthplace of
the human species.391 These words and activities indicate that Baker’s politics were framed by a much larger
internationalist perspective and included a particular concern with the issues of African colonialism and
independence.
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Pan-Africanism linked the liberation of people of African descent throughout the diaspora to the struggle for
self-determination on the continent of Africa. W. E. B. Du Bois was one of its major proponents within the
United States, advocating solidarity among black people around the world but rejecting any type of narrow,
racial separatism at home. Baker’s internationalist stance and her critique of black nationalism went hand in
hand as well. She was indubitably a “race woman,” unapologetic about her love and affinity for black people,
and she situated herself politically and personally within a diverse and sometimes fractious black community.
She lived her entire adult life in the historically and culturally rich black enclave of Harlem out of choice
rather than necessity. But her affinity and sense of community did not stop there. Baker’s class analysis and
political perspective suggested the need for cooperation and coalition building with other oppressed people,
regardless of race. The Young Negroes’ Cooperative League was the only all-black organization with which
Baker was affiliated, and the YNCL maintained amicable relations with nonblack organizations, especially
cooperatives, that had similar economic and political goals. Baker never worked with organizations that
espoused narrow nationalist ideas or advocated Garvey-style separatism. Her views on these questions
closely resembled those of Du Bois. They both recognized that, in a historical period defined by Jim Crow
segregation, all-black organizations were necessary modes of self-help and group empowerment, yet they did
not preclude working with predominantly white or multiracial organizations simultaneously or in the
future.392 In the economic crisis of the depression, African Americans had to take immediate steps to resist
oppression and ensure their survival. They could work toward establishing principled, enduring coalitions
with whites and with other people of color,
especially on issues of economic justice, but coalition-building was a protracted process and was most
effectively conducted from a strong, autonomous base.
Baker saw the necessity of forming alliances across racial lines and national boundaries on pragmatic
political grounds. In response to remarks made by a Philadelphia minister urging blacks to pull themselves up
by their bootstraps, that is, without allies, she ar…
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![Description
Read all of Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” About 5 pagesRead all of “The Bronx Slave Market” by Marvel Cooke and Ella Baker from The Crisis. The story begins on page 330, continues on the next page, and then concludes on page 340. Read the excerpt copied and pasted into the “Week Fives Readings” doc from Ula Taylor’s The Veiled Garvey, about 6 pages. Finally, read the first 7 pages of Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, to note 275. Please refer to the following prompts for today’s response. As always, you are free to make your own connections and draw your own interpretations, but consider these questions:Explain the connection between the “New Negro” Movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and radicalism in the 1930s. Consider the politics and ideology of Garveyism and its relation to Hughes’ argument that, “we younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.” Then, consider how this period set the stage for the political environment Ella Baker encountered in 1930s Harlem.Analyze the sexual and gender politics of the “New Negro” Movement. How does Amy Jacques Garvey’s activism change our understanding of the UNIA? How did Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke engage questions of race, class and gender in their work in Harlem?Explain the different artistic and creative mediums of the radical mobilizations of the 1920s and 1930s. Specifically, what role did the Black press play in raising the issues that animated the Harlem Renaissance and the radicalism of the 1930s (EG Garvey’s Negro World, Randolph and Owen’s Messenger, the NAACP’s The Crisis, and Cooke and Baker’s investigative reporting)?What does Hughes say about class? How does this relate to his analysis of race? Compare and contrast the “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” and “The Bronx Slave Market.” How does Hughes’ piece foreshadow his later interest in Marxism?Compare and contrast Ella Baker and Amy Jacques Garvey. How did their politics differ? What political movements did they engage with? What were their legacies?Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
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3: Harlem During the 1930s: The Making of a Black Radical Activist and Intellectual
[Harlem] is the fountainhead of mass movements. From it flows the progressive vitality of Negro
life. Harlem is, as well, a cross-section of life in Black America — a little from here, there and
everywhere. It is at once the capital of clowns, cults and cabarets, and the cultural and
intellectual hub of the Negro world.
Roi Ottley, 1943
… a hotbed of radical thinking.
Ella Baker, 1977
When Ella Baker arrived in New York City in 1927, she walked up and down the streets of Harlem in sheer
amazement. The intoxicating sounds of jazz floated in the air, competing with police sirens, domestic
arguments, and soapbox speakers. The congestion, intensity, and excitement of urban life were all around her.
At every turn Baker realized that she was further from home than she had ever been before: away from the
South, from the sheltered confines of the Shaw campus, from her protective hometown community, and from
the restrictive authority of her mother.236
Unlike others who had consciously chosen to move to Harlem because of its reputation as a center of modern
African American cultural life, Ella Baker arrived there somewhat by chance. Her original plan when she
finished college was to attend the University of Chicago, one of Professor Brawley’s alma maters, to pursue
graduate studies in sociology or medicine in preparation for a career as a medical missionary. She was all
“gung ho”
for the idea, but her family’s finances were limited, and the Ross-Bakers had no relatives in Chicago to
cushion the transition, either financially or socially. Anna Ross Baker was also reluctant to let her elder
daughter get too far away from her supervision or at least from the watchful eye of someone she trusted. In
New York there was cousin Martha Grinage, a woman slightly older than Ella, whom Anna had helped raise
in North Carolina. This familial connection provided assurance that even if Ella did not find a job right away,
she would at least have a roof over her head and food in her stomach, not to mention a respectable home to
shelter her from the vices of the big city.
Ella got a taste of the real world the summer after she left Shaw and before she landed in New York. That
summer she worked at a New Jersey resort hotel, what she termed a “roadhouse,” that served food and
provided entertainment for guests. She especially enjoyed the camaraderie of her fellow workers. For her, the
job was temporary, but for some of her co-workers it was the only kind of job they could look forward to.
This introduction to the world of work broadened Ella Baker’s perspective. She recalled that she did not
hesitate to stand up for herself: “If something came up that I didn’t like, I’d react to it. I retained what I called
my essential integrity … I neither kowtowed nor felt the need to lord over anyone else.”237
The hotel employees were from diverse backgrounds. “We were all mixed up in nationality,” Baker was to
recall.238 The mix also included show business types, aspiring actors, black and white students, and some
Europeans. “That particular summer I met a very interesting group of young people,” she commented years
later.239 This wild and irreverent crew in no way resembled the model of respectability that her parents and
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teachers had tried to cultivate. The owner was a wealthy eccentric who enjoyed mingling with the guests,
whom Baker mockingly called the local “royalty.” She took a liking to Ella because she was talkative and
friendly. “I had to wait on the table of the owner of the place…. She wanted me to wait on her table because
she had these royalties at the table and I talked. I’m not the court jester but one of the court’s better spoken
servers.”240 This summer job may have represented only a moment of youthful adventure, but it took Ella
Baker far from home and brought her into contact with a colorful and eclectic group of people. Although the
political culture was very different, it resembled the bohemian communities she would soon encounter in
Greenwich Village and Harlem.
There was another development in Ella Baker’s life at this juncture that likely did not please her mother.
During her last year of college at Shaw,
after an impressive academic career with few distractions other than an occasional protest, Ella had fallen in
love with a smart, gentle-spirited, handsome young man named T. J. Roberts (also known as T. J.
Robinson).241 The relationship progressed rapidly, and by the time Baker was due to leave North Carolina
for New York, it was quite serious.242 But her romantic interest in one man was not enough to lessen the
seductive lure of the big city. By all indications, Roberts himself was looking for a way to move north, and
the two lovers would soon be reunited.
When Ella Baker did finally arrive in New York, she was seduced, not by Harlem’s fiery nightlife, but rather
by its vibrant political life. During the late 1920s and the 1930s, Baker came of age politically and began to
formulate the worldview and theoretical framework that influenced her organizing work for the next fifty
years. In this historic decade, she evolved from an idealistic and tentative young rebel into a sawy and
determined organizer committed to achieving justice through radical social change. In Harlem, Baker debated
passionately with left-wing men and embraced a community of dynamic young women whom her friend
Pauli Murray later described as black feminist foremothers.243
Ella Baker was among the tens of thousands of African Americans who migrated to the North during the
1920s. Hopeful migrants followed their dreams of a better life to such urban hubs as New York and Chicago,
contributing to one of the most dramatic interregional migrations in this nation’s history. Although few of
those who participated in the Great Migration found the promised land they were looking for, they
dramatically transformed the social landscape they encountered, forging a new sense of community, creating
a dynamic culture, and developing new strategies for resistance to racial oppression and economic
exploitation.244
What emerged in the African American capital of Harlem during the decades following World War I was a
discourse and practice based on the politics and vision of fundamental social transformation, that is, a
semiautonomous black left. The development of this heterogeneous political community was fueled by
several factors: the rise of a black intelligentsia consciously critical of conservative accommodationism,
liberal uplift ideology, and narrow black nationalism; the influx of blacks from the diaspora who helped to
internationalize and radicalize the ideas and politics of U.S.-born blacks; and finally, the increasingly
independent voice of black women activists, artists, and writers.
Ella Baker’s new-found community was now a distinctly international one. Harlem’s new residents came not
only from the farms and fields of the
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U.S. South, but also from Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, Guyana, Trinidad, and, in smaller numbers, various
parts of Africa. By 1930, 55 percent of all foreign-born blacks in the United States lived in Harlem. Among
them were W. A. Domingo, Claudia Jones, Cyril V. Briggs, Otto Huiswood, Grace Campbell, and Richard
Moore, all of whom became key forces in shaping Harlem’s black left community from the 1910s through the
1930s.245
Baker recalled fondly that Harlem during the years of the Great Depression was “a hotbed of radical
thinking.”246 The political and cultural rumblings of the late 1910s and early 1920s had infused a new spirit
of resistance and intellectual energy into the community. The cultural revolution known as the Harlem
Renaissance, the black pride movement led by the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, and the agitation and
education carried on by a small group of black socialists known as the Harlem radicals had effectively recolored and revitalized Harlem’s political and cultural landscape a decade before Ella Baker’s arrival. These
developments, coupled with the economic suffering caused by the onset of the depression in 1929 and
socialist rumblings increasingly heard around the world, laid the foundation for the “unprecedented explosion
of protest activity” that occurred during the 1930s.247 For Ella Baker and many others, Harlem was a
politically and intellectually invigorating place to be. Intense political debates raged everywhere, spawning
militant protests in the streets. There were rent strikes, picket lines, marches, street corner rallies, and the
famous Harlem riot of 1935, which was triggered by an incident of alleged police brutality. Looking back
during the late 1970s on the vibrant and volatile political climate that she had encountered in Harlem almost
fifty years before, Baker remarked that “I was filling my cup”; “I drank of the ‘nectar divine’.”248
THE EDUCATION OF A RADICAL INTELLECTUAL
Ella Baker’s first task in New York City, after her summer stopover in New Jersey, was finding a job.
Searching for work that paid enough to enable her to support herself provided her with a radically new kind
of education, even before the depression was in full swing. Baker quickly realized that, as a black woman, her
career options were sorely limited. Even her coveted college diploma was not much help. On her arrival in
the city, Ella moved in with her cousin Martha and worked at whatever odd jobs she could find.249 She
knocked on the doors of employment agencies all over town and was unable to find work. She was even
turned down for a job addressing envelopes
because there were so many others competing for the low-paying job.250 Baker’s situation was not unusual.
African American women in general were concentrated at the bottom of the economic hierarchy.251 This
discovery came as a shock to the wide-eyed young woman. Baker had left North Carolina with great
ambitions and high hopes, believing that great opportunities awaited her.252 The reality she encountered
shattered her naive optimism. She had only seen glimpses of the world beyond her sheltered childhood
community and the gated campus of Shaw, but in New York City, largely on her own, she confronted the
harshness of the larger society head-on.
One of the first full-time jobs Ella Baker found in the city was waitressing at New York University’s Judson
House restaurant in Greenwich Village. The work was hard and the pay low, but the job offered other
rewards. Since she worked only the busy lunch and dinner hours, Ella could spend her free time exploring the
neighborhood. Like Harlem, the Village was a vital center of political and cultural activity during the late
1920s. Left-wing meeting places, coffeehouses, and bookstores in Greenwich Village provided almost as
much stimulation for Baker as did the black intellectual and arts community uptown. During her afternoon
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breaks, she would visit the public library or stroll through Washington Square Park. She especially enjoyed
the spring, when the park was being groomed for the summer season; the smell of freshly plowed soil
reminded her of the farm community of her youth.253 It was in Greenwich Village that she first heard about
the ideas of socialism and communism.
Still as eager as she had been as a child to engage strangers in conversation, Ella would meet people on the
streets of New York and begin a discussion. Quite by accident one day, she struck up a conversation with a
young man who, she quickly learned, was a Russian Jew eager to exchange ideas about the Bolshevik
revolution and socialist movements in general. As she recalled the encounter, “I was just standing there
looking at pigeons or whatever else and this chap starts talking and he began to try to recruit me into one
party or the other.”254 They talked for what seemed like hours. Baker was fascinated. She didn’t join his
party because she “didn’t have the burning need to just jump into an organization,” but she became curious
about socialism, Marxist theory, and subjects she “had not heard of before.”255 But the chance meeting in the
park had sparked her interest, and she began to read more about radical ideas on her own. According to one
friend and co-worker during the 1930s, “Ella Baker was a student of Marx and we used to debate that
often.”256
Baker had an insatiable urge to learn as much as she could about politics and world affairs, so she took
advantage of every opportunity to attend lectures and engage in discussions about these subjects. Two vital
Harlem institutions became important intellectual training grounds for Baker and her friends. One was the
135th Street library, later renamed the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the other was
the Harlem Branch YWCA (close in proximity and function to the YMCA). Both institutions were teeming
with political activity, hosting regular forums on issues ranging from socialism to segregation. They became
key gathering places for many young Harlem artists, intellectuals, and activists. On his arrival in New York in
1921, the poet Langston Hughes recounted: “I came up out of the subway at 135th and Lenox into the
beginnings of the Negro Renaissance. I headed for the Harlem YMCA down the block, where so many new,
young dark… arrivals in Harlem have spent their early days. The next place I headed to that afternoon was the
Harlem Branch Library just up the street.”257 These two institutions were the dual pillars of Harlem’s
intellectual and political life for over two decades.
Her intellectual curiosity and growing passion for politics led Baker to spend more and more time at the
Harlem library, where she met and befriended white librarian Ernestine Rose, twenty years her senior.
Beginning in 1925, Rose oversaw the founding and expansion of the Negro Division within the library and
mentored a young interracial staff to maintain the collection.258 At the library, Baker helped establish the
first Negro History Club, which met regularly to discuss historical and contemporary events relevant to
blacks. The group routinely sponsored forums and other educational events for the Harlem community.
Sometimes heated discussions would spill over into the street; interested discussants would gather around an
able orator perched atop a crate, or standing on a stepladder, as she or he preached about colonialism, the
class struggle, or American racism. The library occasionally even paid some soapbox speakers for their
oratory, a political tradition that was imported to Harlem by Caribbean immigrants.259 Baker recalled, “If
you hadn’t stood on the corner of 135th and & 7th Avenue [protesting and debating]… you weren’t with
it.”260 There is no evidence that Baker herself ever climbed on one of these makeshift stages to display her
oratorical abilities, but in May 1936 she helped organize a street-corner discussion on lynching sponsored by
the library.261
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Baker joined the library’s Adult Education Committee around 1933. The Harlem Adult Education
Experiment, as it was called, sponsored forums, lectures, and debates on a wide range of topics.262
According to Elinor Des
Verney Sinette, who wrote a history of the Harlem library, it was “especially innovative in the character and
breadth of its activities. In addition to the traditional library services, the Harlem Experiment used the library
and its resources to offer courses in the graphic and performing arts, to sponsor lectures and book discussions
for local residents and to make its facilities available for community forums.”263 Baker’s involvement in the
Adult Education Experiment was evidence of her profound interest in African American social and political
history and of her commitment to spreading that knowledge to as wide an audience as possible. Up to this
point in her life, knowledge had been a source of personal empowerment; now, as she became more political,
she came to see education and knowledge as tools in the struggle against oppression. From her perspective,
reading, discussions, forums, and lectures were as important to a movement for social change as mass
protests, boycotts, and strikes.
Baker became an employee of the Harlem branch library in January 1934, when she was hired to coordinate
an educational and consciousnessraising program for Harlem youth and young adults, aged sixteen to twentysix. She “organized and developed the Young People’s Forum (YPF) in 1936 and later worked with the adult
Education Committee on its summer programs for mothers in Colonial and St. Nicholas Avenue Parks.”264
According to Baker’s supervisor, she “successfully formed an active organization, which she brought in touch
with other youth groups in the neighborhood and city.”265 As early as the 1930s, Baker served as a catalyst
linking together different sectors of the black community, breaking down generational barriers and
facilitating exchanges of skills and resources. In the YPF, she introduced Harlem teenagers to an impressive
roster of prominent speakers, emphasizing the need for active participation by the youth themselves. As
Baker exposed many young people to the world of books and ideas, she sought to instill in them a sense of
their own power to think critically, analyze events, and articulate their opinions and beliefs. The YPF
included discussions about “social, economic, and cultural topics,” as well as library-sponsored debates on
various controversial issues of the day.266 In her work with the YPF and in many other contexts, Ella Baker
was a teacher without a traditional classroom. The belief that education and the exchange and dissemination
of ideas could make a difference in people’s lives was to remain central to her life’s work.
The 137th Street YWCA was another important gathering place, attracting many strong-minded, young,
single women who were seeking the excitement, intellectual freedom, and the cultural stimulation that only
Harlem
could provide. Pauli Murray, who later became a prominent civil rights lawyer, religious leader, and feminist
poet, rented a room at the Y in 1929. Murray described the Harlem YWCA as a focus of political and social
activity, and a “heady” place to be at that time. On its staff were such bright and determined black women as
Dorothy Height, later the head of the National Council of Negro Women, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the
YWCA’S membership secretary, Viola Lewis Waiters, and Margaret Douglass; all went on to illustrious
careers as professionals, public figures, and political activists.267 According to Murray, “None of these
women would have called themselves feminists in the 1930’s, but they were strong independent personalities
who, because of their concerted efforts to rise above the limitations of race and sex, and to help younger
women do the same, shared a sisterhood that foreshadowed the revival of the feminist movement in the
1960s.”268 Baker spent many hours in the Y cafeteria and meeting rooms. In this thriving community of
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black women, she found the inspiration and intellectual challenges that aided her in defining her own
personal and political identity.
Pauli Murray, Ella Baker, and the friends who congregated at the YWCA represented a new model of black
womanhood in this era. Untrammeled by attachments to either birth families or husbands, these women were
adventuresome, educated, and ambitious. The social climate of the times and the abysmal conditions of
suffering created by the depression helped to channel much of their energy and ambition into radical political
activity. Some of them worked with the Communist and Socialist Parties but many more of them were
“fellow travelers” in a loosely connected circle of oppositional forces. If there was a rally about the
Scottsboro case to defend young black men against trumped-up charges of raping two white women on a
train, they called up one another and went as a group. If there was a picket line organized by the “Don’t Buy
Where You Can’t Work” campaign, which used consumer boycotts to persuade stores with black customers to
hire black employees, leaflets would be dropped off at the Y for distribution. This was a loose, informal
network of women activists, many of whom did not join or pledge allegiance to any of the organized left
factions but were actively engaged with a wide range of issues.269
Women were integral to Harlem’s political life, both as individuals and in organized groups. Some
organizations, such as the Harlem Housewives League and the Domestic Workers Union, represented
collective action around the common interests of women. In her study of African American women’s political
activism, the historian Deborah Gray White argues convincingly
that “seldom did African American women organize across class lines.”270 In the unique political
environment of depression-era Harlem, however, such cross-class unity was indeed attempted and
occasionally achieved. Maids, cooks, and unemployed workers bonded with leftist, middle-class teachers in
adult education classes. Ordinary Harlem residents worked with journalists and other professionals in the
cooperative movement. And the library, the YMCA and YWCA, and the street corners were democratic
public spaces where community members, either formally educated or self-taught, gathered, debated, and
collaborated. In all these venues, women were central participants.
Pauli Murray stood out among this group of smart and spirited young women. She was articulate, well read,
witty, and fiercely interested in politics and social justice. She and Ella Baker became fast friends. Their lives
had interesting parallels. Both women grew up in North Carolina; both migrated to Harlem around the same
time; and both obtained jobs in the Workers Education Project of the Works Progress Administration. Both
were involved in the Jay Lovestone political faction during the 1930s and affiliated with the (Lovestoneinfluenced) Liberal Party during the 1940s and 1950s. Years later, when Baker was working for the NAACP
and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Murray lent support and sang the praises of her old
friend.271 After she left Harlem, Murray attended Howard University Law School, taught law at Yale and
Brandeis, eventually entered the ministry, and wrote four books. The two women remained in touch off and
on for over forty years.
Baker’s political awakening was stimulated by the lively social and intellectual community she encountered
in Harlem, and her close comradeship with other women activists such as Murray nurtured her political
maturation. Her development as a radical intellectual took place through a systematic educational process that
went on both inside and outside cultural institutions. Baker later described herself as one of the “ignorant
ones” when she first arrived in Harlem with her college degree in hand.272 In retrospect, she felt that she had
gained a clearer understanding of the world around her and of how to go about changing it through her
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political education by activists, many of whom had less formal education than she. In lauding Baker’s
credentials in a 1932 article in the NAACP’S magazine, the Crisis, her mentor, George Schuyler, underscored
the learning process that occurred through Baker’s participation in the low-wage work force. “By force of
circumstances,” he observed, “her ‘post graduate’ work has included domestic service, factory work and other
freelance labors, to which
‘courses’ she credits her education.”273 Baker learned many valuable lessons about history, politics, and
people through her experiences as a political organizer, journalist, worker, and teacher, as well as through her
discussions and interactions with other activists in a wide array of settings.
The streets of Harlem provided a cultural and political immersion like no other. At no other time in twentiethcentury African American history was there a more vibrant black public sphere than in Harlem in the 1920s
and ’30s, infused as it was with the exciting intellectual rhythms of the black diaspora. The serious exchange
of ideas, cultural performances, and political debates flowed out of classrooms, private homes, meeting halls
and bars onto the neighborhood thoroughfare of Lenox Avenue.
As historian Irma Watkins-Owens writes: “From World War I through the 1930’s, the unclaimed terrain of the
Harlem streetcorner became the testing ground for a range of political ideologies and a forum for intellectual
inquiry and debate.” These self-styled orators are sometimes described as “soapboxers,” but because of their
choice of political platform Watkins-Owens calls them “stepladder speakers.”274 Among them were wellknown Harlem radicals like Baker’s friend Frank Crosswaith of the Harlem Labor Center and Hubert
Harrison, a socialist and onetime Marcus Garvey supporter. Women participating on the stepladder circuit
included Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, Grace Campbell, Williana J. Burrroughs, and Elizabeth
Frederickson. The struggle to determine Harlem’s public culture was as much a class and ethnic struggle as a
struggle over which speakers and ideas would predominate. Respectable Harlemites saw the sometimes
raucous crowds that gathered as a source of embarrassment; preachers looked down on the crude language
that was sometimes expressed; and police actually arrested several speakers for disturbing the peace. Still, the
tradition continued.275 Streetcorner discussions were an informal site of Ella Baker’s political education in
the 1930s, but there were more formal courses of study as well.
In 1931, Baker spent a semester at the Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York. There she had an
opportunity to learn about theories and models of social change, as well as the history of working people.
Brookwood, where Pauli Murray had also spent time, was established in 1921 by a group of socialists and
pacifists in order to offer union organizers and other progressives a socially relevant curriculum.276 It was
one of a number of worker education schools set up around that time to train labor organizers. The teachers at
Brookwood went far beyond their stated mission.
They were radical, not only in what they taught but also in how they taught, experimenting with new teaching
methods and encouraging students to think and speak for themselves. In her book on the Brookwood
educators and their cohorts, the historian Susan Kates describes how these teachers sought “to enact forms of
writing and speaking instruction incorporating social and political concerns in the very essence of their
pedagogies.”277 This was Baker’s first encounter with an open, democratic approach to formal education.
She saw enormous transformative potential in democratic and nontraditional learning environments like
Brookwood. She took ideas, theoretical paradigms, and philosophies seriously, and she spent much of her
adult life mastering ways of how to pass that knowledge on to others and empower them in the process.
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Ella Baker’s political work from the late 1930s onward was consistent with a worldview that she constructed
from the wide range of ideologies and traditions she had engaged with over the years. She combined the
black Baptist missionary values of charity, humility, and service with the economic theories of Marxists and
socialists of various stripes who advocated a redistribution of society’s wealth and a transfer of power from
capitalist elites to the poor and working classes. Added to the mix was Baker’s popular democratic pedagogy,
which emphasized the importance of tapping oppressed communities for knowledge, strength, and leadership
in constructing models for social change.
In many respects, Baker herself was what Gramscian theorists refer to as an “organic intellectual.” Her
primary base of knowledge came from grassroots communities and from lived experience, not from formal
study. She was a partisan intellectual, never feigning a bloodless objectivity, but always insisting that ideas
should be employed in the service of oppressed people and toward the goal of social justice. In the 1930s,
New York was her classroom, and Baker was both student and teacher.
In his biographical study of Ivory Perry, a St. Louis activist, George Lipsitz offers a useful definition of an
organic intellectual in practice:
Traditional intellectuals can distinguish themselves purely through the originality of their ideas
or the eloquence of their expression, but organic intellectuals must initiate a process that involves
people in social contestation…. Organic intellectuals try to understand and change society at the
same time…. Organic intellectuals generate and circulate oppositional ideas through social
action. They create symbols and slogans that expose the commonalities among seemingly
atomized experiences,
and they establish principles that unite disparate groups into effective coalitions. Most significantly, they
challenge dominant interests through education and agitation that expose the gap between the surface
harmonies that seem to unite society and the real conflicts and antagonisms that divide it.278
This description characterizes much of the public intellectual work that Ella Baker did, beginning with the
Harlem Adult Education Experiment and the Young People’s Forum and continuing with the Young Negroes’
Cooperative League and with the Workers Education Project later in the decade. By the time she was thirty,
she had become a radical intellectual committed to teaching and learning from the people in movements for
social change, an approach that would continue to distinguish her political work.
THE YOUNG NEGROES’ COOPERATIVE LEAGUE AND THE DREAM OF A NEW SOCIAL
ORDER
In the early 1930s, grim economic realities, the looming threat of a second world war, and the rise of
European fascism had a strong, sobering effect on the young activists and intellectuals Ella Baker associated
with. Their debates about politics, economics, and social change took on timely relevance and had concrete
implications for the lives of the masses of black Harlemites. The historic backdrop of the depression era
imbued their exchanges with a new sense of urgency.
The Great Depression hit Harlem hard. Forced evictions of entire families in the dead of winter were
common sights, as were the hungry faces of poverty-stricken children and long lines of desperate job-seekers.
Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who was on the staff of the Harlem YWCA that Baker frequented, recalled:
With the financial collapse in 1929, a large mass of Negroes was faced with the reality of
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starvation and they turned sadly to public relief. A few chanted optimistically, “Jesus will lead
me, and Welfare will feed me,” but… meanwhile men, women and children searched in garbage
cans for food, foraging with dogs and cats. Many families had been reduced to living below
street level… in cellars and basements that had been converted into makeshift flats. Packed in
damp, rat-ridden dungeons, they existed in squalor not too different from that of the Arkansas
sharecroppers.279
Seeing black people living in southern-style poverty in the North’s most modern city shook many Harlemites’
assumptions about which pathways would lead to progress for the race. These scenes of suffering had a
tremendous impact on Baker’s evolving political consciousness.
Baker’s political journalism reveals her responses to the depression. An article she coauthored in 1935 with
African American communist Marvel Cooke, vividly describes the abysmal plight of black New Yorkers.
Titled “The Bronx Slave Market,” the article highlights the connections among wage labor, slavery, race, and
sex. Baker documented the humiliating experiences of black domestic workers who huddled together on
designated street corners in the early morning hours, waiting for white middle-class women to look them over
and choose a lucky one to hire for the day. Baker, who, according to a friend, had worked briefly as a maid
herself, posed as a job seeker in order to get an insider’s view of what these women were going through. The
humiliation that such self-exposure entailed was compounded, so Baker found, by the desperate act that some
women were driven to: that of selling their bodies to the highest bidder:
The Simpson Avenue block exudes the stench of the slave market at its worst. Not only is human
labor bartered and sold for slave wage, but human love also is a marketable commodity…. Rain
or shine, cold or hot, you will find them there — Negro women, old and young, sometimes
bedraggled, sometimes neatly dressed — but with the invariable paper bundle, waiting
expectantly for Bronx housewives to buy their strength and energy for an hour, two hours, or
even for a day…. If not the wives themselves, maybe their husbands, their sons, their brothers,
under the subterfuge of work, offer worldly-wise girls higher bids for their time.280
Baker and Cooke’s vivid account of these scenes illustrates how deeply both women were affected by the
depression and its dehumanizing impact on poor black women.281
“The Bronx Slave Market” reflects Ella Baker’s lucid assessment of the complex realities of race, gender, and
class in the lives of African American women. The women Baker observed on Simpson Avenue were
victimized by their position as blacks, as workers, and as women. Baker’s description meshes these analytical
abstractions together in the intricate web of lived human experience. Although poor black women were
sexually exploited as women, there was no magical, raceless and classless sisterhood between them and the
white female employers, who were just as eager to use them for their muscle as their husbands were to use
them for their sexual services.
The economic rigors of the depression had intensified all forms of oppression, pushing many black women
from the lower rungs of the wage labor force back to day work and even into occasional prostitution. When
Baker and Cooke wrote their article, the modern concept of feminism was still a foreign notion to most
Americans, black and white. Yet the black feminist notion of intersecting systems of oppression as a
cornerstone of black women’s collective experience was an observable reality, and in their article Cooke and
Baker came close to articulating it as a theory.282
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Ella Baker and Marvel Jackson Cooke traveled in overlapping political and social circles. They knew one
another by reputation and through mutual friends but had not formally met until they were asked by an editor
at the Crisis to coauthor an article on the plight of poor black women in the Bronx. Over the course of several
weeks, as the two women researched, discussed, and wrote their story, they got to know one another and
gradually became friends. After the publication of “The Bronx Slave Market,” Baker and Cooke were on a
few panels together and saw one another from time to time at social and political events in Harlem.283 They
developed a mutual respect and admiration for one another that, according to Cooke’s recollections decades
later, continued despite their political differences. Ella Baker spoke quite fondly of Marvel in an interview as
late as the 1970s.284
Marvel Jackson Cooke, the daughter of black Debsian socialists from Minnesota, came to New York in 1927,
the same year that Baker did, and quickly landed a job as W. E. B. Du Bois’s secretary and assistant. Her
mother had known Du Bois previously and thus helped her to secure the job. Du Bois introduced Marvel
Jackson (later Marvel Cooke) to a whole array of political ideas, and according to his biographer, David
Lewis, also may have made unwanted sexual advances toward the naive young woman.285 She made other
political and personal connections on her own, and she eventually chose to join the underground section of
the Communist Party (CP). She became a “mainstay” of the “popular front” publication the People’s Voice
and grew to be very close to Paul and Essie Robeson and other well-known CP members and sympathizers
who congregated in Harlem. Cooke lived in the popular 321 Edgecomb Avenue apartment building that was
at one time or another the home of George and Josephine Schuyler, the journalist Ted Poston, and NAACP
executives Walter White and Roy Wilkins.286 Her sister’s marriage to Wilkins could have connected Cooke
to a wider network of people, but she and her brother-in-law were at odds politically; so the relationship was
never close. Cooke’s clandestine party membership circumscribed her involvement in
other political activities, a fact that she regretted many decades later.287 Her closest friends were, for the
most part, her party comrades.
The differences as well as the connections between Baker and Cooke are revealing. The two women were
close in age, lived nearby, and shared a left-leaning political orientation and passion for ideas. Yet their social
and political lives were not analogous. While Cooke associated primarily with other members of the
Communist Party, Ella Baker’s circle was much broader and more eclectic. She maintained close relationships
with some CP members, and she worked with many others on particular campaigns. Baker did not confine her
associations to people of a single ideological stripe or political party. In the early 1930s, she admittedly had
more questions than answers. She sought out people with whom she could study social conditions and
political strategy and places where wide-ranging discussion and debate flourished. This curiosity inescapably
brought Baker into contact with not only communists and socialists but also the followers of Marcus Mosiah
Garvey, who were a visible and vocal force on the Harlem political scene, despite Garvey’s deportation the
year Ella Baker arrived there. A Jamaican immigrant and admirer of Booker T. Washington, Garvey arrived
in Harlem in 1916 and began recruiting members to his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
His message of African pride and economic self-sufficiency for blacks, coupled with his flamboyant
pageantry, won him thousands of followers and the ire of both the federal government and black political
leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois, who saw his politics as escapist and self-promoting. Ella Baker’s close friend
William Pickens, an NAACP official, was one of Garvey’s most ardent critics. But UNIA’S popularity piqued
Ella Baker’s interest: she regularly read the organization’s paper, the Negro World, and, according to Conrad
Lynn, even attended public forums organized by the group.288 Baker spent much of her early years in
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Harlem in public venues soaking up the culture, the politics, and the intellectual fervor. She even enjoyed
dining at the restaurant run by Father Divine’s organization on occasion, because it was another lively site for
political and intellectual engagement with ordinary Harlem residents.289
For most of the 1930s, however, Ella Baker’s closest political ally was the iconoclastic writer and activist
George Schuyler, a socialist, philosophical anarchist, and critic of Soviet-style communism. He became a
mentor to Baker, and through him and his wife, Josephine, a young, white artist from Texas, Baker was
absorbed into a lively community of writers, artists, and radical intellectuals from across the nation and
around the world who were
living in Harlem at the time. Baker and Schuyler were introduced to each other by a mutual friend, L. M.
Cole, a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American, and the two hit it off right away. Schuyler was a smart,
creative, provocative, and critical thinker who, according to Baker, impressed her because he “would raise
questions that weren’t being raised.”290
Baker soon became a regular member of the circle that gathered at the Schuylers’ home, which was large,
lively, and exceptionally open, as Marvel Cooke recalled. People would bring friends or acquaintances
without a specific invitation from the hosts.291 In this setting, Baker found others who were grappling with
the same moral, philosophical, and political dilemmas that she was wrestling with at the time. She enjoyed
their company, but, she later recalled, she “didn’t care as much about the socializing as the exchange of ideas,
or at least being exposed to the debate.”292 The Schuylers’ apartment, like the YWCA cafeteria, the forums
at the library, and the public parks and street corners of Harlem, was a site for an animated discourse that
helped define African American public life. In these venues, politics and culture were debated and areas of
consensus were formed and reformed.293 The activists, writers and artists who convened regularly at the
Schuylers’ apartment had a certain romantic appeal about them. They were young, creative, bold, witty, and
cosmopolitan. Some were known to be pretty “snappy dressers,” too.294 Their spirited conversations often
lasted until dawn, and participants left intellectually energized and physically exhausted. Ella Baker took part
in many of these late-night parlays, enjoying the stimulating company, provocative conversations, and elegant
hospitality. The Schuylers resided at one of Harlem’s more prestigious addresses, in the “Park Lincoln
Apartments on Edgecomb Avenue on what Harlemites called the upscale area of ‘Sugar Hill.’” A reporter
described the building as one “where a rich canopy runs out to the sidewalk, and where a liveried footman in
gold braid must announce a visitor before he is permitted to go up in the automatic elevator.”295 In other
words, the group’s criticisms of capitalist decadence were made in very comfortable surroundings.
Despite this obvious material contradiction, most members of Schuyler’s circle were not simply armchair
radicals; they were organizers as well. Schuyler was as much of a doer as he was a talker and a writer. By all
indications, he was genuinely committed to improving the conditions of the poor, even though he had
managed to secure a fairly cushy lifestyle for himself.
A belligerent and colorful character in Harlem politics during the 1920s and 1930s, Schuyler became even
more controversial thereafter.296 Born in
Providence, Rhode Island, in 1895, he served in the army during World War I and then settled in New York
City. In 1923 he joined the staff of the Harlem-based socialist magazine the Messenger, working alongside
Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph; the latter became one of the country’s best-known labor leaders as
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head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and then as a founder of the Congress of Industrial
Organizations.297 Schuyler became contributing editor of the magazine after Owen’s departure in the winter
of 1923. As a protégé of Randolph, Schuyler was pulled into a circle of black radical intellectuals that
included Frank Crosswaith, a black labor leader; Robert Bagnall, an NAACP official; and J. A. Rogers, a
journalist and self-taught historian. These Harlem leftists were united by their opposition to the separatist
nationalism of Marcus Garvey. Under the banner of the short-lived organization the Friends of Negro
Freedom, the group met weekly at Randolph’s apartment to discuss contemporary politics, history, and
philosophy. Those Sunday gatherings made quite a strong impression on Schuyler, who recalled that nothing
“escaped the group’s probing minds and witty shafts.”298 By the late 1920s, the Messenger had ceased to
exist, the group had disintegrated, and Schuyler had begun writing a popular column, “Views and Reviews,”
for the nationally circulated African American newsweekly the Pittsburgh Courier. The column surveyed
domestic politics and race issues and occasionally commented on foreign affairs.
Ella Baker and George Schuyler became very close friends despite their very distinct personalities. Schuyler
was an arrogant, irreverent, and sometimes ostentatious young writer, who took particular pleasure in
intellectual sparring matches with worthy opponents. He was a close friend and admirer of the iconoclastic,
white editor of the American Mercury, H. L. Mencken; in fact, he was sometimes referred to as the black
Mencken.299 Schuyler took great delight in ridiculing groups and individuals that he deemed corrupt,
backward, or inept. His targets covered the gamut from black ministers and petit bourgeois black
entrepreneurs to Communist organizers. According to his longtime colleague A. Philip Randolph, Schuyler
took few things seriously.300 In contrast, Baker was pensive and unassuming. Despite her wit and goodnatured humor, she took everything seriously, and, as one friend recalls, she always “seemed mature beyond
her years.”301
By the early 1930s, Ella Baker was no longer a devoutly religious person, but she still appreciated the
cohesive role of the church as a spiritual and material resource for black people.302 In contrast, Schuyler was
an
avowed and outspoken atheist who saw Christianity and religion as stumbling blocks to black progress. At
times, his criticisms of the black church were so ruthless and relentless that anyone who was uncritical of
organized religion on some level would have been unable to work closely with him. Presumably, Baker had
developed her own doubts and criticisms of the church as an institution by this time.303 Her doubts later
evolved into a more developed critique of the mainstream black church in general and of the black clergy in
particular. Yet, despite or perhaps because of their contrasting characteristics, Schuyler and Baker were the
best of friends and the closest of comrades for several years. They complemented each other in their joint
political endeavors, with Baker guaranteeing that business matters were taken care of and Schuyler serving as
a figurehead and spokesperson for the cause. In her relationship with Schuyler, Baker took on a role she
continued to play for much of her political life, that of a behind-the-scenes organizer who paid attention to the
mechanics of movement building in a way that few high-profile charismatic leaders did, or even knew how to
do.
Ella Baker was frequently a resource for the Schuylers in personal as well as political matters. When the
Schuylers’ daughter, Phillipa, was born in 1932, George was, as usual, away on business, and he asked Ella to
assist his wife. Ella stayed with Josephine for a few days after the baby was born. keeping her company and
helping her with chores around the apartment.304 Ella and Josephine became very good friends. Baker
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recalled that the wives of many of Schyler’s black colleagues disapproved of his interracial marriage, which
was quite uncommon in those days, and did not welcome Josephine into their social circle.305 For Baker,
that was simply not an issue.
But there were other issues in the Schuylers’ marriage that caused her some difficulty.306 Much later, Baker
hinted that George may have had extramarital affairs and further intimated that she had kept George’s
philandering a secret from his wife. Her disapproval and silence reflected Ella Baker’s complicated and often
conflicted relationship with black men in leadership positions. She was close enough to their day-to-day lives
to witness the backstage drama, the character flaws, the sexism, and the contradictions between their high
ideals and their imperfect, even duplicitous actions. Although she was often critical, her criticism may have
been muted by the political goals she shared with her colleagues. Baker acquiesced to the permeable and
artificial divide between the personal and the political only with regard to sexual matters.307 She was aware
that Schuyler, and later some of her colleagues in the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, were cheating on their wives and professing moral rectitude according to conventional standards,
but she did not expose their behavior or frame it in political terms, even though she clearly viewed it as an
expression of male sexual privilege, an option not socially acceptable for their wives or, for that matter, for
Baker herself. Despite George Schuyler’s male chauvinism and adulterous behavior behind closed doors, Ella
Baker was still willing to work with him politically.308 Many years later, she revealed his secrets, but even
then she was not explicit: “Of course George was male and had opportunities to exercise his maleness by
traveling. I wouldn’t claim that George was a saint and all.”309 Still, she accepted him as a flawed person, yet
a reliable colleague.
The idea of forming black consumer cooperatives as a strategy to combat the economic devastation being
wreaked by the depression and to educate black people about socialism galvanized the group of intellectuals
and activists that gathered around Schuyler. He proposed the idea in his column in the Pittsburgh Courier and
received a positive response from readers. In the spring of 1930, Schuyler issued a call to young blacks
interested in the “economic salvation” of the race through cooperative economics to come forth and establish
a new organization for the purpose of studying the idea and “carrying the message to all corners of Negro
America.”310 He emphasized that the young recruits had to be “militants, pioneers, unswerved by the
defeatist propaganda of the oldsters, and the religious hokum of our generally… parasitic clergy.”311 By
November, he had only received a handful of responses. Undeterred, Schuyler joined forces with Ella Baker
and called a meeting of those who were interested in the idea. The Young Negroes’ Cooperative League
(YNCL) was formed in 1930. In October 1931, the group held its first annual conference at the YMCA in
Pittsburgh, with Robert Vann, publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier, delivering the introductory remarks. The
event was attended by thirty delegates “who paid their own carfare to come” from as far away as Washington
D.C. and South Carolina.312 Despite the small number of official delegates, the conference’s opening session
drew a capacity crowd of over 600 people. Baker shared the speaker’s platform with Schuyler and Vann,
addressing the important role of black women in the emerging cooperative movement. Schuyler became the
first president of the YNCL, and Baker was unanimously elected to serve as its national director.313
The YNCL was a coalition of local cooperatives and buying clubs loosely affiliated in a network of nearly
two dozen affiliate councils scattered throughout the United States. Each council functioned independently
but
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contributed funds for the national office, which was based in New York City. The YNCL circulated a
newsletter, served as a clearinghouse for information, attempted to bolster the cooperative concept through
national publicity efforts, and offered workshops and training sessions for co-op leaders. In her capacity as
executive director of the organization, Baker staffed the national office and traveled around the country
consulting with local council leaders and promoting the value of cooperative ventures, for which she received
a salary of $10 a week.314 As the masthead of the group’s stationery proclaimed, its principal purpose was to
“gain economic power through consumer cooperation.”315 Baker emphasized her own commitment to that
mission in 1932, when she stated: “We accept with zest the opportunity which is now ours to prove to
ourselves and others that the Negro can and will save himself from economic death.”316
The founding statement of the YNCL reflected many of the principles of grassroots democracy and groupcentered leadership that Ella Baker advocated for the rest of her political life. The coalition pledged itself to
the full inclusion and equal participation of women. An explicit emphasis on gender equality was unusual for
any political organization, black or white, during this period; this commitment suggests that Baker’s remarks
about the vital role women could play in the cooperative movement were well received, and it certainly
underscores the group’s inclusive and egalitarian orientation. The YNCL took steps to ensure the full
participation of its rank and file in decision making and leadership. Since membership in individual co-ops
had to be purchased through the buying of shares, larger shareholders could conceivably have wielded greater
influence in determining the priorities of the co-ops than smaller shareholders. To avoid such inequalities, the
YNCL adopted the position that each member was allotted only one vote, regardless of the number of
cooperative shares he or she owned. In a pamphlet titled “An Appeal to Young Negroes,” George Schuyler
declared the organization’s commitment to grassroots democracy: “We are ultra democratic and all power
rests in the hands of the rank and file. All officers serve only during the pleasure of the electorate.”317 This
emphasis on participatory democracy is all the more significant in a political climate where the major
organizations trying to organize among blacks — the NAACP, the CP, and the UNIA — were under fire for
elitist, authoritarian, or messianic leadership styles.
Another founding principle of the YNCL was that young people should be in the forefront of the struggle for
social change. If the energy, optimism, and rebelliousness of youth could be harnessed and directed into
constructive
political channels, the black movement would be revitalized. The YNCL restricted its membership to young
adults thirty-five years old and younger. Older adults could be admitted only after a two-thirds vote of
approval by the local membership. The group’s founder, George Schuyler, was already thirty-five years old
when the organization was established; Ella Baker was twenty-seven. Schuyler commented at the time, “This
measure is designed to keep the control of the organization in the hands of young people. We consider most
of the oldsters hopelessly bourgeois and intent on emulating Rockefeller and Ford on a shoestring
budget.”318 To ensure that its autonomy would remain uncompromised, the YNCL refused to accept
financial support from churches or charitable foundations.319
While Ella Baker and the other leaders of the YNCL held no great reverence for older, established leaders,
they did not assume that the mantle of leadership should pass to them automatically because of their youth. In
the tradition of the young intellectuals known as the Harlem radicals in the 1920s, a group to which Schuyler
had belonged, the YNCL placed great emphasis on internal discussion and education among its members.
The founding statement declared that “each council should follow a wellplanned educational program,
emphasizing at all times the inclusiveness and far-reaching effects of Consumers Co-Operation on the
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Negro’s social and economic status.”320 Rank-and-file members were offered an analysis of the cooperative
movement as it related to larger national and international issues as part of their orientation to the cooperative
movement. The organization’s founders insisted “we must be trained before trying to lead people” and that
therefore in the first year “each council [will be] engaged in extensive educational work.”321 The key role of
mass education in grassroots organizing was another principle Baker pushed for time and again in the
decades that followed.
In 1930, the YNCL envisioned an ambitious five-year plan, which, according to Schuyler, was inspired by the
Bolsheviks’ five-year economic plan. It included the goals of training 5,000 co-op leaders by 1932,
establishing a cooperative wholesale outlet by 1933, and financing an independent college by 1937. Although
most of these heady plans were never realized, the YNCL’s membership did grow steadily in its first few
years. Starting with a core group of thirty in December 1930, the organization boasted a membership of 400
two years later, with local councils in some twenty-two cities from California to New York.322 Two of the
more successful ventures were a grocery store employing four full-time workers and “doing a business of
$850 a week” in Buffalo, New York, and “a co-operative newsstand and stationery store” in Philadelphia.323
The organization faced financial difficulties from the outset. In January 1932, Ella Baker, as executive
director of the organization, oversaw the kick-off of a three-month “Penny a Day” campaign urging YNCL
supporters to set aside a penny each day to invest in cooperative projects in the hope of revitalizing the
cooperative movement and saving the fledgling national office of the YNCL. The campaign was timed to
coincide with three dates of historic significance: Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, Negro History Week, and the
signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The second annual conference was held in Washington, D.C., in
April 1932. By September of that year, however, the national office was forced to close because of the lack of
financial support from local councils. Without any guarantee of steady income, Baker continued to serve as
unpaid executive director of the YNCL, answering correspondence, accepting speaking engagements, and
coordinating weekly meetings of the New York council, which were held at the offices of the Urban
League.324 At the height of the organization’s financial crisis, Baker urged her comrades to remain
optimistic: “remember, every movement has started as our movement has started.”325
Ella Baker’s determination in the face of such formidable obstacles was due, in large part, to her having
begun to develop a long-range view of political struggle. The founders of the YNCL had a vision of social
change and racial uplift that extended well beyond the immediate benefits resulting from the establishment of
buying clubs and cooperative enterprises. They viewed the cooperative movement as much more than a
survival strategy to ameliorate the suffering of a handful of black participants; it was a vital, practical proving
ground for the socialist principles of communalism and mutual aid. To them, the concepts of cooperation and
collective action were the ideological pillars on which this larger movement was to be built. The cooperative
movement was thus a microcosm of a new social order and embodied the idealistic vision held by many of its
proponents.
Cooperatives offered an alternative to the cut-throat, unbridled competition that many felt had led to the 1929
stock market crash and the ensuing depression. In describing the mission of the cooperative movement, Baker
declared: “Ours is an unprecedented battle front. We are called upon to… be in the vanguard of the great
world movement toward a new order.”326 An article distributed by the YNCL explains the mission of the
more radical wing of the 1930s cooperative movement as follows: “The consumer coop is
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an evolutionary movement, whereby the people… hope to obtain full control of the supply and distribution of
the necessities of life, thereby eliminating the profit motive from trade…. Consumer cooperation is
revolutionary, for its ultimate aim is to create a better social structure by making unnecessary the present
form of government which is operated by and for the privileged class.”327
Baker and her idealistic young comrades saw the building of cooperative economic institutions as the first
step toward a peaceful transformation of society from capitalism to a more egalitarian, socialist alternative.
Buying cooperatives would, they hoped, demonstrate on a small scale the efficiency of collective economic
planning and simultaneously promote the values of interdependency, group decision making, and the sharing
of resources. As sociologist Charles Payne points out, this vision echoes the memories Baker treasured from
her childhood in North Carolina during the early 1900s. She often spoke fondly of a time when mutual
obligation and shared resources were the ties that bound small southern black communities together and
brought out the best in the individual members of those communities.328 The plan of the organization was
that all profits earned by shareholders would be “used for the common good”; profits were to be reinvested in
“clinics, libraries, and cooperative housing to combat slums.”329 In a 1935 article for the Amsterdam News,
Baker articulated her hope that the new cooperative ventures would be harbingers of “the day when the soil
and all of its resources will be reclaimed by its rightful owners — the working masses of the world.”330 In
her 1935 view of the world, a redistribution of wealth had to be a part of any radical reorganization of society.
The YNCL was not formally linked to any socialist or communist party, and its founders were harshly critical
of the weaknesses of much of the organized left. Yet the YNCL’s leaders had their own vision, however
elusive, of how their efforts could transform society and eradicate capitalism. George Schuyler was firm and
outspoken in his condemnation of the evils of modern capitalism, and Ella Baker shared that critique. This
conviction was central in Schuyler’s call for the formation of consumer cooperatives. In a 1930 column,
Schuyler identified capitalism as the cause of much of the suffering experienced by African American people.
He responded sharply to an anticommunist critic:
[W]hen the best minds of the age are questioning how long an economic system can last that
exploits its slaves and does not even protect
them from hunger and the elements; when we see capitalistic governments advocating many policies that
were suggested by Socialists 50 years ago, and finally, when capitalism has been the greatest factor in the
ravishing of Africa and the degradation of her transplanted sons and daughters, it sounds strange to hear a
smug little Negro editor criticize other Negroes because they have the intellectual courage, ability and vision
to study socialism and bolshevism.331
Linking economic exploitation, enslavement, and colonialism, Schuyler proclaimed that only a left-wing
analysis could adequately address the problems facing the race. The progress of the race depended on a
clearsighted critique of the class dynamics of American capitalism. Schuyler outlined the YNCL’s long-term
objectives in terms that stressed the group’s unique combination of revolutionary goals with an evolutionary
process of social transformation:
Co-operative democracy means a social order in which the mills, mines, railroads, farms,
markets, houses, shops and all the other necessary means of production, distribution and
exchange are owned cooperatively by those who produce, operate and use them.
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Whereas the Socialists hope to usher in such a Utopia society by the ballot and the Communists
hope to turn the trick with the bullet, the cooperator (who is really an Anarchist since the triumph
of his society will do away with the state in its present form — and I am an Anarchist) is slowly
and methodically doing so through legal, intelligent economic cooperation or mutual aid.332
Schuyler claimed to be an anarchist in part to be provocative. He identified with a freer form of radicalism
that rejected the strictures of a Soviet-style state or the centralized hierarchy of a Bolshevik-type vanguard
party. He seems to have embraced socialist ideals, not socialist or communist parties.
Baker did not share all of Schuyler’s views, but she did share his optimism about the cooperative movement,
proclaiming that “from economic planning must spring our second emancipation.”333 For the rest of her life
she challenged the inequities inherent in a capitalist society. In an article published in 1970, for example,
Baker argued that “only basic changes in the social structure of the country will be adequate to the needs of
the poor, both black and white,” given that “in the midst of such great wealth, millions are impoverished.”334
The YNCL and the concept of economic cooperation enjoyed a very broad
base of support that spanned the spectrum of African American political thought during the early 1930s. Such
moderate black leaders as newspaper publisher Robert Vann, Howard University president Mordecai
Johnson, and Benjamin Brawley of Shaw, expressed support for the organization, although none of them
were socialists, much less philosophical anarchists. These unlikely associations suggest two things. First,
cooperative economics was rooted in the long-standing tradition of black self-help, mutual aid, and uplift, so
it had wide appeal to both small entrepreneurs and socialists. Cooperatives could be viewed as a way of
navigating the racist stumbling blocks within American capitalism; alternatively, they could be seen as a
direct challenge to its legitimacy. Second, in a time of systemic economic crisis, many small business people
were eager to try any methods they could, however unorthodox, to keep their businesses afloat. For blacks in
particular, the repertoire of survival strategies included the pooling of resources and a willingness to at least
temporarily substitute cooperation for competition.
Baker and Schuyler were heirs to a long tradition of mutual aid in the African American community, and
many black organizers had seen cooperatives as an avenue for economic improvement. During the 1920s and
1930s, several organizations and leaders, including, most notably, W. E. B. Du Bois, advocated similar
strategies. According to historian Manning Marable, Du Bois’s commitment to all-black cooperative ventures
was consistent with his deepening socialist vision and simply took into account the reality of American racial
politics in the Jim Crow era. Du Bois, in Marable’s words, “firmly believed that the Negro middle class could
lead black workers to a moderate socialist program. In a series of articles in the Pittsburgh Courier, Du Bois
explained that the entire working class could ‘make one assault upon poverty and race hate.’ But to begin this
process, black Americans had to build their own separate organizations along cooperative lines.”335 Du Bois
held the view, Marable concludes, that “the rise of black cooperativism would ultimately establish a unity
between workers of both races.”336 In other words, African Americans had to initiate a transitional strategy
toward socialism that made political sense within the confines of Jim Crow. Toward this end, Du Bois
“supported the development of black cooperatives.”337
Varied political tendencies can be identified under the rubric of the cooperative movement. Du Bois
represented one strain, while Father Divine represented quite another. A flamboyant and controversial
messianic religious leader who professed no socialist aspirations whatsoever, Divine
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adopted cooperative methods and rhetoric in building his religious empire. He organized soup kitchens,
stores, and nurseries by calling on his followers to pool their meager resources and labor together under the
banner of self-help. Divine’s cooperative enterprises did help many poor black people to survive during hard
times. Contrary to the YNCL’S policy of channeling profits into community projects, however, Divine
siphoned off a good chunk of the excess to support his own lavish lifestyle.338 Some supporters of
cooperatives had more straightforward, pragmatic goals. Many small business people entered into
partnerships and joint, bulk-buying arrangements to minimize their costs and maximize their profits.
Although advocates of “black capitalism” supported cooperatives, most of them strongly disapproved of the
YNCL. For example, in 1933 the YNCL was sharply criticized by the conservative Colored Merchants
Association and the National Negro Business League. Schuyler predictably reacted with biting criticisms of
his own.339
The YNCL was a short-lived experiment in collective black self-determination. Like many economic
cooperatives, it was unable to survive the concrete pressures of a dominant social and economic system
antithetical to its aims or to sustain a mass base of committed supporters. It proved especially difficult to
hammer out a daily practice to implement the group’s long-term goals. The organization was plagued by
monetary woes from its inception and eventually collapsed under the weight of financial obligations that
could not be met. Schuyler’s biographer, Michael Peplow, attributes the failure of the YNCL not only to the
lack of capital and financial support but also to the fact that Schuyler’s inflammatory remarks about the black
church and the black middle class had made him too many enemies.340
Rooted in the idealism of the utopian socialist communities of the nineteenth century, cooperatives held out
the illusory hope of creating an oasis of economic democracy in the midst of a capitalist society, an objective
rife with pitfalls and contradictions from the outset. Schuyler traveled to England and met with organizers of
the famous British cooperative movement to garner lessons to ensure the longevity and stability of the
YNCL, but the odds were against the venture.341 Cooperatives needed capital, which few black people had
even during the best of times. In the depths of the Great Depression, the minimum funds required to sustain
stable buying coops were simply unavailable. Cooperatives were not a short-term solution to economic woes;
they needed considerable time to demonstrate progress. In such urgent and uncertain times, most people were
not confident or
patient enough to allow them to work. The co-ops that did succeed were absorbed into the dominant
economy.
Still, the cooperative movement held a special appeal for Ella Baker. Given the range of political
organizations based in New York City during the early 1930s, why did she choose to dedicate her efforts to
the YNCL? One reason is that the cooperative philosophy resonated with many of the ideals that were
instilled in her as a child. She brought her memories and ideals of community solidarity in the rural South to
bear on the predicament in which she found oppressed black people in the urban North.
Judging from the political views that the mature Ella Baker articulated during the 1960s, there are other ways
in which the YNCL must have appealed to and influenced her as well. Baker’s political philosophy called for
challenging the laws and institutions of society in order to eliminate discrimination and inequity, but at the
same time she felt strongly that any movement for social change must transform the individuals involved —
their values, priorities, and modes of personal interaction. Baker expressed this viewpoint as early as the
1940s, and it remained a constant theme in her politics thereafter. The cooperative movement offered
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organizers a way of working with people on a protracted, day-to-day basis. The process of setting up co-ops,
establishing common priorities for those involved, solidifying democratic methods of decision making, and
building communications networks encouraged people at the grassroots to engage in social change and
transformation, changing themselves, each other, and the world around them simultaneously. Unlike such
singular events as voting on election day or attending a political rally, involvement in cooperatives and
buying clubs enabled people to redefine the ways in which they related to neighbors, friends, and co-workers.
For Baker, political struggle was, above all, a process, and she insisted that the structure of political
organizations had to allow for the process of personal and political transformation to occur.
In many respects, the YNCL experiment foreshadowed a very similar organization with which Baker would
be closely affiliated some thirty years later, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Both
organizations were decidedly independent of more moderate black leadership. Both embraced the concept of
leadership at the grassroots as opposed to a top-down model. And both focused on youth as a cutting-edge
force for social change. The two groups certainly had different goals and emerged from distinctly different
historical contexts. But parallels are clear: both the YNCL and SNCC were distinguished from other
contemporary organizations
by their focus on grassroots education, democratic decision-making, and a step-by-step, transformative
process of working toward long-term goals. The connection between the YNCL and SNCC in Baker’s own
life history illuminates the carryover of strategies for resistance and change, which were passed on through
conduits like Ella Baker from generation to generation. Since the YNCL was so crucial in shaping Baker’s
own political thinking, she presumably drew on many of the lessons and mistakes of that experience in the
efforts to launch and sustain SNCC during the early 1960s.
Her years in the YNCL left Baker with a wealth of political experience, but her lack of any real material
wealth took its toll. Throughout the depression, she suffered bouts of unemployment and was in a perpetual
state of financial instability. Her predicament was shared by many other educated people, both black and
white, but her commitment to voluntary political organizing kept her poorer than some. To make ends meet,
Baker took short-term jobs whenever they were available, often finding them through friends. In the summer
of 1934, she worked with the World’s Fair Boosters and Friends of Africa, in their offices on 135th Street, to
promote black attendance at the fair and coordinate the Negro exhibits. She worked briefly, along with John
Henrik Clarke, on the Youth Committee of 100 against Lynching; with Lester Granger at the New York
Urban League; with Harlem’s Own Cooperative; and with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.342 Some
of this was volunteer work, and some provided her with a nominal salary. She also did freelance writing for a
wide variety of periodicals and worked as office manager for the National News, a short-lived publication
edited by Schuyler that was geared toward a black readership. Finally, Les Granger told her about job
openings at the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Baker immediately “went down and signed up.”343
THE WORKERS EDUCATION PROJECT
In October 1936, Baker began working as a consumer education teacher for the Workers Education Project
(WEP) of the WPA, based initially in offices on Broadway across from City Hall and later on 14th Street in
lower Manhattan.344 Her experience in coordinating and conducting education programs in the cooperative
movement qualified her for this assignment. The WPA was one of numerous New Deal agencies set up during
the depression by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to combat massive unemployment through the creation of
government-funded jobs. Employment programs designed specifically for educated workers aimed to use
their talents for the
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public good: artists created murals and sculptures for public buildings; the Federal Theatre hired actors and
directors to stage plays for popular audiences; the Federal Writers Project compiled guides to states and
collected historical documents. Black leaders close to the Roosevelt administration made sure that black
artists, writers, and teachers were not denied access to employment programs for educated workers, and some
projects documented and supported African American culture.345
The WEP consisted of 1,000 teachers nationwide who were sympathetic with the militant forces within the
burgeoning trade union movement, specifically the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The project’s
official purpose was to “cooperate with union officials and community leaders in organizing and conducting
classes in workers’ and consumers’ problems.”346 WEP teachers held classes in settlement houses, union
halls, churches, and workplaces, and discussions ranged from practical questions about the social security
program to the growth of fascism abroad.347 The New York City office had a staff of about eighty and was
supervised by Isabel Taylor, “a mild-mannered woman whose background included settlement house work in
the tradition of Jane Addams, and working with coal mining families in Pennsylvania.”348 Initially,
according to Baker’s friend and WEP co-worker Conrad Lynn, “the government felt we [in the WEP] should
be neutral in the struggle between capital and labor… but we won the right to study the history of the labor
movement,” which soon became a primary focus of the group’s work.349 Lynn recalled how prolabor WEP
teachers tried to infuse radical politics into their classes. “We ferreted out instances of exploitation of
workers, educating them about instances such as the famous Triangle Shirtwaist fire in which dozens of
workers were killed due to the unsafe conditions they were forced to work under.” Such lessons, Lynn
admitted, were intended to motivate workers to join the growing trade union movement.350 Baker’s longtime friend Pauli Murray, who also worked with the WEP, made the case for partisanship even more strongly
in a 1938 report on how to improve the project’s efforts. In her view, teachers needed to bolster workers’
confidence so that they would not be “satisfied with things as they are.” She felt that the WEP should
encourage black workers, in particular, to overcome feelings of “inferiority and timidity” and to “see the
world as theirs and from which they have a right to take what rightfully belongs to them.”351
Ella Baker was recognized as a successful educator within the WEP. Soon after joining the WPA, she was
promoted to assistant project supervisor in the Manhattan office of the WEP. There, Baker coordinated and
conducted
workshops on consumer issues for church, labor, and community groups. She was also the author of several
publications, including a study guide on consumer issues that was distributed nationwide.352 Like Lynn and
Murray, Baker strove to politicize the content of her work and radicalize her students by linking the problems
of consumers with larger issues of inequality and the need for social change. A flyer announcing one of
Baker’s consumer education workshops read: “Some consumers organize to save money, others to save the
world — what does consumer education mean to you?”353 Her syllabi posed such questions as “Why so
much poverty in so rich a country as America?” and “What role can organized and dynamic consumer action
play in issuing in a new social order?”354
Baker undertook concerted efforts to make consumer education available and accessible to black Americans,
who might otherwise not have seen WEP programs as relevant to them. She conducted workshops in Harlem,
holding classes in old storefronts and at workplaces, and created an educational exhibit on consumer issues in
Harlem Hospital to accommodate hospital employees, especially nurses who might not have otherwise
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attended.355 Pauli Murray shared Baker’s goal of making the WEP more accessible to black workers and
supported her efforts, praising Baker’s work in Harlem and urging the office to lend more publicity to the
work.356
The WEP provided a serious political education for the teachers it employed. “We had few guidelines and we
learned as we taught, pooling our experiences,” recalled Murray. “We also had to familiarize ourselves with
the immediate problems of clothing workers, Pullman car porters, domestic workers, transport workers, sales
clerks, the unemployed, or whatever groups we were assigned to. We had to be well informed on
contemporary social, economic and political issues to satisfy the demand among workers for discussions of
political events.”357 The WEP teachers learned from their dialogues with adult students and from their
debates with one another. They studied, argued, and grappled on a day-to-day basis with the most pressing
economic and political problems of the time. Looking back decades later, Conrad Lynn was convinced that he
had encountered “some of the best political minds collected under one roof” while working there.358 In the
WEP, young radical intellectuals hammered out together new approaches to social change.
The WEP was host to virtually every sector of the American left, from proponents of labor union organizing
and independent socialists to members of the Communist Party. Baker recalled their passionate debates with
pleasure: “You had every spectrum of radical thinking on the WPA. We had
a lovely time…. Boy it was good, stimulating.”359 In this intellectually dynamic environment, where theories
were tested against the experiences of working adults as well as against alternative points of view, many of
the amorphous ideals that had attracted Baker to the YNCL were challenged and refined. The YNCL had
introduced Baker to progressive politics; in the WEP, her ideas were forged into a coherent political analysis.
Baker also studied and taught in the workers’ education program at the Rand School for Social Science,
located on East 15th Street in Lower Manhattan. In 1936, while she was working for the WEP, Baker
attended classes at the Rand School, and by 1937 she was teaching consumer issues at the school’s weekly
afternoon classes for women.360 Founded in 1906 by members of the American Socialist Society and funded
by Carrie Sherfey Rand, a wealthy Iowa radical and former abolitionist, the school offered courses on
socialist theory, economics, and labor history and hosted such notable intellectuals as John Dewey, Bertrand
Russell, and Charles Beard. By the 1930s the school’s cafeteria, classrooms, and bookstore were hangouts for
an interracial crowd of young radical thinkers and activists.361 Her experience as a student and teacher at the
Rand School was another part of Baker’s deepening involvement in and exposure to leftist politics in New
York City.
In the WEP office where Baker worked, there were constant debates and discussions about such topics as the
future of socialism, the relationship of the communist movement to the struggle for Negro rights, how to
structure organizations democratically, the rise of fascism in Europe, and the future of colonialism in Africa.
Her coworkers included Conrad Lynn, a lawyer for the Young Communist League; Agnes Martuoucci, a
member of the Socialist Party; and Pauli Murray, who supported the independent socialist faction led by Jay
Lovestone. “You had every splinter of the CP,” Baker recalled, as well as a variety of socialists and
independent radicals. In describing the backgrounds of her co-workers at the WEP, Baker remembered that
many of her white colleagues were so-called red diaper babies who had been brought up in leftist families,
but who “had become disillusioned with the bringing in of the socialist order through the CP, and yet who
couldn’t leave the idea.”362 They were actively looking for socialist alternatives. Lynn echoed Baker’s
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assessment: the WEP staff “were men and women committed to the cause of labor, and they represented
every party and tendency of the left. For the first time Trotskyists, Lovestoneites, Stammites, Socialists,
Anarchists, and Henry Georgeites mingled with orthodox Communists.”363
In this new environment, Baker clarified her thinking about class, and began to put her ideas about education
and social change into practice. The philosophy of education that she expressed during her work for the WEP
reflects some key features of her larger political vision. One of the main goals of workers’ education,
according to Baker, was to provide the worker with “a more intelligent understanding of the social and
political economy of which he is a part.”364 For Baker, consumer issues were not apolitical matters that
affected everyone regardless of their economic position. She pointed out that although “everyone is a
consumer… here, we are primarily concerned with the wage earner whose income fails to satisfy the needs
and desires of himself and his family… and who can find small comfort and little hope in our present
economy.”365 In describing her approach to consumer education, Baker insisted that “the aim is not
education for its own sake, but education that leads to self-directed action.”366 Consumer politics were one
aspect of a larger class struggle between the haves and have-nots. Baker saw consumers as workers at the
other end of the production process and struggle over consumer power as analogous to the struggle for
workers’ power on the factory floor. As she put it in her syllabus: “All work is but a means to the end of
meeting consumer demands. The ‘real wage’ is what the pay envelope will actually buy. The wage-earner’s
well-being is determined as much at the points of distribution and consumption as at the point of
production…. Since recurrent ‘business slumps’ and the increased mechanization of industry tend to decrease
the primal importance of the worker as producer, he must be oriented to the increasingly more important role
of consumer.”367
In other words, organization at the point of consumption was potentially as important as the Marxist strategy
of organization at the point of production. By acting collectively as consumers and as workers, ordinary
people could influence the economy and improve the condition of their lives. In her WEP course syllabus,
Baker raised fundamental questions about the economic injustice of American capitalism and suggested that
an independent, aggressive consumer movement had an important role to play in changing that system.368
She clearly saw her work as a part of a bigger process of social and economic change along socialist lines.
The WEP exposed Baker to the entire spectrum of leftist political ideologies and factions. She was a careful
observer and critic of the left and had many close friends in opposing organizations and parties. In her
opinion, the Communist Party “was the most articulate group for social action. [It] may not have been well
organized all the time, but it was articulate.”369
Charles Payne points out that Baker also admired the localized “cell structure” of the CP, which could be
interpreted any number of ways, but, given the trajectory of Baker’s politics after the 1930s, it is likely that
she simply valued the localized process of intensive small-group discussion and planning that a “cell”
structure composed of small units that worked closely together would allow for.370 Baker respected the CP’s
leadership in organizing white and black industrial workers during the 1930s, and its white members were
some of the staunchest antiracists around. However, her criticisms of the party, which she did not write down,
seem to have outweighed her praise.371 Baker’s relationships with CP members were not governed by the
politically expedient notion of “live and let live.” Rather, she constantly struggled with her friends and
comrades around points of disagreement. Conrad Lynn, one of her closest CP friends, recalled that Baker
often “shoved reading material under my nose critical of the Communist Party.” Yet the two remained
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lifelong friends.372 Even though Baker was more closely associated with the socialists, rather than the
communists, in Harlem, she never endorsed the “militant anticommunism” of some of her friends, such as A.
Philip Randolph, who, according to historian Mark Naison, took the position that “communism represented a
‘Fifth Column’ in American life that had to be destroyed at all costs.”373
Among all the various and competing leftist organizations active in New York during the 1930s, Baker was
particularly sympathetic to the Lovestonites, an independent socialist faction named after its leader, Jay
Lovestone, who had split from the Community Party during the late 1920s.374 In interviews, John Henrik
Clarke and Conrad Lynn agreed about Baker’s Lovestonite affiliation.375 The fact that one of Baker’s closest
friends, Pauli Murray, supported Lovestone adds weight to Lynn’s and Clarke’s recollections.376 Lovestone
and his followers were critical of the Communist Party’s view of the Bolshevik revolution as a virtual
blueprint for socialist revolutions worldwide. As proponents of a brand of American exceptionalism, they
believed that the United States had to follow its own path toward socialism. Lovestone had been general
secretary of the Workers (Communist) Party during the late 1920s, when the so-called Negro question was
being hotly debated within party circles. Before he was ousted in 1929, Lovestone and his black and white
allies within the party opposed the notion of black self-determination founded on the idea of a southern-based
Negro “nation within a nation,” which was introduced at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International
in Moscow in 1930. Lovestone had little confidence in organizing in the agrarian South and thought that the
party should urge blacks to migrate to the industrial North instead.377 Lovestone advocated interracial
organizing on the basis of common class interests. One of his strongest black supporters within the party was
Lovett Fort-Whiteman, who coauthored an internal party document that called for the abolition of the partyrun American Negro Labor Congress on the grounds that it unfairly segregated black workers coming into the
party. Those on the other side of the debate countered that critics of the American Negro Labor Congress and
the self-determination position were minimizing race and suggesting that it was marginal to the class
struggle.378 Lovestone recognized that racism was a problem within the party as well as in the nation as a
whole, and he maintained that the party should fight “white chauvinism” and upgrade “Negro work.”379
According to historian Paul Buhle, the Lovestonite faction, after its expulsion from the Workers (Communist)
Party, encouraged “a rethinking of communist policies in a more open fashion” while promoting an
aggressive agenda, including the development of a Worker’s School headed by Bertram Wolfe.380 The group,
in Buhle’s assessment, maintained a “small but vital intellectual following” in the early thirties.381 Baker
may have been drawn to the Lovestonites’ lively intellectual debates and emphasis on radical education. The
group’s interracial composition and its commitment to understanding the connections between racial injustice
and class inequality would also have appealed to her. Whatever the attraction to the controversial group,
Baker’s affiliation with Lovestone was a loose one at best.
Baker was well informed about left political theory and questioned all the viewpoints. She read and debated
Marxist ideas regularly with her coworkers in the WEP, but she was never known to toe a “party line” of any
type. Indeed, she was a vigorous opponent of sectarianism, regarding organizational splits over abstractions
as destructive to organizing for change. Baker’s interest in Marxism was an extension of her open-minded
exploration of a wide spectrum of political views. According to some of her friends, she was fairly
promiscuous in her political associations during and after the 1930s. It did not matter whether she dealt with
communists, Lovestonites, socialists, or ardent Garveyites; she was eager to engage them all. This openness
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to diverse political views and ideologies characterized much of her political life. Anyone concerned with
social and economic justice, civil rights, and human progress was a potential ally — or at least worthy of a
hearty debate. Even at this early stage of her political career, Baker was a catalyst for bringing people
together. She was a common denominator among the varied and often contentious segments of Harlem’s
progressive political community. “Characters of all the various political stripes would drop by Ella’s
apartment, just for the political challenge of it. She would argue her point one day,” John Henrik Clarke
recalled, “and see you on the street and hug you the next. Principled disagreements were not a basis to shut
anybody out.”382
INTERNATIONALISM AND THE BLACK DIASPORA
Moving from the provincial South to metropolitan Harlem opened Baker’s eyes to the variety of black
diasporic cultures and politics. One of the things Baker loved about New York was its global character, a
multinationalism that permeated the political and cultural life of the city. Baker marveled that “if ever there
was any ferment across the ocean in terms of social action and development of political parties like
communist, socialist, etc., New York became the place where it birthed and blossomed most.”383 During the
1930s, Baker, like many African Americans, took a greater interest in world affairs and U.S. foreign policy.
As John Henrik Clarke put it, “black took on a bigger meaning and freedom took on a global character.”384
In 1932, Baker worked as a reporter for the West Indian News and familiarized herself with Caribbean
politics and culture; she also became acquainted with the Caribbean socialist Richard Moore.385 In January
1937, when England sent troops to suppress a strike by oil workers in the British colony of Trinidad and
Tobago, Baker took a stand in support of the striking workers. She had lengthy conversations with her friend
Conrad Lynn about the incident, firing him up so much that he disrupted a meeting of the New York City
Committee of the Communist Party by demanding that they funnel aid to the embattled black strikers.386
The CP committee refused, and Lynn walked out of the meeting threatening to resign his membership in
protest. Lynn recounted this dramatic incident in his autobiography, There Is a Fountain, but only years later
did he mention that his conversations with Ella Baker were the impetus for his actions.387
During 1934-35, when the Italian dictator, Mussolini, moved to annex the African nation of Ethiopia,
thousands of Harlemites mobilized to protest the violation of Ethiopia’s autonomy and to support the
Ethiopian resistance. Ella Baker lent her voice in support of this international campaign, marching in
demonstrations, attending meetings, and circulating petitions under the organizational banner of the
American League against War and Fascism.388 The league held a major march through Harlem on
August 3, 1935, which brought out nearly 25,000 people.389 Baker’s close relationship with one of the key
leaders of the Ethiopian aid campaign, Rev. William Lloyd Imes, suggests that she may have played more of
a role in this effort than extant documents indicate.390 In “Light on a Dark Continent,” an unpublished article
on the richness of African history written by Baker in the late 1930s, she directly challenged the bias of
Eurocentric histories, pointing out that, in fact, the so-called Dark Continent of Africa was the birthplace of
the human species.391 These words and activities indicate that Baker’s politics were framed by a much larger
internationalist perspective and included a particular concern with the issues of African colonialism and
independence.
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Pan-Africanism linked the liberation of people of African descent throughout the diaspora to the struggle for
self-determination on the continent of Africa. W. E. B. Du Bois was one of its major proponents within the
United States, advocating solidarity among black people around the world but rejecting any type of narrow,
racial separatism at home. Baker’s internationalist stance and her critique of black nationalism went hand in
hand as well. She was indubitably a “race woman,” unapologetic about her love and affinity for black people,
and she situated herself politically and personally within a diverse and sometimes fractious black community.
She lived her entire adult life in the historically and culturally rich black enclave of Harlem out of choice
rather than necessity. But her affinity and sense of community did not stop there. Baker’s class analysis and
political perspective suggested the need for cooperation and coalition building with other oppressed people,
regardless of race. The Young Negroes’ Cooperative League was the only all-black organization with which
Baker was affiliated, and the YNCL maintained amicable relations with nonblack organizations, especially
cooperatives, that had similar economic and political goals. Baker never worked with organizations that
espoused narrow nationalist ideas or advocated Garvey-style separatism. Her views on these questions
closely resembled those of Du Bois. They both recognized that, in a historical period defined by Jim Crow
segregation, all-black organizations were necessary modes of self-help and group empowerment, yet they did
not preclude working with predominantly white or multiracial organizations simultaneously or in the
future.392 In the economic crisis of the depression, African Americans had to take immediate steps to resist
oppression and ensure their survival. They could work toward establishing principled, enduring coalitions
with whites and with other people of color,
especially on issues of economic justice, but coalition-building was a protracted process and was most
effectively conducted from a strong, autonomous base.
Baker saw the necessity of forming alliances across racial lines and national boundaries on pragmatic
political grounds. In response to remarks made by a Philadelphia minister urging blacks to pull themselves up
by their bootstraps, that is, without allies, she ar…
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)
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