FEBRUARY IS AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH -- ROBERT PARRIS MOSES

 

 
   Probably one of the lesser known greats of the civil rights movement, Robert Parris Moses is known lately as an educator and founder of The Algebra Project.  Possibly the most down-to-earth brilliantly educated organizer of the struggle, he recognized the potential of every person as he organized for voting rights in Mississippi.  He encouraged people such as Fannie Lou Hamer to take leadership, rather than putting himself forward.   It was Bob Moses who came up with the idea for the Freedom Summer project inviting northern college students down to organize for voting rights in 1963.  Bob Moses also thought up the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, led by Fannie Lou Hamer, to challenge the racism of the Democratic Party in 1964.  And so much more.

   Precisely because he was so intelligent and yet so modest, his influence was great.  Born in Harlem in 1935, he attended public schools, Stuyvesant High School, and then a scholarship to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.  He earned a Masters Degree from Harvard University.  He was working toward a Doctorate when his mother died and his father became ill, so he returned to New York and became a school teacher at Horace Mann School.
   When he finally stepped down from his role in the civil rights movement, he returned to New York and organized against the war in Vietnam.   "Throughout his involvement in the civil rights movement Moses was subject to physical violence. He was arrested numerous times in Mississippi. In 1966, Moses, a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, fled to Canada to escape the draft. Two years later he moved to Tanzania and taught mathematics. Upon his return to the United States in 1976, Moses resumed his undergraduate studies at Harvard which he had left in 1957."
- See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/aah/moses-robert-p-1935#sthash.NcdNlHff.dpuf  

   From Americans Who Tell The Truth website:  "In a 2013 interview, the historian Taylor Branch explained Robert Parris Moses’s significance to the American Civil Rights Movement: "To this day he is a startling paradox," Branch said. "I think his influence is almost on par with Martin Luther King, and yet he's almost totally unknown." Through his years as a Civil Rights organizer, Moses was self-effacing, observant and sensitive. These characteristics kept him out of the spotlight, but made for a highly effective leader."

   "For this work, Moses was awarded the MacArthur "Genius Grant" in 1982. Not content to rest after past achievements, Moses moved forward with a new civil rights agenda: education. He used the MacArthur grant to start The Algebra Project (AP), which helps the lowest-performing students prepare for college math and twenty-first century careers."

   “AP’s unique approach to school reform intentionally develops sustainable, student-centered models by building coalitions of stakeholders within the local communities, particularly the historically underserved population. Since 2000, we have continued to provide the context in which students, schools, parents and communities maximize local resources and take ownership of their own community building and mathematics education reform efforts.”
   "In 2001, Moses published a book, Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project. There he explains how the principles of the Civil Rights Movement can be applied to the fight for equitable public education. "Everyone said sharecroppers didn't want to vote. It wasn't until we got them demanding to vote that we got attention. Today, when kids are falling wholesale through the cracks, people say they don't want to learn. We have to get the kids themselves to demand what everyone says they don't want.” In the book, Moses explains how community involvement is the key to successfully changing schools and communities for the better."

   "In addition to the MacArthur Fellowship, Moses has received several awards for his work, including the War Resisters League Peace Award (1997), Heinz Award for the Human Condition (2000), Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship (2001), Margaret Chase Smith American Democracy Award (2002), James Bryant Conant Award (2002) and Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship (2005). At an age where most are retired, Moses continues teaching in Algebra Project schools and traveling, sharing his model for community-building and improving education all over the United States."

“Well, I don’t think that the Democratic Party to this day has confronted the issue of bringing into its ranks the kind of people that were represented by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. That is the real underclass of this country. The Democratic Party primarily has organized around the middle class. And we were challenging them not only on racial grounds but we were challenging them on the existence of a whole group of people who are the underclass of this country, white and black, who are not represented. And they weren’t prepared to hear that; I don’t know if they heard.” — Bob Moses, quote on portrait

Civil Rights Digital Library - http://crdl.usg.edu/people/m/moses_robert_parris/?Welcome 
King Encyclopedia - http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_moses_robert_parris_1935/  
Americans Who Tell the Truth - http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/bob-moses 
Black Past - http://www.blackpast.org/aah/moses-robert-p-1935 
American Radio Works - Say It Plain, Say It Loud http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/blackspeech/bmoses.html  Robert Moses Speech on Freedom Summer.
Mississippi Freedom Summer 50 Years - http://freedom50.org/moses/   
Zinn Education Project - http://zinnedproject.org/materials/robert-moses/ 

Readings (from American Radio Works - see above)
1. Robert P. Moses, Radical Equations — Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 3.
2. Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000 (New York: Penguin, 2001), 256-58.
3. Tom Hayden, "Bob Moses: His Technique Is to Be A Catalyst in People's Efforts to Free Themselves," The Nation, July 21, 2003, 34.
4. David Harris quoted by Richard J. Jensen and John C. Hammerback, "Robert Parris Moses," African-American Orators: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 261.
5. Moses, 73.
6. Dudley Lehew, "Mississippi Summer Project to Go On Through Winter," AP report in Sarasota Herald Tribune, August 27, 1964, 14.
7. Moses, 69.
8. John Dittmer, Local People — The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994) 102.
9. Dittmer, 424.

FEBRUARY IS AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH - - ELLA BAKER

 

 

   Thanks in part to the growth of interest and the Black Lives Matter movement, more people know who Ella Baker was than before.  I remember being so delighted to find out about her especially because of the important role that woman have played in the history of the civil rights movement. Here was a woman who was so key to the struggle that it appears very little would have happened without her presence and leadership.  I knew that Ella Baker was the greatest unsung hero of the civil rights movement. 

   Ella Jo Baker was born on December 13, 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia and died on December 13, 1986 her 83rd birthday.  The Ella Baker Center took her name because of  "Wanting to celebrate Ella Jo Baker as an unsung hero of racial and economic justice and seeking to honor her legacy of leadership and movement building, our founders chose to name our Center for Ella Baker. Her audacity to dream big is a cornerstone of our philosophy."

   "Fundi" was her nickname. A documentary "Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker" was made in 1981.  Sweet Honey in the Rock composed a song about her - Ella. "We who believe in freedom cannot rest..."   Go to this link for the words to "Ella's Song" by Sweet Honey in the Rock.

   In her early years in rural North Carolina, Ella was fortunate to hear stories from her grandmother about slave revolts and her own resistance to the slave owner. Baker later went on to study at Shaw University and graduated as valedictorian, while protesting school policies she thought were unfair. She moved to New York City to work with various organizations. In 1930 she joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League to develop "black economic power through cooperative planning."  She was also involved in women's organizations.  "She was committed to economic justice for all people and once said, “People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job.”  

From the Zinn Education Project site:  "Ella Baker began her involvement with the NAACP in 1940. She worked as a field secretary and then served as director of branches from 1943 until 1946. Inspired by the historic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, Baker co-founded the organization In Friendship to raise money to fight against Jim Crow Laws in the deep South. In 1957, Baker moved to Atlanta to help organize Martin Luther King’s new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She also ran a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for Citizenship."

Ella Josephine Baker. Portrait by Robert Shetterly.

"On February 1, 1960, a group of black college students from North Carolina A&T University refused to leave a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they had been denied service. Baker left the SCLC after the Greensboro sit-ins. She wanted to assist the new student activists because she viewed young, emerging activists as a resource and an asset to the movement. Baker organized a meeting at Shaw University for the student leaders of the sit-ins in April 1960. From that meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — SNCC — was born."

   Ella Baker may not have been the first but certainly prominently began the use of Gandhian principles of nonviolent direct action in organizing the movement.  Along with CORE, SNCC organized the 1961 Freedom Rides. In 1964 SNCC organized Freedom Summer -- voting rights seen as key!  

   From the Biographer of Ella Baker Barbara Ransby - "For more than 50 years, she traveled the breadth of this country organizing, protesting and advocating for social justice. Her main concern was the plight of African-Americans, whose rights, she argued, were the litmus test for American democracy. But she was also concerned with the cause of labor, the poor, Latinos and women.

"Over the course of her life she worked alongside some of the most well known civil-rights leaders of the 20th century. They included W.E.B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr.

"But celebrity did not impress Baker. Instead she placed emphasis on grassroots organizing and local leadership. Her own humble style is part of the reason her contributions and accomplishments are less known than those of many of her male counterparts."

   To show the complexity and strength of Ella Baker here is an excerpt from the American National Biography online -     "After hundreds of students sat in at segregated lunch counters in early 1960, Baker persuaded the SCLC to invite them to the Southside Youth Leadership Conference at Shaw University on Easter weekend. From this meeting the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was eventually formed. Although the SCLC leadership pressured Baker to influence the students to become a youth chapter of SCLC, she refused and encouraged the students to beware of SCLC's "leader-centered orientation." She felt that the students had a right to decide their own structure. Baker's speech "More Than a Hamburger," which followed King's and James Lawson's speeches, urged the students to broaden their social vision of discrimination to include more than integrating lunch counters. Julian Bond described the speech as "an eye opener" and probably the best of the three. "She didn't say, 'Don't let Martin Luther King tell you what to do,' " Bond remembers, "but you got the real feeling that that's what she meant" (Hampton and Fayer, p. 63). James Forman, who became director of SNCC a few months later, said Baker felt SCLC "was depending too much on the press and on the promotion of Martin King, and was not developing enough indigenous leadership across the South" (Forman, p. 216).

    "After the Easter conference weekend, Baker resigned from the SCLC, and after having helped Walker learn his job she went to work for SNCC in August. To support herself she worked as a human relations consultant for the Young Women's Christian Association in Atlanta. Baker continued as the "ever-present mentor" (Garrow, p. 518) to SNCC civil rights workers. At a rancorous SNCC meeting at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in August 1961, Baker mediated between one faction advocating political action through voter registration and another faction advocating nonviolent direct action. She suggested that voter registration would necessitate confrontation that would involve them in direct action. Baker believed that voting was necessary but did not believe that the franchise would cure all problems. She also understood the appeal of nonviolence as a tactic, but she did not believe in it personally: "I have not seen anything in the nonviolent technique that can dissuade me from challenging somebody who wants to step on my neck. If necessary, if they hit me, I might hit them back" (Cantarow and O'Malley, p. 82).

   Baker was a mentor to SNCC and many young organizers including Bob Moses, Julian Bond, Bernice Johnson Reagon (Sweet Honey in the Rock), Marian Wright Edelman (Children's Defense Fund), and Eleanor Holmes Norton.

   After SNCC began to "unravel" Ella Baker went on to fight against the War in Vietnam, for Puerto Rican independence, against Apartheid in South Africa, and more.  She never stopped fighting for the rights of the oppressed. Although she has not been well known, there was no question that she has left a deep mark on the fabric of this country.  We would likely not have had such a successful Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s without this courageous woman. Would that we could get her again!!  We need her now!

 

Who was Ella Baker? the Ella Baker Center - http://ellabakercenter.org/about/who-was-ella-baker  

Biography - http://www.biography.com/people/ella-baker-9195848  

Models of Courageous Citizenship - http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/ella-baker  

Profile of Ella Josephine Baker - http://zinnedproject.org/materials/baker-ella/  

Centennial of Ella Baker's birth is a day to remember  - http://progressive.org/media_ransby_976  

Great list of books about Ella Baker and more -  http://zinnedproject.org/tag/ella-baker/  

Article by Barbara Ransby about the Myth of the Leaderless Movement - http://www.colorlines.com/articles/ella-taught-me-shattering-myth-leaderless-movement  

Oral History Interview - http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/G-0008/menu.html  

Link for Barbara Ransby's book  "Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement" - http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-391.html  

American National Biography online - http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00989.html