Our project gained momentum, and so did the Occupy movement. The demonstration camp in New York City’s Zuccotti Park triggered the vital question of all political movements—and especially grassroots movements—how to organize and mobilize. No figure embodies more convincingly than Ella Baker the genius of grassroots organizing in the civil rights movement. Her deep commitment to democratic decision making turned her into an ideal choice for our next conversation, which took place in summer 2012, when the Occupy movement was at its height. With Ella Baker we opened up the field of the female voices within the Black prophetic tradition. The women, in contrast to their charismatic male companions, had not just been sanitized but, worse, marginalized.
CHRISTA BUSCHENDORF: In our three previous conversations we talked about Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr. Even when we consider the tremendously rich tradition of African American intellectuals and activists, these were obvious choices. After all, all three were considered towering figures, if not the most towering intellectuals of their time, by their contemporaries as well as by posterity. To many, our choice to speak about Ella Baker will be much less evident, although she clearly belongs to the exclusive group of long-distance runners, i.e., freedom fighters who devote their whole lives to the struggle for freedom and justice. However, her life’s work is more difficult both to access and to assess. First, as a highly skillful organizer, she often became an indispensible member of the organization for which she chose to work, but she never stood in the limelight of the movement. Second, while she held concise theories of social change and political action, she never put them down in writing. There is no memoir; there is no collection of essays. There are just speeches, a few newspaper articles, and interviews, but apart from that, we rely on biographers who consulted her papers and spoke to the people who knew her personally. Third, her very theory of political action is decidedly group-centered in that she firmly believed in a kind of grassroots organizing that would allow the poor and oppressed to get actively involved in the fighting. To Baker, the ideal activist was not the charismatic figure of the prophet who mobilizes the masses by mesmerizing speeches but an unassuming person who helps the suppressed to help themselves. As she put it in 1947, “The Negro must quit looking for a savior, and work to save himself.”1 And twenty years later, with regard to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which she cofounded, she maintained, “One of the major emphases of SNCC, from the beginning, was that of working with indigenous people, not working for them, but trying to develop their capacity for leadership.”2
If, then, Ella Baker may not be as obvious a choice as Douglass, Du Bois, and King, she nevertheless is, I think, a very obvious choice for you. So could you just start by giving us an assessment of why you cherish her personality and her work in the civil rights movement?
CORNEL WEST: I think in many ways Ella Baker is the most relevant of our historic figures when it comes to democratic forms of leadership, when it comes to a deep and abiding love for not just Black people in the abstract or poor people in the abstract, but a deep commitment to their capacities and their abilities to think critically, to organize themselves, and to think systemically, in terms of opposition to and transformation of a system. When we think of the Occupy movement—we do now live in the age of Occupy in this regard—and Ella Baker’s fundamental commitment to what Romand Coles calls “receptivity”—Coles’s work also was quite powerful in terms of Ella Baker’s legacy3—learning to receive from the people, not just guide, not just counsel, not just push the people in a certain direction, but to receive from the people the kinds of insight that the people themselves have created and forged in light of a tradition of ordinary people generating insights and generating various visions. And so it’s grassroots in the most fundamental sense of grassroots. And I don’t think that even Douglass, in all of his glory, and Du Bois, in all of his intellectual genius, and King, in all of his rhetorical genius, have that kind of commitment to the grassroots, everyday, ordinary people’s genius in this sense. And of course, there is a gender question as well: her powerful critique of patriarchal models of leadership, including especially messianic models of leadership, which ought to be a starting point for any serious talk about organizing and mobilizing and social change in the twenty-first century.
In addition, I was just in dialogue with my dear brother Bob Moses.4 He spent a whole year at Princeton, and his office was right across the hall from mine. Of course, for him, Ella Baker is the grandest figure in radical democratic praxis, and he is very much a disciple of Ella Baker. He is quite explicit about that, very explicit that charismatic leadership, messianic leadership is something that he rejects across the board. But I think what comes through is that Ella Baker has a sensitivity to the existential dimension of organizing and mobilizing, and what I mean by that is that for her political change is not primarily politically motivated. This goes back to her early years in the Black Baptist women’s missionary movement. When she talks about humility with the people, not even for the people but with the people, when she talks about service alongside the people, and when she talks about everyday people, everyday people’s capacities becoming more and more manifest at the center of the movement, not something that is just used and manipulated by messianic leaders, but at the center of the movement, that’s a kind of democratic existentialism of a sort that I see in her work—and I see in Bob Moses’s. But you see it in very few people’s works.
There are elements of this in some of the anarchists, and that’s why I have a tremendous respect for anarchism, because anarchism has this deep suspicion of hierarchy, be it the state in the public sphere, corporations in the private sphere, or cultural institutions in civil society. We know Baker worked with George Schuyler, who called himself an anarchist in the 1930s. He ended up a reactionary right-wing brother, but he earlier called himself an anarchist.5 We also know Bayard Rustin was an anarchist, called himself an anarchist quite explicitly.6 We know that Dorothy Day called herself an anarchist, quite explicitly, till the day she died.7 This is a great tradition I have great respect for, and I see it among my young brothers and sisters of all colors in the Occupy movement, even though I don’t consider myself an anarchist. I do see similarities between Ella Baker’s position and the council Communist tradition that called for Soviets without Bolsheviks, that called for workers’ councils without a revolutionary vanguard party that served as managerial manipulators of the people in the councils, so that the self-organization of working people was the kind of radical organizing among everyday people without any managers, experts, or party members telling them what to do. And there is some overlap between Herman Gorter and Anton Pannekoek and some of the early council Communists that mean much to someone like myself coming out of a deep democratic tradition.8 And so, ironically, Ella Baker, the very figure who one would think would be marginal vis-à-vis these male-type titans, ends up being the most relevant in light of our present dark times of political breakdown, economic decline, and cultural decay.
CHB: It is so interesting that the Occupy movement is definitely leaderless, tries to be leaderless and group-centered, which has great advantages. For one thing, you can’t decapitate a movement easily by just killing one of its charismatic leaders. But more than that, as you just explained, it gives the group much more power, a power that it otherwise delegates to a representative. But even if we say today that this is why Ella Baker is more important, when we think back, what is your stance on the fact that after all we also needed a Martin Luther King Jr.? What, then, is to your mind the relation between those two forces, the charismatic leader-figure and the group-centered work that Ella Baker did?
CW: When Ella Baker says that the movement made Martin, Martin didn’t make the movement, she is absolutely right, and so for me the greatness of Martin King has to do with the ways in which he used his charisma and used his rhetorical genius and used his courage and willingness to die alongside everyday people. The critique of Martin would be that the decision-making process in his organization was so top-down and so male-centered and hierarchical that one could have envisioned a larger and even more effective mass movement, especially when it came to issues of class, empire, gender, and sexual orientation. When he hit economic justice for janitors and the poor, and when he hit issues of American imperialism in Vietnam, he would not have been just dangling all by himself if there had been more political education and cultivation among the people in the organization and the community. And Ella Baker—who was shaped by the South, went to Shaw University in North Carolina, and then straight to New York City, where she runs the West Indian newspaper, and she is working with George Schuyler during his anarchist years, interacting with leftists, interacting with various progressives, but always rooted, always grounded—offered a deep democratic alternative to the model of the lone charismatic leader.
One of the things about Ella you might recall is that—and Bob Moses was telling me this, it was so striking—right in the middle of the movement, she pulled out to take care of her niece. And people said, “Wait a minute, this is something that you have been waiting for. This is the moment. The cameras are here.” “I got my roots,” you see, “my niece needs to be taken care of. She is, after all, by herself.” And people would say, “Oh, but that’s part of the gender question. She had to think of herself as a carer and nurturer.” But, no, no, she puts things in perspective. Her caring for her niece in those years that her niece needed her was part and parcel of her calling as someone who is of service. But for Ella, her calling embraced both service to her family and service to the movement. For her, humility and service flow across the board, and so I think that her critique of the great Martin Luther King Jr. ought to be integral to any discussion about Martin Luther King Jr. She brings to her critique humility, service, and love; her own willingness to sacrifice. She’s the kind of unassuming character who doesn’t need the limelight at all in order to have a sense of herself. She doesn’t need the camera. You know what happens is that these charismatic leaders become ontologically addicted to the camera. And it’s a very sad thing to behold. You see it in Jesse Jackson, despite his rhetorical genius and great contributions to our struggles. We see it in Al Sharpton, despite his talent for adaptability and service. You saw it in the later years of Huey Newton, as great as he was in his early years. Angela Davis has resisted it. Bob Moses also resisted it. Stokely Carmichael—even given his greatness, incredible love for the people, and the deep influence of Ella Baker—was still much more tied to the charismatic model.9 My dear brother the charismatic Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright—largely misunderstood and underappreciated—was demonized by the media and will, in the long run, be vindicated. But, like Ella, prophetic giant Dr. James Forbes Jr. defies these seductions.
CHB: One wonders, of course, whether there is not a natural relation between the possibility of becoming such a charismatic leader and a certain degree of narcissism, so it is an even greater accomplishment of those figures who do not develop in terms of egocentricity, and yet are great leaders. Baker often criticized the mostly male cofighters she had to put up with. As she recalled, they took it for granted that when there was a meeting she would take care of the people, so that they would have something to eat and drink, that the coffeemaker was running. Thus, there was always that double concern of hers. For she was not at all a person who was content with those everyday services to the movement; she had great foresight. In fact, this to me is another important feature of hers: the way she understood the whole process, namely, as something that would go on for a long time, because nothing would be accomplished in ten years or twenty years, but that nevertheless you would have to bring all your strength to it, even if you did not see much progress. She was looking ahead and willing even to pass on the baton to the next generation, to the next person who was there to serve, and that is one of her great strengths.
CW: Absolutely. There is a fundamental sense in which the age of Occupy is the age of Ella Baker. Even given the deep contributions of the legacies of Douglass and King—we could add Malcolm; we certainly would add Du Bois as well—for Ella Baker, you know, when you radically call into question the distinction between mental and manual labor, then that frees you up to engage in forms of activities in the movement that allow for a natural flow, from caring for the homeless, cooking food for the elderly, and reading Gramsci on what it means to be an organic intellectual all in the same afternoon, because these are all just functions of a freedom fighter, functions of an organic, catalytic figure, where the intellectual is not somehow either isolated or elevated and therefore distinct from the manual, tactile, touch, hands-on-activity.
You know, when I talked about Ella’s democratic existentialism, it is relevant to me in terms of your point on narcissism and charismatic leaders, because anyone who is a long-distance freedom fighter has to have a tremendous sense of self-confidence, and the real challenge is how do you have this tremendous sense of self-confidence when you are being targeted by assassination attempts or threats; when you are rebuked, scorned, lied about, or misunderstood. You need self-confidence in order to keep going in a community and a network, but how do you hold on to self-confidence without sliding into self-indulgence? The only weapon against narcissism is a belief in self and a greater cause than the self that is severed from an obsession with self as some grand messianic gift to the world. And I think you could see elements of this in the other figures that we talked about: Douglass and King and Du Bois had unbelievable self-confidence, and at their best, they are Ella Baker–like; at their worst, they are narcissists. And of course, this is a struggle in the human soul in each and every one of us. But the major weapon against narcissism for me is a kind of spirituality or a spiritual strength that accents, on the one hand, gratitude—what it means to be part of a long tradition that has produced you and allowed you to have the self-confidence—because self-confidence doesn’t drop down from the sky; it is cultivated over many, many years owing to earlier people, antecedent figures who had the same kind of self-confidence—so gratitude on the one hand, as a kind of democratic piety in that sense, if piety is understood as the debts you owe to those who came before tied to the tradition and community and legacy of struggle, and on the other hand, there is an indescribable joy in serving others. This joy in serving others is qualitatively different than pleasure in leading others.
CHB: And a third factor in combatting narcissism may be the belief in the cause, or do you take that for granted?
CW: That’s true, the depth of your commitment to the cause. And that is, I think, very important, because when you really get at the complicated core or the mediated essence of Ella Baker, it really has so much to do with this kind of democratic gratitude of being in a tradition of struggle, of being an agent of change and transmitter to the younger generation, which allows you to make a Pascalian leap in belief in the capacities of everyday people, because it’s a kind of leap of faith that you are having in their capacity to cultivate themselves. You don’t need messianic leadership; you don’t need a revolutionary party; you don’t need professionals and experts coming in from the academy and telling you x, y, and z. You are in conversation with them, but they don’t need to have an elevated status. But it’s that democratic gratitude on the one hand, and it is that deep spirituality that actually I think was rooted initially in Baker’s early Black Baptist experiences and the model of her blessed mother, and then the depth of her belief, in the cause, what she calls the cause of humanity.
CHB: Indeed, it wasn’t just a particular cause, as important as the civil rights movement she had actually worked for was to her—she was in the NAACP for some twenty years. She said explicitly that she worked for so many organizations and campaigns, more than thirty, I think, but in truth, she said, she worked for a movement that is greater than all these particular struggles.10
CW: It would be wonderful if one were to meet members of a progressive organization and you asked them who do you work for and they would say not the organization, whatever it is, but I’m working for the freedom of human beings around the world; I’m working for the cause; I’m working for justice, and this organization is a means toward that end, this organization is a vehicle or conduit through which my commitment to the cause for humanity, the cause for social justice, the cause for human dignity, beginning with poor and working people and those Frantz Fanon called the wretched of the earth. She always kept that in mind. So even when it comes to the kind of organizational chauvinism—organizations clash because they are trying to gain access to a certain kind of turf on a terrain—she would look at that and say, “Oh, you are missing the point.” SCLC people wanted to know how she could make that move from interim executive director of SCLC—before Wyatt Tee Walker was to take it over in 1960—how she could make that move so smoothly from SCLC to SNCC, when the tension between SCLC and SNCC was so intense. She is the only one who carries over and becomes a hero for the young people. She’s already an older person; the young people trusted her.
CHB: She never attempted to tell them to do it her way, but she listened and engaged in what you would call, I assume, a Socratic dialogue.
CW: Oh, absolutely, a Socratic dialogue in the deepest sense. I’ll never forget Bob Moses recalling one of the meetings where it was clear that SNCC was collapsing. It was right near the end, very intense conversations, and Ella Baker was sitting there. You could just see the internal pain, and more and more, the young people were looking toward her to intervene to save and rescue the organization. And she just sat there and listened, and afterward people were saying like, “Damn, if Martin and the others had been there, they would have come to our rescue. Can’t you see this is the only way? We need this almost Hobbesian sovereign, you know what I mean, to help impose some order, so we can sustain an organization that we worked so hard for. We don’t understand your silence.” And she said, “It’s up to you. It’s up to you all. You all got to work it out. I am just one voice.” And of course, someone said, “We want to hear that one voice!” Sometimes, you know—Bob Moses is like this, too—sometimes you just wonder whether they could be too reticent and too reluctant to speak. Their democratic humility is never false, but their democratic receptivity could be more balanced with bold democratic voicing.
CHB: She was convinced that if a movement cannot find a way from within the group to go on, then it is no longer relevant. It has to be replaced. It might have had its time, done its work. And when she moved from SCLC to SNCC, it was in part, I think, because she was frustrated, owing to what you talked about earlier about hierarchy and the male chauvinism, which, for example, never allowed her to have this post of executive director fully. It was always interim. She showed that she could do it, but she was a woman, so it was not acceptable to the male-dominated group at that time. So she moved, because she had more confidence in the radical thinking of the young, and she thought it was needed at that moment. Now, within SNCC, there were different developments, and I think at one point—it may have been earlier in their development than the moment you talked about—two groups within SNCC fought each other, and at that point she tried to reach a compromise with this idea: let’s have two strains; let’s have two subgroups that follow their agenda, and let’s see how far this takes us. And it was accepted at the time, but that was probably already foreshadowing a conflict within the group, and she would have been the last one to fight for something that she thought, “Well, if it can’t sustain itself, it is not worth fighting for. It has to be replaced. This is what a revolutionary process is about.”
CW: And she understood it so very, very well. Again, that has something to do with the kind of revolutionary patience that she had which I am associating also with this radical democratic receptivity that Romand Coles has talked about with such insight. You know, we do have to pay tribute in so many ways to Joanne Grant and Barbara Ransby and Romand Coles and others who really have not just thought through and theorized but thrown their hearts and minds and souls into the radical democratic praxis of Ella Baker.11 Because on the one hand, she seemed to be rather reluctant to write a book about what she was doing, or write a memoir about her life, all of those things, in some ways mitigating against her commitment to radical democratic praxis, and yet we know there was always a theoretical dimension to it,12 because she was just so brilliant; she was so reflective, introspective, and spiritual all at the same time.
CHB: To come back to one of your points as to education and how it might work when you try to educate a group not by preaching, not by lecturing from top to bottom, but by engaging in a dialogue—it takes a long time to begin with.
CW: Absolutely. I think that the major limitation of Ella Baker’s global historical work and witness is the tremendous clash between democratic time and market time. With the commodification of cultures around the world, most of us, if not all of us, live in market time, even if we are on the margins of the larger imperial system of our day. And market time is fast; it’s quick; it’s push-button; it’s 24/7 cycles of media. Whereas democratic time, which has to do with the kind of organizing and mobilizing Baker was doing, requires a long revolution, in the language of the great Raymond Williams.13 And it’s a long memory, in the language of Mary Frances Berry and John Blassingame, who wrote that wonderful book together, Long Memory.14 So, you get a long revolution, a long memory, a long struggle within democratic time; in market time: quick, quick, quick, quick, quick. And the charismatic leadership is very much tied to market time. It’s fast, you see. You want to get the cameras to see those precious kids get mistreated in Birmingham, boom, flash. It’s all around the world, quick, quick, quick. Congress has to do something; the president has responded, telephone calls. And Martin knew that he had to live in some way between times, right on the thin edge between democratic and market time. But that slow, bottom-up, democratic organizing that Ella talked about has always been associated with some of the best social movements.
For example, Saul Alinsky, who in some ways we associate these days with the Industrial Areas Foundation of my dear brother Ernesto Cortés15—they have been at this form of organizing in democratic time for thirty years, and you end up with some elected officials and local groups,16 two elected city councilmen, and people say, “Damn, a whole generation and you got a union in place.” And of course, they have done amazing things in terms of raising consciousness, because it’s not just reflected in the electoral process. But from a market perspective, of course, you might say, “Eh, that’s all you come up with in twenty-five years? When we got all these babies who die, we got all these struggles going on, and that’s the best we can do?” And I think that’s the challenge, maybe limitation is too strong a word, but it’s a real challenge for the genius of Ella Baker.
CHB: And even more so today than in her time, because of the speed.
CW: Yes, hyper-capitalism, absolutely.
CHB: So the question is, how can change be brought about with the powers that be? Should we, like anarchists, work locally and change the system on the level of the local community and go on from there, and change it radically at a particular place and in a particular moment and thus make at least a small difference, rather than battling and struggling in market time and being shot dead or defeated? The question becomes the more urgent when we look at what we are fighting for and against right now and compare it to the past, when Ella Baker—just as you and many others still do in the present—talked about poverty and civil rights.
CW: But I wonder—here my own view becomes more manifest and pressing—when you look at it from the perspective of the powers that be, what do they find most threatening? That’s always a measure, you see. And they are threatened by any serious challenge to their oligarchic power, to their profit-driven economic system and their cultural forms of distraction that keep the masses pacified. And I think that in the long run, they are more threatened by Ella Baker’s mode of engagement; in the short run, they are more threatened by Martin King’s mode of engagement, because for the FBI and the CIA and other repressive apparatuses in the nation-state in which we live, that patience and that receptivity, you can keep track of that more easily, and you can infiltrate it quicker,17 whereas if the people who don’t have revolutionary consciousness but do have a love for one leader, they see that leader shot down and mistreated, they are more likely to rebel. Now, that’s not revolutionary action; that’s rebellion.18 And given the constraints of the system, in which electoral politics is so much dominated by big money and so forth, it’s the rebellions that have played a fundamental role in getting concessions from the powers that be, more so than the long-term organizing that’s quiet on the margins, hardly visible. When you have two hundred cities going up in flames, the powers that be have to concede something. They could go fascist and say, “No concessions at all,” or they can be moderate and say, “We have to give a little bit. We have to be open for the expansion of the middle class. We have to bring in a relatively privileged people from the working class: women, Black folk, brown folk, red folk, or whatever.” This middle class of color is a lumpenbourgeoisie beneath the wealthier white bourgeoisie.
But I do think that—this is the Chekhov in me, of course19—I think that the cycles of domination and the cycles of death and the cycles of dogmatism are so deeply entrenched in human history, that more than likely the best we can do is to break the cycle. And even what we call revolution, when you think you really have broken the cycle in, say, the Soviet Union, Cuba, or what have you, the same cycle comes right back in new clothing. The men are heroic against the white supremacist powers, but look what they’re doing to the women, and the straights are heroic, but look what they are doing to the gay brothers and lesbian sisters and bisexuals and transsexuals and so forth. Or the elderly seem to be heroic, but look how they are demeaning the youth—these different kinds of cycles. And, so, I am not suggesting that there are no breakthroughs or progress or betterment or amelioration, but Ella Baker is most relevant because she tells a fundamental truth about the need for democratic organizing. King becomes highly relevant in our time, less relevant than Ella in regard to democratic leadership. Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer stand above Martin Luther King in their democratic existentialism; their democratic leadership and horizontal organization stand above his messianic leadership and hierarchical organization. All three have a love supreme for the people that is so visible, that cannot be denied. King’s organizing fits well with market time and his murder generated massive outrage, and you end up with a real rupture in the cycle. It’s not a change in the system, but it’s a rupture in the cycle, and the powers that be have to make some concessions, you see. But deep democratic revolution requires the democratic existentialism of Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer.
CHB: Back to the kind of organizing Baker practiced. I think one could distinguish even within her work the very patient, slow-pace education of groups and what follows from that and what she herself, I think, saw as the need for a more radical pushing of groups. That’s why, to go back to that, she joined the youth and cofounded SNCC, because she hoped that, from that more radical group, less bourgeois, less concerned with respectability, and more radical in a broad sense, that something like a rupture might result, even out of a group. I think that was her hope. So she tries to do both, patient grassroots organizing and speeding up the process through work with radical groups, which I think is particularly difficult. And one would have to ask oneself how far she got, but do you see the possibility of radicalizing groups, too, so that they work like charismatic leaders?
CW: Yes. You see, in my own view, that kind of crucial radicalizing of the group toward a more revolutionary consciousness becomes one of the essential elements in the rebellion. That is to say, when the rupture takes place and the system must just stop and respond rather than just keep going on and trying to deny the suffering of the people who are revolting. Now, whether in the end that generates the kind of system change that she wanted and I want, I don’t know. But in my more Chekhovian thinking, I can see not so much a cycle but a spiralling, where these systems of domination and oligarchies reemerge and the hierarchies reemerge, the anti-democratic forms reemerge, and that revolutionary consciousness is this deep democratic consciousness suspicious of those hierarchies, suspicious of those oligarchies, and so on.
Here Clausewitz’s philosophy of war20 plays an important role for me—not in a moral sense but a crass political sense, in terms of just how cruel the struggle for power is and how gangster-like these thugs are who run things at the very, very top, who would kill anybody and do anything to reproduce their power. You see, you look at the number of times Martin went to jail, while Ella hardly ever went to jail—stark contrast! And when you talk about rupture, you’re talking about a threefold moment of, first, hitting the streets—and Ella is already in the streets—and, second, being willing to go to jail, and, third, being willing to be killed. If you don’t have those three elements, you don’t have a movement. That is to say, you have to have people who are willing to take that kind of risk, and you need the blood of those martyrs to help fertilize the movement, which is not to view those martyrs as instruments, because they are still human beings, but that’s the historical process. That’s how bloody it is. It is just a fact. It can’t be denied. When you juxtapose Ella Baker to Martin King, you see, one of the reasons why Martin’s death generated the rebellions it did was because all three of those moments were satisfied and in a way in which they were not satisfied for Ella. Now, that’s partly again a matter of both gender and theory. She called him the “Great One” and had her powerful critiques, but she never denied his deep love for the people, you see, just like she had that deep love for the people, as everybody who knew her, like Bernice Reagon, one of the great artists of the movement,21 would say over and over again. But that’s an interesting contrast when you think about it.
CHB: But I still wonder about certain aspects of that contrast. Now, Ella Baker could not have been the charismatic leader,22 so the group did not feel represented by her. No one could have that identifying moment one had with King. So when you say this is threefold—you go to the street, you go to jail, and you get killed—she would not have gotten killed; it was not very likely. But does that really mean that revolt can only happen with the model of the charismatic leader? If we look again at the Occupy movement today, people go to the street; they are willing to go to jail; they are even willing to die. But there is no charismatic figure, and yet you have these three moments, or would you still make a distinction as to their effectiveness?
CW: That’s an interesting question. You see, I think that when you satisfy all three of those moments in light of the Ella Baker model, I am not so sure that the death or deaths that take place could have the same galvanizing effect as the death of a highly charismatic, highly visible figure who touched the hearts, minds, and souls of people, you see. And because precious ordinary people are in a condition of catastrophe and wrestling with desperation, for them to break out of a mind-set that is deferential to the powers that be, it is only a love that they have for someone they identified with, who was out there speaking on their behalf, that has the power to move them to rebellion.
CHB: It’s very interesting, because both models work with the insight that it is not enough to understand a problem and then act politically; you need the emotional involvement. In the first model, we have the love toward a leader that you identify with and who acts for you. Now, Ella Baker would have said, “This is not my model, because it harms the potential activity of the group, of the masses, if they delegate. So I want the other model. What then is my means of arousing emotion? It is personal connections. People have to interconnect.” And, again, you can say, and rightly so, it is so slow; it takes time to bring this process to a point that it becomes efficient. But to her it was the emotional binding of people that she would say is needed, but it works differently and, again, slower, not in market time.
CW: Exactly. I think, in the end, we have to say that there should be no discussion of Martin Luther King Jr. without Ella Baker, which is to say they are complementary. These two figures, voices, tendencies in the Black freedom movement, and particularly in the human freedom movement in general, they say something to young people these days in the age of Obama. See, Obama ends up being the worst example of messianic leadership, captured by a vicious system that is oligarchic domestically and imperialistic globally and uses the resonances of this precious freedom struggle as a way of legitimating himself in the eyes of both the Black people and the mainstream Americans, and acting as if as community organizer he has some connection to Ella Baker, which is absurd and ludicrous in light of him running this oligarchic system and being so proud of heading the killing machine of US imperial powers. So that when young people—who now find themselves in an even more desperate situation given the present crisis—think about the legacy of Martin King and the legacy of Ella Baker in the age of Obama, it compounds the misunderstandings and misconstructions, and sabotages the intellectual clarity and political will necessary to create the kind of change we need. To use jazz metaphors, what we need would be the expression and articulation of different tempos and different vibrations and different actions and different witnesses, so it’s antiphonal; it’s call-and-response, and in the call-and-response, there are Ella Baker–like voices tied to various kinds of deep democratic witnesses that have to do with everyday people organizing themselves. And then you’ve got the Martin-like voices that are charismatic, which are very much tied to a certain kind of messianic leadership, which must be called into question, which must be democratized, which must be de-patriarchalized. And yet they are part of this jazz combo.23
CHB: But it means we need to turn our attention to Ella Baker, because historically she has had—and understandably so, given the strong effect of charismatic leaders—she has had much less attention in the historical reception of the movement.
CW: Yes. Absolutely. And again, one of the ironies—I never met Ella Baker, but I recall taking my class down to the film Fundi when I was at Union Theological Seminary thirty years ago.24 I was overwhelmed by it. Oh I was overwhelmed by it. It hit me so hard, because I just so much resonated with Ella. I could see Curtis Mayfield in her; I could see Bessie Smith in her; I could see the great gospel artist Shirley Caesar in her; I could see Aretha Franklin in her. And nothing moves me more than that level of artistic engagement with suffering and transfiguring it into vision and witness. I said to myself, “Ella Baker is one of the most charismatic figures I’ve seen on film, and yet she is fighting against charisma”; you know what I mean. So, what happens is, her critique of charisma goes hand in hand with an enactment of a kind of quiet, unassuming charisma, which swept me away.
Now, it could be that I am just tied to charisma in various forms, but I do think that you get ordinary people like Louis Armstrong; this brother is charismatic—and a genius—to the core. Now, with Ella Baker, you see it in the way she interacts. You look in her eyes and you get a sense of how she is reading people when she is silent that has its own kind of charisma, you know. Maybe it’s a charisma to be deployed in democratic time in the service of the self-organization of everyday people. Martin’s charisma is more usable in a market time, though it is just as genuine as Ella’s charisma. I think, in the end, Ella’s is probably closer to my own soul, but in terms of how you deal with this vicious system in which we find ourselves, you can see why Martin’s love, which is continuous with Ella’s love, becomes indispensable, and his death is nothing but an extension of his love. I mean, Martin’s death is nothing but the love-ethic at work, just as Ella’s long-distance struggles are extensions of a love-ethic at work, and both of them encountered that love-ethic in the Black family, initially in the Black church. And yet both, in the end, were scandalized by the Black church, which is to say they both end up on the margins of it, even as they are products of it. For brother Martin and sister Ella, it is a privilege to live and die for everyday people.
CHB: But for reasons that have nothing to do with their spirituality but rather with their outspoken political opinions in terms of how, for example, they use the word socialism.25
CW: That’s right. Explicitly, publicly.
CHB: Yes, and the demand for the change of the system—they resemble each other very much in what they demand, certainly the later King and, well, maybe even the early Baker,26 but certainly the later King.
CW: That’s very true. Now, the speech that she gave in defense of Puerto Rican independence in Madison Square Garden is something that the film Fundi and other scholars have made much of, and there she engages in explicit talk about colonialism, imperialism, some things that she had always talked about but that now were more publicly projected. And to be publicly associated with a Puerto Rican independence movement—of the great Pedro Albizu Campos and Lolita Lebrón—that was perceived to be an extension of the kind of terrorist attack on the US Congress.27 You know, for anybody, let alone a Black woman, to be associated with that kind of movement, which in the eyes of the public was nothing but crude terrorism, required a level of courage, which brings us back to that willingness to take a risk even in her own quiet—and in this case, not so quiet—way, because she was quite eloquent in her speech in front of thousands of people in Madison Square Garden. Absolutely. Absolutely.