NINE
THE SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE
IN DECEMBER 1956, Bayard Rustin introduced Martin Luther King Jr. to two friends, both white, who would play important roles in King’s future and the future of the movement that was slowly growing beyond King himself. One was Harris Wofford, the first white twentieth-century graduate of the Howard University Law School, who had written a book on Gandhian nonviolence. The other was Stanley D. Levison, a forty-four-year-old New York lawyer active in a group called In Friendship, formed in 1956 to raise money for Southern activists; its other members included a Black woman named Ella Baker.
Rustin and Levison told King they had discussed with Baker an idea Rustin had for using the momentum generated by the Montgomery bus boycott’s success to create other movements throughout the South. The numbers who had attended the Institute on Nonviolence in Montgomery proved there was wide interest, and now was the time to strike. Rustin and Levison had drafted a memorandum on the establishment of a “Southern Leadership Conference on Transportation.” King agreed and promised to issue a call for the meeting, set for early January 1957 in Atlanta at King’s father’s church, Ebenezer Baptist.
Rustin, ever the organizer, drafted seven position papers. He later wrote, “In practical terms . . . the movement needed a sustaining mechanism that could translate what we had learned during the bus boycott into a broad strategy for protest in the South.”1 King, Rustin, Reverend K. C. Steele, Reverend T. J. Jemison, and Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth issued a call for the “Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Integration.”
In his working papers circulated to the participants, Rustin argued: (1) The church is the base for a protest movement; (2) nonviolent action will be necessary; (3) an organized mass force must supplement the legal approach of the NAACP; and (4) Black clergymen and the masses must make up the movement.2
That the church would be expected to continue to play such an important role is not surprising. “The black church,” Cornel West reminds us, “is the major institution created, sustained, and controlled by black people themselves; that is, it is the most visible and salient cultural product of black people in the United States.”3 The Black church represented both a separation imposed by whites and a refuge preferred by Blacks, both an accommodation to white prejudice and an assertion of Black independence and self-respect.
Despite denominational differences and differences in social class, Black churches shared many commonalities. They shared the role of attending to their congregations’ spiritual needs. They sang the same songs, and all believed in contributing to church-endorsed causes. Their ministers were independent agents, free from dependence on the white world for sustenance, able to take leadership without the restraints imposed on most Blacks. And their ministers not only had weekly access to a built-in constituency but also had access to city, state, and nationwide networks; locally they shared membership in citywide denominational or interdenominational alliances.
The leadership elected at a second meeting of the group in New Orleans in February reflected the extent to which ministers would dominate the new organization and demonstrated how a newer generation of leadership was seizing control. King was chosen president; all of the executive officers were men, and all but two were clergymen. Reverend Kelly Miller Smith of Nashville was elected chaplain. All were Southerners educated at Southern Black colleges, and all but two were under forty. All had histories of past NAACP activism, demonstrating how important the NAACP was as an incubator for the more activist movement of the late 1950s. In New Orleans, a name was chosen; the group became the Southern Leadership Conference and later the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Rustin and Levison prepared drafts of speeches for King’s “Give us the ballot” speech at the May 17 March on Washington, and Rustin prepped King for a meeting with Vice President Nixon on June 13. At the Nixon meeting, the vice president reported later, King and Abernathy said they had voted Republican in 1956.
Both Rustin and Levison would continue as speechwriters, critics, and editors of King’s books; theorists; and confidants for years; Levison even prepared King’s tax returns. Eventually, as Rustin’s politics grew more conservative, he and King would drift apart, but Levison remained King’s closest white friend until King died.
The new SCLC met for a third time in early August in Montgomery; a plan, prepared by Rustin, King, and Levison, for a “Crusade for Citizenship” was presented and adopted. This meeting heightened the tension already existing between King and the NAACP, tension that had begun in the early days of the boycott when the MIA adopted a “separate but equal” demand for bus seating; now King was planning to do what the NAACP did. Additionally, dynamic NAACP presidents in Atlanta, Tallahassee, and Nashville had become presidents of SCLC affiliates. Despite King’s appearance at two NAACP conventions, Roy Wilkins remained wary of him and saw the new organization as a threat to the NAACP’s emphasis on legal strategies—and a threat to the NAACP itself.
The SCLC met for a fourth time in early November in Memphis, and King announced plans to begin the Crusade for Citizenship, a South-wide voter registration drive, on January 20, 1958. With no director or other staff hired for the Crusade, no office secured, and with little money raised, King postponed the opening rallies until February 12, the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. In early January 1958, Rustin and Levison proposed that King hire the executive director of In Friendship, Ella Baker, to direct the Crusade; they would raise her salary so she would not cost the SCLC. She arrived in Atlanta, set up her headquarters in the Savoy Hotel on Auburn Avenue, and, as acting director, began work.4
ELLA JO BAKER
Ella Jo Baker was born on December 13, 1903. Her mother, Georgina Ross, was one of twelve or thirteen children born to parents themselves born in slavery. Her family moved to Littleton, North Carolina, in 1910. Her mother taught the children to read before they entered school. Ella attended Shaw University’s high school in Raleigh in 1918, taking courses in English, Latin, French, math, science, history, home economics, and the Bible. She graduated as class valedictorian and in September 1923 entered Shaw as a college student.
While at Shaw she worked two jobs—waiting tables and supervising a chemistry laboratory. She began a lifetime of protest at Shaw too. Women students were not allowed to wear silk stockings to class; Baker couldn’t afford them but thought those who could do so should have the right to wear them and spoke out. When she heard that Ella Jo Baker was questioning the school dress code, the dean of women fainted. And when the president of the university asked students if they would entertain visiting white Northerners by singing spirituals, Baker refused. In 1927, she graduated as valedictorian again, with enough credits to receive both a bachelor of arts and a bachelor of science degree.
She moved to New York in the summer of 1927 and took a job waiting tables at a New York University dormitory. Her free time was spent in the public library, listening to street corner speakers in Washington Square Park and attending plays and discussion forums at the Harlem YMCA at 135th Street. The Depression devastated Harlem, beginning in 1929; the misery she saw and the intellectual ferment she saw around her created a new understanding in Baker of social problems. She served on the editorial staff of the American West Indian News from 1929 to 1930 and in 1930 became office manager for the Negro National News. She went undercover to expose New York’s “slave markets” where black women stood on street corners, waiting for jobs as maids. She wrote for several Black publications including The Crisis, the New York News, the Amsterdam News, and the Pittsburgh Courier.
In December 1930, she and other young Blacks organized the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League. The league believed in democratic control; voting was based on one person, one vote, rather than a vote for each share you owned. In the co-op movement, Baker learned organizing techniques—taking all classes into an organization and using democracy as an organizing and managerial principle.
In the ‘30s, Baker worked at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, the center of Harlem’s intellectual life, and as a consumer education teacher for the Committee on Negro Welfare for the Welfare Council of New York, sponsored by the Works Progress Administration. In October 1936 she became assistant director for the Consumer Education Division of the WPA.
In 1941, she joined the staff of the NAACP as field secretary. The organization was then in the middle of internal strife—both personal and political—between executive director Walter White and The Crisis editor W. E. B. Du Bois. Baker took her first trip South for the NAACP in 1941, staying in members’ homes rather than hotels. For the next three years she traveled six months out of every year, organizing NAACP chapters; in 1942, she attended 146 meetings and traveled 9,294 miles. In 1943, she was appointed director of branches and continued her whirlwind travel, beginning leadership training conferences the NAACP still employs today. By 1946, however, she resigned, frustrated at her inability to operate in the NAACP’s hierarchical structure so dominated by Walter White.5 She still served the NAACP as president of the New York branch, the first woman to hold that position, and also worked for the Young Women’s Christian Association and the American Cancer Society.
In January 1958, Baker moved to Atlanta to assume her position as the first acting executive director of SCLC. With less than two months to pull together voter registration rallies across the South, Baker used her NAACP contacts as well as those furnished by SCLC. She put together a list of twenty-one cites where rallies would occur, gathered state registration laws, and produced and distributed literature. Again, there was tension with the NAACP. NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, who had been ordered by Roy Wilkins to end his association with SCLC, reported to the NAACP’s New York office that he had stopped plans for an SCLC rally in Jackson. This example of petty backbiting characterized too much of the NAACP’s attitude toward newer civil rights groups. The NAACP’s imperious attitude would do much to dislodge it from its position as the premier civil rights organization in the years ahead.
Only a dozen of the rallies actually occurred, few new voters were added to the rolls, and Baker went back to New York on February 16. She returned to Atlanta March 20. Knowing King had preferred a preacher for the job and had objected to hiring a woman, Baker sought out an old friend, Reverend John Tilley of Baltimore; on April 30, the SCLC board made Tilley executive director and Baker associate director. Fifteen months after it began, the SCLC finally had a staff.
ON JUNE 23, 1958, King, Randolph, Wilkins, and Lester Granger of the National Urban League met at the White House with Eisenhower and Attorney General William Rogers. This was the president’s first meeting with Black leaders; he had been in office for five years. They asked the president to vocally support the 1954 Brown decision, to call a White House meeting to promote peaceful desegregation, to support stronger federal antidiscrimination laws, to recommend the extension of the Civil Rights Commission, and to order the Justice Department to become more active in fighting voting discrimination. Nothing resulted from this meeting. Randolph gathered the group to sponsor an October “Youth March for Integrated Schools” in Washington, DC, but after a deranged woman stabbed King in New York on September 17, he had to cancel his appearance there.
In the meantime, Tilley and Baker alone could do little toward making the SCLC into a viable organization. In April 1959, Tilley was dismissed as executive director, partly because the SCLC board was impatient with the organization’s inaction and lack of focus. Baker stayed on as interim director.
A second Youth March on Washington, organized by Bayard Rustin, occurred in April. King, Wilkins, and Kenyan labor leader Tom Mboya, then visiting the United States, were the featured speakers; 26,000 gathered at the Washington Monument. Mboya also spoke at an SCLC-sponsored “African Freedom Dinner” in Atlanta. “I am absolutely convinced,” King said there, “that there is no basic difference between colonialism and segregation. They are both based on contempt for life, and a tragic doctrine of white supremacy. So, our struggles are not only similar; they are in a real sense one.”6
By the fall, it was clear that, after two and half years, SCLC had little program beyond the personality and pronouncements of its leader, Dr. King. Baker had begun to explore SCLC’s adoption of citizenship training to overcome the illiteracy that kept many Southern Blacks from registering. She visited Highlander Folk School to see such a program in operation.
If King could devote more time to the organization, it might succeed. He decided to resign his pulpit at Dexter Avenue in Montgomery and return to Atlanta where he would become co-pastor of his father’s church. He was coming home, but no one in Atlanta’s Black leadership—beside his father—greeted him with open arms. Whites felt the same way. Governor Ernest Vandiver said: “He is not welcome to Georgia. Until now, we have had good relations between the races.”7 Since SCLC’s founding in 1957, King had been unable to get the largely clerical board to do more than come to meetings, where much of the discussion consisted of praise for King. Baker was frustrated by her inability to get King’s attention or resources to carry out any program.
That same year, students at South Carolina State College conducted a boycott of classes, and, in 1958, students in Nashville had begun training in nonviolence under the direction of a Vanderbilt University divinity student, James Lawson. These events, the two youth marches, and a 1959 Prayer Pilgrimage had been the major civil rights activity since SCLC’s founding. None could be traced directly to SCLC, but each involved something more than boycotts or marches—for the first time, large numbers of young Black people were becoming involved. Civil rights activity was no longer something only older people could do.