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Interview

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Ella B a k e r

Born in Norfolk, Virginia, Ella Baker grew up zn a small town in North Carolina, the state in which/ she received all her formal education. After graduating from Shaw University in Raleigh, she came to New York City, arriving just in time for the 1929 Depression. For years, Ella Baker has been actively associated with such organizations as the NAACP, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Southern Conference Educational Fund, among many others. For nearly two years, she was the sole professional staff member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, setting up its Atlanta office. In SNCC: The New Abolitionists, Howard Zinn, professor of government at Boston University, describes Ella Baker as "'more responsible than any other single individual for the i birth of the New Abolitionists as an organized group, a n d . . , the most tire- ' less, the most modest, and the wisest activist I know in the struggle for human rights today.'" --Editor

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INTERVIEWER Mrs. Baker, how does one go about p r e p a r i n g adult citizens for effective participation in u r b a n affairs generally, and, in particular, how do you organize a c o m m u n i t y for better schools?

ELLA BAKER First, there is a prerequisite: the recognition on the part of the established powers that people have a right to participate in the decisions that affect their lives. A n d it doesn't m a t t e r whether those decisions have to do with schools or housing or some other aspect of their lives. T h e r e is a corollary to this prerequisite: the citizens themselves must be conscious of the fact that this is their right. T h e n comes the question, how do you reach people if they aren't already conscious of this right? And how do you break down resistance on the part of the powers that be toward citizens becoming participants in decision making? I d o n ' t have any cut pattern, except that I believe that people, when informed about the things they are concerned with, will find a way to react. Now, whether their reactions are the most desirable at a given stage depends, to a large extent, u p o n whether the people who are in the controlling seat are open enough to permit people to react according to the way they see the situation. I n organizing a community, you start with people where they are. For example, the b u r n i n g question after the 1954 Supreme Court school decision in an u r b a n center like New York, had to do with breaking down de facto segregation. You begin by organizing people a r o u n d that issue in terms of their level of understanding. T h e n you try to reach from one level of understanding to another. Sometimes you may have to use different strategies to focus on tile question. I think that focusing public attention on the question at h a n d is a very i m p o r t a n t aspect of organizing. I recall, in that period, going a r o u n d to different sections of the city, which for me was not unusual, as I ' d been in consumer education and cancer education, and civil rights activities. Many of the more affluent white 'liberals' with whom I talked were anxious to have what they called an "integrated school system," as long as it did not touch them. T h e sensitive point was that of housing. And the question of schooling remains closely related to that of housing. H o w can Harlem, for instance, ever achieve an integrated school system as long as it remains a segregated c o m m u n i t y in terms of housing?

INTERVIEWER We'll get back to housing a little later. First, you've had considerable experience working with both the u r b a n poor up N o r t h and the rural poor down South. Is there a basic difference in the problems they face, say, in the area of early education. A n d is there a basic difference in the solutions to these problems?

ELLA BAKER Well, my experience, of course, in working with the poor is primarily working with the black poor. I've 'had some relevant experience working with white poor, but it is not as pointed. Is there a basic difference between the problems of the p o o r - - r u r a l and urban? I would say no. I think that the crux of the problems peculiar to p o o r people is the fact that they are poor. These are the people who get the l e a s t - and who get the last consideration. I think this obtains, whether rural or urban. I n some instances, the black poor of the South were m u c h poorer in terms of creature comforts. I n the Mississippi delta a r e a - - e s p e c i a l l y during the period when the farms became mechanized and laborers were being thrown off of t h e m - t h e Negroes lived in shacks, without indoor toilet facilities, without electricity, sometimes without windowpanes. Even the worst of the northern slum areas did not have these housing conditions as a general characteristic, though the people were still p o o r and still given last c o n s i d e r a t i o n - in the matter of school buildings, for instance. Getting back to the conditions in the South, the rural school buildings were just as uncomfortable as the shacks. It was not until the NAACP's consistent legal effort to improve school situations in terms of accommodations, teacher's salaries, bus transportation, etc., that the picture began to change materially. One difference between poor blacks, u r b a n and rural: in the South, the teachers and the students generally came from the same community. They, therefore, had an o p p o r t u n i t y to associate beyond the school hours. I regard this as a positive factor. T h e r e was less of that tendency, so prevalent in the North, for an elite to set itself apart. But this, too, is changing. In recent years, I have noticed that in the rural areas of the South, the well-paid teachers move out of the community. T h e black poor in u r b a n areas were not only the last to be considered, they were also without the benefit of having black teachers to identify with on any significant scale. T h e teachers who entered the community frequently came with a good supply of the attitudes that prevailed in society as a whole regarding the potential of black children. T h e y did not come with very much identification with the children or any considerable expectation of what they could do. And, of course, came three o'clock, these teachers hurriedly left the community. I used to attend a n u m b e r of P T A meetings in H a r l e m in connection with various comm u n i t y interests I had. T h e r e weren't m a n y white teachers who remained after school for those meetings. A n d those who did usually assumed too m u c h of a supervisory role, rather than acting as equal participants in discussing a situation that needed to be taken care of. I believe it's i m p o r t a n t for children (especially poor children, who are the last to receive consideration) to feel a sort of a c o m m u n i o n and friendship with their teachers. I know it was i m p o r t a n t for my childhood. As I think back to my public school teachers in the South, they seem to have had a conviction that their m a j o r role was to help provide an extra a m o u n t of support for a child in his growing years. Since then, the whole culture has changed. As its orientation increasingly became one of the individual getting as m u c h as he can as quickly as he can, the supportive attitude diminished in the rural area.

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INTERVIEWER Mrs. Baker, how do you regard primary and secondary schools that are r u n by the community, rather than by some centralized bureaucracy?

ELLA BAKER I would say that their major role is to wipe out some of the sense of alienation so deep in the black community, in terms of the community's relevance to the school system and the benefit its children receive from the school system. It ought to be mentioned, incidentally, that many parents were aware of these conditions long before the recent establishment of experimental districts in New York City. Soon after the Supreme Court's decision on segregation, the New York City Board of Education established a Commission on School Integration. I was one of the few lay members of that Commission. In December of 1954, the New York City Board of Education issued a statement, which said in part: "It is imperative that members of this Commission approach their responsibility with the understanding that racially public schools are educationally undesirable. It is now clearly the reiterated policy of the Board of Education of the City of New York to devise and p u t into operation a plan which will prevent the further development of such schools and would integrate the existing ones as quickly as possible." T h e reason I quote this is that three years later we community parents presented a statement to the Board of Education, pointing out that, as of September 30, 1957, Negro and Puerto Rican parents, in the absence of concrete evidence to the contrary, had grounds for wondering whether actual integration kept pace with the rosy picture of progress reported at the time in the local press. So there we were, questioning more than a dozen years ago.

INTERVIEWER And what do you feel has taken place since that time?

ELLA B A K E R T o me the most salutary development in New York City is that the parents themselves have become much more vocal; there are now more people who are getting involved in questioning the whole pattern of education. In the early '50s the protesters were mostly women; I am gratified to see the subsequent evolution of male leadership. But aside from this renewed parental interest, I don't feel that much progress has been made since 1957. Basically, we're asking the same questions now that we were then. For instance, why are teachers not assigned on the basis of need, in the same m a n n e r that policemen and other civil servants are supposed to be assigned. We asked this question because the teachers who predominated in the black community were the new, less experi-

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enced teachers. And, of course, teachers had the right of getting themselves transferred out. This wasn't too difficult for them because of the ethnic ties in so many instances between the teachers and the principals. Another key question is why, when a slum child enters the first grade, the difference between his capacity (as measured by the usual tests) and that of a non-ghetto child is less than it will be later on, when the slum child reaches grade five or six. T h e community-based school, if it does nothing else, at least makes visible in some measure the right of people to participate in the decisionmaking processes; it gives people an opportunity to feel that they have this right. I'm not an educator and, therefore, not in a position to verify whether or not it is the most salutary educational step forward. But when I look at some of the other steps that have been taken, wh.ich were supposed to produce educational results, I'm willing to give a try to community-based teaching and learning centers.

INTERVIEWER Mrs. Baker, do you discern any improvement or lack of improvement in the ability of poor black children to read or write or do arithmetic today as compared with when you first became interested in the problems?

ELLA B A K E R Frankly, I've never lacked confidence in the native abilities of children - w h a t e v e r their c o l o r - to read, write, do arithmetic, under a given set of circumstances. We hear a great deal -- and no doubt there is some validity to i t - about the fact that a child's motivations have to come from the home, that a child who has not had the opportunity of people reading to him at home and of having discussions with parents does not bring to school the same readiness with which to respond to the teaching of reading, writing, arithmetic, etc. T h e question of why J o h n n y can't read, does not apply only to black, impoverished ghetto children; it applies also to children in more affluent communities. My own feeling is that the problem is related to the teaching methods. In earlier travel through the South, I noticed on numerous occasions that many teachers who attended some highly esteemed teachers colleges came back with the theories of that particular period, b u t with little notion of how, exactly, such theories might be applied. I think this may also have obtained in the public schools in general: teachers become a little too involved with the theories propounded in the teachers colleges; they feel the need to use them even where they are not particularly applicable. And one result is that J o h n n y can't read as well as he might. I believe it has been recognized that faulty reading theories are responsible for a large n u m b e r of reading failures over the past years. T h e r e is another factor that I consider favorable. W h e t h e r you like it or not, children are exposed to much more information via television

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than ever before. Even those who may not be able to read the textbooks become familiar with scientific and other concepts and a range of vocabulary.

INTERVIEWER Mrs. Baker, what is the bearing of health, housing, and welfare on teaching and learning in the city schools?

ELLA BAKER If people live in unhealthy environments, this is bound to have an effect on their capacities for learning or for concentration. A tragic example of this is the n u m b e r of children who, for various reasons, go to school without breakfast. T h a t in itself reduces their capacity to respond and be alert. Of course, the health factor is a lot more than just a matter of going to school without breakfast. In crowded areas, all types of diseases are prevalent, especially the bronchial diseases, which range all the way from multiple colds to tuberculosis. So I would call health a highly important factor in any learning situation. For any people to advance, they must be able to live in a somewhat healthy environment. T h e basic effect of housing, so far as the Negro is concerned, has been to maintain a segregated society, with all the social ills that go with desegregation. In addition to the prevalence of this de facto segregation, the public housing developments have seldom lived up to the promises they held out for the poor. It's not easy for these people to feel that they can depend upon government for the relief that they've been promised. T h e welfare system has an affect on the teaching situation to the extent that it involves the whole question of how we regard people in our society. Welfare recipients are often categorized as being something different from other people. T h e y are charged with being indolent, not willing to work. Statements are made to the effect that welfare mothers spend their money on things such as beer and liquor. And this tends to put a stigma upon the child. Directly or indirectly, welfare can generate a backlog of self-depreciation out of which can grow a great deal of deepseated resentment towards the young person's environment. I think this has been a major factor in the 'disturbances' of recent years. Many people feel that they will never be recognized as h u m a n beings. A poor child, who is also black, senses in our society an inherent attitude of disrespect for poor black people, an attitude that regards them as being so different that they are incapable of being considered equals. T h e contradiction of having children salute the flag and learn the prevailing slogans of e q u a l i t y - that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, that all Americans have equal opport u n i t y - and then have these children confront the realities of their lives is bound to produce an indigenous bitterness that grows and grows as their awareness of the society becomes more acute. Is it any wonder that we come across what they call the disruptive

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child? Teachers usually react to him on the basis of what they consider his disturbance of the classroom; they often dismiss him from school without any provisions for the child's being cared for. W h a t happens if his mother is working, if 'he has no home to go to after he's been dismissed, or if there is no social agency that is promptly going to take up his problem? - the problem of emotional maladjustment. I believe that all these factors have telling effects on the learning capacities of young people.

INTERVIEWER I understand, Mrs. Baker, that you are currently meeting with dissident high school pupils. W h a t can you tell us about these encounters?

ELLA BAKER One group of youngsters which I worked with last summer was composed, for the most part, of 'high school dropouts. T h e y had a deep feeling for people. Strange as it may seem, five of them just banded together and named themselves the " W e Care" group. These H a r l e m youngsters taxed themselves two dollars a week to raise funds for the purpose of taking smaller children (from about age five to twelve) on cookouts, exhibits, and the like. T h e y were also interested in offering older children a black studies program encompassing social history and dealing with some of the problems youngsters face in terms of their sex interests and unwed motherhood and some of the services available to them for jobs and for improved social relationships. My help was largely at the point when these young people felt they needed somebody they could talk things out with and help them battle through some of the bureaucratic resistance to funding a group with no established history in the community. T h e y took 60 or so people, including their mothers, to Washington where they talked with some established poverty groups and visited various parts of the capital. Most of the youngsters had never been there before; in fact, few had ever been out of New York. T h e fact is, I haven't had much opportunity to make myself available to dissident high school students. I do have some opportunity to communicate with people who are working with youngsters who are not only dropouts but are also very annoyed, to say the least, with the society of which they are a part. One of the major concerns is trying to provide some funds for people who are interested in finding new ways of fulfilling their lives.

INTERVIEWER A m o m e n t ago, you mentioned an aspect of sex education. T h e r e is, as you know, a tremendous controversy over the whole question of institutionalizing sex education in the school curriculum. Do you feel that there

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is a basic sex education curriculum that is equally applicable to ghetto poor and affluent middle class, or is it unrealistic to think that educators can come up with a kind of universal curriculum on the topic?

ELLA B A K E R T h e r e is a danger of thinking that you can develop a universal answer to any social question. However, I don't think that you can draw a hard and fast line between the ignorance regarding sex on the part of the young poor and the young affluent. Some of my social worker friends who have been working in the area say they frequently find that affluent youngsters possess less information about themselves and their bodies than some of the poorer ones living in closer quarters, who have had occasion to learn more, although that learning is not always to their advantage. However, when it comes to the question of what the body is, and what the sex functions are, and the extent to which sex is but a part of the whole love cycle, rather than the whole story, I don't think you find too much difference between the affluent young and the poor. My first concern about sex education is directed less at the curriculum than at the teachers, the people who are going to teach t~he young. My experience has been that too many adults are at a disadvantage when the question of sex comes up. T h e y particularly shy away from it if they have to talk to a young person. Also, many adults come out of a background where they have never learned that sex and love are integral parts of a larger relationship. So in my view, the first step should be in the direction of selecting and training adults to deal with the subject. Our efforts must also be directed toward parents, since they, too, tend to shy away from it. Let me say that I think there is a need for sex education as such. Young people certainly ought to know something about h u m a n anatomy. T h e y shouldn't just have to grow up and experiment in order to find out that pregnancy results from intercourse. Aside from anatomy and biology, the subject has to be approached from the emotional standpoint, relieving people of fears and of the bugaboo that so often obtains in respect to sex: as constituting something that should not be, rather than accepting the fact that it is and that it should be developed so as to be part of the enrichment of people's lives.

INTERVIEWER Mrs. Baker, as you go into different communities in different sections of the country, N o r t h and South, do you find hope for a better life among the poor? Is there greater optimism or pessimism in one part of the country than the other?

ELLA BAKER W h a t I find in general is that people have an increased sense of their own worth and their right to be considered as people. This is the basis of whatever hope I have, whatever sense of comfort I can find.

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I think you have always had hope for a better life. T h e question is, do people realistically expect to have a better life. I don't think they do expect to achieve a better life as much as they once did. T h e y have a growing awareness of the contrast between the lives of affluent Americans and their own. T h e y are concerned that the majority, those with the greatest power to affect society, fear and oppose changes that will benefit the poor. T h e y see that those just above them on the economic ladder regard such changes as a threat to their own gains. It is not uncommon (and it shouldn't be unexpected) for any poor who have been oppressed over a long period to realize and resent the length of time it has taken to move a short distance from one level to another. T h i n k of the promises held out to black Americans since the Emancipation Proclamation, and then think of the repressions and obstacles and the n u m b e r of lives lost trying to make those promises a reality. I believe that larger segments of blacks in the urban North are more realistic, and more inflamed, about the difference between hope and expectation than blacks in the South. T h e rigid and repressive response of white southerners to any demand for change has conditioned many blacks to accept with greater enthusiasm and hope whatever social gains they make. However, thanks to mass actions of recent years, which were generated to a large extent by the student movement between 1960 and 1965, this tendency toward easy acceptance is definitely changing. While the voices of the northern ghettos may be more strident, the black South is increasingly more critical and unwilling to settle for tokenism. Voices are being heard, N o r t h and South, emphasizing that only basic changes in the social structure of the country will be adequate to the needs of the poor, both black and white. Questions are being raised about our country, growing out of the very visible fact that, in the midst of such great wealth, millions are impoverished. Such questions must be answered in tangible and realistic terms, and not in the rhetoric of the past; for people are coming to realize that, in the final analysis, they are the source of the nation's real worth and power.