[Recording-A Starts]
Jean Wiley: I started out as an activist when a student, actually my freshman year at Morgan State College in Baltimore, which is now Morgan State University. Morgan is a historically Black college, and as some of you know who studied the movement or who have seen the film on the movement, the best one of all, Eyes on the Prize, you may know that the student sit-in movement was begun by Black students at Black colleges who were then joined quickly by white students. Especially in the North, who were supporting what we were trying to do, which was open up the South, by then going to the headquarters of the various places that were keeping out Black people.
You may know that February 1st, 1960 began in North Carolina with the sit-ins and then spread across the South very rapidly. So by the time that you read about Ella Baker, there have been thousands and thousands of students arrested already. And some of them still in jail at the time that you are picking up what you've read on Ella Baker.
A couple of things. I interviewed Ms. Baker, an extensive interview filmed. And the film was lost or damaged or something. It was around 1981, so it's a long time. She was back in her apartment in Harlem that she kept, I guess, throughout the years that she was working in the South. And it was a tremendous experience for me. It was the first time I had ever shared any time with her alone outside of a SNCC meeting or a conference or those other kinds of gatherings. It was a deep pleasure, and we both, I think, had a good time, at least she said she did.
I've read the piece that you were asked to read on Ella Baker. And I thought that I would talk about those particular principles that you've read about in terms of how they affected me, my life.
And so I want to start with direct action. Even though I think that's the third one in the essay you've got, but it's where I began. I didn't start out as an activist. I'm not sure the term was used much then. If it was, I hadn't heard it. I just knew that things had to change a great deal. That segregation as it was institutionalized and practiced, it just had to go. It was affecting my life and the lives of everybody I knew and cared about.
I did grow up in Baltimore. I'm born in Washington, but grew up primarily in Baltimore. And as some of you may know, Baltimore is North of Washington D.C. So what I say about Baltimore and its whole system of legal segregation is also true of Washington, except that Baltimore's was much deeper, even though it was north of there. So the nation's capital was also segregated, is what I'm saying.
And I want to stress because it's where you're picking up Ella Baker, that segregation was legal. It was by law. It wasn't just a weird kind of practice that southern whites happened to have. Some people think it was, some people think it was like prejudice. It wasn't like prejudice. And to combat segregation, you knew that you were going to go to jail because you were breaking the law by being at the lunch counter or by being and trying to get into a theater, or by being at the public library main branch, or by being at the concert hall, the swimming pools, I mean you name it.
So it was across the board. It wasn't just schools and it wasn't just lunch counter. And to attack it, students quickly found that we were going to be forced to tackle everything at every single moment. That is you opened up — You finally got the city or the town you lived in to open up, say, a lunch counter. But it was only, say, the Woolworth lunch counter. The Kresge's lunch counter was still closed to you. The swimming pools were still closed to you. So it's one by one by one by one that you were forced to confront this. Few cities made a blanket statement and said, "Okay, enough, we're going to get rid of these segregation laws and open up everything to everybody."
There's a case, for example, a case I'm going to mention that you haven't read, and that's one of the reasons I mentioned it, Jacksonville [FL]. Where the sit-ins went on and on and on and on because they were forced to confront with their bodies every aspect of public life. And part of that public life was of course the arts, museums are closed as well. Now, the Black community had their own arts, and we had our own theaters and our own music. But to be confronted with that constant oppression of not being able to go anywhere you wanted to go, to use the streets that you wanted to use was to a young person, particularly galling.
Setting the tone again and following along Ella Baker's path, we've just shortly before the sit-in strike and spread so rapidly, we've just come out of two things, three things that are really important to the young Jean. This Jean is still in her teens.
One is the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which took Ella Baker back to the South to help form the new organization that grew out of the [Montgomery Bus Boycott 1955-1956] — SCLC, Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Which of course you may know Martin Luther King headed as the young minister and which grew to cover most of the South out of Montgomery.
So we've gone through a whole year of watching the Black community in Montgomery, Alabama, seed of the Confederacy. We want to come back to the Confederacy, by the way, because as you may know, this is the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the Confederacy. And you're going to be hearing a lot about that on the news and on TV. But Montgomery was the seat. And so we've just spent a year seeing people in Montgomery walking instead of taking the buses because of another name you may recall, Rosa Parks, you recall, refused to give up her seat. She wasn't the only one, but she's the one you'll know.
And thus began massive protests in Alabama where people stopped riding the buses until the buses desegregated. And that took a whole year. And caused a tremendous hardship on folks but they were successful. And eventually, I think wonderfully, the bus company went out of business. And I mean, they'd been recalcitrant, they weren't going to budge, and they went out of business a few months after the city opened the buses.
[The privately-owned, for-profit, bus company eventually went out of business. The bus routes were taken over by the city as public transportion which is now known as Montgomery Transit System or "M Transit."]
The other thing that I'm coming out of, again if you can remember, forget the gray hair now. If you can remember the young Jean, I'm coming out of watching the photographs of the mutilated body of Emmett Till [1955], who was lynched and who was my age when he was lynched for — you recall — speaking or flirting with a white woman in Mississippi. I've forgotten which town. That had a tremendous impact on me and my generation. Almost everybody mentions that incident in my generation.
And the third thing that comes up for me is Little Rock [school desegregation in 1957]. It's the screaming white mobs when Black school children try to integrate the schools in Little Rock. And again, youngsters my age are having to go through those angry mobs that are spitting on them and yelling at them and throwing things at them. And it's almost like it's me.
In fact, it is me because I'm a child and therefore I'm impressionable. It's coming out of these three main events, and they are the three main ones for me. That suddenly we hit upon a tactic that the kind of thing that we've been talking about for months, how are we going to attack this system? How are we going to confront this system called segregation? Or then in the South, it was known as "Jim Crow." I had somebody ask me once, "Who was Jim Crow?" It wasn't a person, it was a system. And that system was segregation.
So Ella Baker believed very firmly, as some of you read, in direct action. Now, for me, that meant, and we used to say it all the time, putting your body where your mouth is. That's what that meant for me. And it still resonates with me that you say you don't like things, you say things have to change, you say, okay, now the next step is confrontation, putting your body where your mouth is. But also doing so nonviolently. Doing so nonviolently.
And the brilliance of the student sit-ins was that you could do it at any time as long as you kept up the pressure. You could sit-in with your books trying to study your biology test. You could sit-in with your friends. You could plan when you were going to sit-in and when you were not. And you could tell other people, we'll be here at this time. Somebody else will have to replace this at another time.
But the idea was to keep up the pressure. And I still like that phrase, putting your body where your mouth is. But confronting what you're saying is wrong, what you're saying is unjust, what you're saying has to be changed. And it's direct confrontation.
I have a son who's a little older than you guys, and by the way, my piece in [Hands on the Freedom Plow] is written to my son. He still gets confused when he sees the film footage of some of the sit-ins where people are being spat upon, Black students, mostly Black are being spat upon, or water is being tossed at them. And he says, "Why don't they do something?" And the thing is, he's not only saying, why don't they do something like smack the person who's attacking them. He's also saying, why don't they do something like defend themselves? Like cover their heads or protect their face when the hot water is coming along.
And I know it looks strange today. But it was the most assertive thing. That's the thing that you have to understand about nonviolence. It's you're asserting your will, you're asserting your vision, you're asserting who you are by standing up. It's not cowardice in those circumstances. It's doing what you can do at the moment to change something. And you're doing it with your body as well as your mouth, and as well as your thoughts, and as well as beyond your friends and your immediate family and community.
So the other thing about those sit-ins and direct action is that for the first time they shadow — Well, the first time for me and my generation at least. They shadow a couple of other things that Ella talks about and by the way, I did not know Ella Baker when I was a high school student. I would not meet her until several years later — High school or college student until several years later. But one of the immediate benefits of this direct action that she was so committed to was that it involved everybody who would put themselves on the line.
And everybody, guess what, meant women and girls. And everybody meant young people. So that issue that she used to have about leadership — Who read the section on leadership? What Ella thinks about leadership. Yeah, it's that anybody can become a leader. The leader is not the person who's the most credential anymore. It's not the person who has the position anymore. It's not the minister anymore. It's not the politicians, it's not the university professors. Lo and behold, it's not only young people now, but those young people are women as well.
Which then means that — Remember, we're coming out of the fifties, and I'm not going to bore you with my thing about the fifties. But that was unheard of, that you were supposed to follow the rules, and the rules said you were supposed to follow the leader. And the leader was never a woman, by the way. Not in the churches, not in the universities, not in the colleges, never. So it opened up a broad avenue that was unthinkable just a few months previous to that. When women had always been in the background. And even those in the background were adults, they weren't young people.
With then the young people being the foot soldiers of the modern Civil Rights movement because that's what it rapidly became. And as you know, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, those of us in it were the shock troops. And worked in a lot of the worst counties in Mississippi and Alabama and Southwest Georgia. By worse, I'm talking about worse in terms of terror. And I do mean terror here. You've heard about the beatings and the bombings and the burnings of the churches. You've heard about the mass arrests. You've heard about the intimidation. It's time to kind of call it what it was. It was terror against a whole people and a whole community.
So imagine for me then this power, this newfound power that I hadn't even known to ask for. I hadn't even known to maybe want. And suddenly I'm in the thick of it and my opinions are counted as are other women's, as well as other men's. It's a whole universe that's opened in a few short months. And that decade moves further and further on. And as you know, young people would then move through the civil rights movement to the anti-war movement. Anti-war meaning the war against the Vietnamese people, which you know about. I don't call that the Vietnam War. I call it what it was, the war against the Vietnamese people. And onto other things that were very wrong with this society.
What I'm saying is that with people like Ella, who always was operated in the background, I asked her in my interview, how would she call her — How would she define the role she played in the movement, in the freedom struggle? She said she was a facilitator. And I was startled, and I was speechless. And I thought, and then I asked her, "Well, is that humility speaking for you?" Because in my head, she was a giant. By the way, she was a tiny woman, very petite, as petite as the most petite woman in this room. Had a powerful voice in that very petite body, and she remained petite.
She replied that she thought being a facilitator for the freedom struggle was indeed an honorable role to play. She had done her best.
But she was our mentor. I remember that she would sit in rooms [during SNCC meetings]. Here's her participatory democracy coming in. She would sit in a room full of young people, many of them smoking. Because smoking then was a big thing, and nobody had thought that it was a killer. Sometimes she'd have on a mask. It didn't occur to me that that mask was a mask to protect her from the smoking. I don't think it occurred to anybody, but she never asked anybody to stop smoking or put it out. Now, she could have asked us to do anything. She was one of the few "adults" that could have asked anything, and we would've tried to comply.
I remember [SNCC] meetings going on for hours and hours and hours thinking, "I wonder what she thinks of us." Because there'd be this constant flow, sometimes a little antagonistic, certainly a little heated of people throwing out their ideas of what we should do, where the monitoring ought to be, where the direct action ought to be. And she'd sit there and listen. Seldom saying anything, until we reached a point where it was clear that we might need some help. And then it would be a gentle, often a question, never a directive — that was not her style.
Participatory democracy meant people talked through the problem, came out with a solution, and then moved forward. And I think I know that SNCC captured that, that as heated as things got, everybody in SNCC knew that the next day you were going to be where you'd said you were going to be, and so was everybody else. Whether it was the picket line, whether it was the canvassing, the little towns and the sharecroppers communities in the deep south. You were going to be where you said. An enormous amount of discipline that took, especially for young people, but we had a vision.
So Ella really lived this concept of group leadership, of direct action, and of participatory democracy. It colored everything that the young people, by now, as you know, I'm talking about SNCC here.
[Recording-A Ends]
[Recording-B Starts]
Jean Wiley: — It did. It took a lot of discipline. I would find out about that discipline when I went to the Deep South myself, and very quickly became a student, sorry, a teacher activist. I went from being a student activist to being a teacher activist, which were very different roles.
I helped to form a cadre of students at Tuskegee Institute, who would go out into the nearby [Alabama] counties and augment SNCC staff in organizing those counties toward voter registration. In that capacity — with not only organizing them to go, but also literally taking them to some of these places and canvassing with them — in that avenue, I realized how difficult participatory democracy can be because I had to practice what I preached too. If students wanted to do one thing and decided and came to a rational decision, I felt I had to go along with that.
They were taking infant steps in organizing, and it was often very difficult for me to go along with it. But one of the lessons I learned, if any of you are thinking about being an organizer and I'm hoping that you will be, is that you have to let people — you have to give people room.
In that room, in that space that you're giving them, they'll come to their own conclusions and decisions often far better than you could have thought about because it's their lives now being affected and the people that they care about. To me, organizing is an art. We know organizing often as politics. I know it as part political and part art form, and you got to know when it's this and when it's that.
This class is about politics, women in politics. Based on my experience in the South and since the South, I have a strange relationship to politics here. I'm still an activist. I still have very passionate beliefs about how society should work for everybody, but politics here tends to mean Republican Party or Democratic Party. I'm not getting hung up in that.
As a friend said years ago when we were both in the South and a rural county and talking about, it seems to me we were talking about the horror of witnessing on television, the debate happening around whether Black people should be given their civil rights. That was the debate by the way, before the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 passed and the Voting Rights Bill of 1965 passed. There was a national televised debate in the Houses of Congress about whether Black people should have the vote, or should have civil rights. And so, you may understand my annoyance with both parties.
But I've always remembered what one of the SNCC people said is, we were talking about how horrible it was to watch this and to experience it. His name is Courtland Cox. He's mentioned several times in this book, which I haven't told you about yet, but I'll get to it. He said, "The Republican Party and the Democratic Party are two wings of the same bird flying in the same direction," and that's how I see it. I won't be able to talk with you much about the politics of this society if we're talking about partisan politics, because I think there's so much to be desired that, in other words, I'm way beyond that. I'm way beyond it.
This class also looks at women in politics. I thought that I'd read a section in this book. Those of you who were here before, it's called, Hands on the Freedom Plow. It was 17 years now in the making. It's the voices, the memoirs of 52 women, all women who were in SNCC. Its six editors were also in SNCC, and you get to see a side of the SNCC movement and the freedom movement that you don't often see. They're names that everybody should know about, but you don't know about them. And so, it's one of the gems. It just came out late last year. I'm one of the 52 women in the book, and I do have a statement about women as I saw it in those days. At this point now, I'm talking about — again, the young Jean, the Jean in her early 20s.
New paragraph, I've said a lot in this section. As I said, mine is called, Letter to My Adolescent Son, who is now in his 30s. It took a long time to bring this out.
Which brings me to the subject of women in SNCC, a subject that historians and academicians now writing our history presently get wrong — and I think deliberately so. I won't speak for others, but I can emphatically declare my own experience. I wish to high heaven, [that] I had found in my life before SNCC, or in the years since SNCC, the freedom, [that] I as a woman, found there. That my gender should prevent me from a role in SNCC was unthinkable.
By the time I got to the South — that was December of 1964 — SNCC women were driving the cars and riding the mules, organizing the plantations, directing the field staff, writing the reports and mobilizing the northern campuses. How could it not be so? Ella Baker gathered and mentored us. Fannie Lou Hamer was one of our most eloquent spokespersons, and Ruby Doris Robinson would soon become SNCC's executive secretary. Yes, SNCC was the first and only time in my life that my gender was not a barrier to my aspirations. I'd love it for that, if for nothing else.
And then I go on to talk about some of the things that I discovered, that SNCC helped me discover and pave the way for as I moved through my own career and my own life. We all owe, in this book, a tremendous amount to Ella Baker. In fact, I wanted this book to be called, Ella's Daughters, but I wasn't one of the editors and they went with Hands on the Freedom Plow, but I wanted to be called, Ella's Daughters or Daughters of Ella.
I'm going to stop there and I hope that we've got time for some of your questions.
Kathy Emery: Five minutes for questions.
Jean Wiley: Just five minutes? Sorry, [that I left] you so little time, but would you mind going?
Speaker 1: I was just curious. Would you say that Ella Baker was a accommodationist just like Booker T. Washington was?
Jean Wiley: Oh, no, no. She said the exact opposite.
Speaker 1: She said the opposite of what he was?
Jean Wiley: I would put her on the opposite end of — Hers was radical politics. Well, part of that's in her life too, and the career she chose. But to be talking about people demanding their own rights and confronting any system that denied them those rights, her stance on organization, non-hierarchical, her stance on putting your body where your mouth is, that was radical politics in 1959.
And in 1949, the idea that anybody willing to share your vision was your friend and ought to be included at a time when we were just coming out of the McCarthy era, where just to be threatened with the label of 'communist' was enough to scare this country to death. No, no, she was on the opposite end of the —
Speaker 1: It seemed like they had similar ideas though, unless I'm just confused about Booker T. Washington. Because I thought that he was not accommodated with what was going on, but instead of being more on what Du Bois was doing, he was more on social equality will come and you have to work for it. You can't — But I suppose that's just, I was just curious if they were, they just seemed similar.
Jean Wiley: Ella in ideology was closer to Du Bois. With some real exceptions, by the way. She would never have gone for the idea of the 'talented tenth.' You know about that, about training, that she wouldn't have abided. Nor would she have abided, even in this piece that you've read, the idea of hierarchical leadership with one charismatic leader and everybody else following along no matter who that person happened to be or where they were leading the herd.
But in all other respects, yeah, she was much more left leaning. Do you remember what you've read that gives you, that makes you come up with that question?
Speaker 1: For the two things that you were saying how, I don't know how she basically, it just seemed like the whole organization was, not that she was accepting what was going on, but instead of fighting it in a radical way that putting on the voice was, she was accommodating. Because in the article, it says that she, to be a strong leader, you don't need to be, or to be a strong person, or be a strong leader, or something like that. It just seems like she took the organization route, which makes me think of accommodation is how Washington was. I don't know. It just seems like they're a little bit similar, but it seems like she has the same ideas as [inaudible 00:13:15]. I was just curious what you thought she was more closer to between the two.
Jean Wiley: Yeah. Actually, Ella Baker would've had as hard a time as I had had she been at Tuskegee, which is the school that W —
Speaker 1: That was going to be my next question. I was just going to be curious. I was chiming off, but I was curious about your time at Tuskegee.
Kathy Emery: Somebody else.
Speaker 2: I was just going to ask, what was it like, was there lot of public speaking? How did the organizing took place? Were people stepping up on soapboxes, or was it a discussion forum? Were there group meetings? What was the experience as far as communication and rounding each other up? What did you do?
Jean Wiley: Inside SNCC, it took a lot of forms. The key form and the form that I liked best was the mass meeting, which was, I think typically Southern in that respect. Most of the mass meetings were held in churches. Most were held out in very, very rural areas that had been plantations. Some of the families still on that land had been on the land since slavery, and were still working the land as sharecroppers. They were the poorest of the poor in this entire country. You may know that sharecropping was essentially the same as slavery, you were bound to the land. They made sure that you were bound to the land because the communities were widespread because they were rural.
Mass meetings for me, were the most exciting place where people could talk and could sing. I should mention singing and lots of other art forms that came out of the Southern Movement. But the one you've heard about most and hopefully have heard, Freedom songs was another way of meeting in a strange way.
Speaker 2: The mass meetings were, would people take turns going up to the pulpit and speaking, or did they stand up in the pews and speak?
Jean Wiley: They did it differently depending upon, often depending upon the community and the formality of the churches in which they were in, but I've seen people stand [in the pews] and I've seen people go [to the podium].
Speaker 2: You like the mass meetings because of the alternating speaking and singing.
Jean Wiley: The high energy. The high energy that came largely from the actions that you were about to take as a community. Also, because they were intergenerational. In a SNCC meeting, we were talking to SNCC people. The only person outside that group was maybe Ella herself. In mass meetings, four and five generations could be present.
[Recording-B Ends]
Copyright © Jean Wiley, 2011
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