Mrs. Septima Clark was one of eight children born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1898 of a former slave father. “I was forty-nine when the Civil Rights Movement really got going, both for me personally and for people all over the South,” she said in Ready from Within. She had been teaching children in public schools since 1947. About the time Mrs. Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, Septima Clark was facing the loss of her job. She had joined the NAACP and sought equalization of salaries for Black and White teachers in South Carolina. She said the biggest failure of her life was not persuading Black teachers who were afraid of losing their jobs to join the NAACP and her struggle for equal justice.
After Federal District Court Judge Waties Waring, following the law rather than White southern mores, ordered equal pay for Black and White teachers and also ruled that Black citizens must be permitted to vote in the next primary, he and his wife and Septima became friends and social pariahs in their community. When Septima asked the judge’s wife to speak at her YWCA and Mrs. Waring accepted, both women received obscene calls. Neither backed down although the Warings eventually did leave Charleston after increasing harassment.
Myles Horton, Highlander’s wonderful folk school head, said that Septima Clark did not let anyone or anything discourage her. She did not let the timidity of her Black friends in South Carolina who criticized her friendship with the Warings discourage her. She did not let the false label of Communist that White segregationists put on Highlander stop her. She did not let her arrest on a spurious charge intended to shut down Highlander’s interracial activities discourage her. She did not let the sexism of some of the men on SCLC’s staff discourage her: “The men on it [the executive staff] didn’t listen to me too well…. They just thought that women were sex symbols and had no contribution to make.” She says that Rev. Ralph Abernathy kept asking Dr. King why she was on staff.
Septima Clark knew education was the foundation of citizenship. She traveled tirelessly across the deep South teaching illiterate Black citizens to read in two or three months while also teaching them to stand up for their rights. She trained hundreds of other citizenship education teachers, providing not only the model but helping to build the community capacity needed to translate legal rights into political realities.
And she did not let two heart attacks or aging discourage her. She won her second term on the Charleston, South Carolina school board in 1976 as she celebrated her seventy-eighth birthday. She was the first Black woman ever to serve on that board.
The photographer Brian Lanker’s cover of his marvelous book of photographs and essays on Black women, I Dream a World, captured this great woman’s indomitable spirit a few weeks before her death. Septima Clark not only dreamed of but worked tirelessly for a world where every child is well educated and respected and loved as God intends. She told Brian, “I’d tell the children of the future that they have to stand up for their rights. They have an idea that they can. But I feel that they are shadows underneath a great shelter and that they need to come forth and stand up for some of the things that are right.”
MRS. ELLA BAKER
Andy Young told a group gathered at the former Alex Haley Farm that some of Dr. King’s SCLC staff “could not stand Ella Baker.” “When she heard I was planning to go to work for him, she called my mother and told her not to let me come. She thought we were all trifling and undisciplined and that included Martin and Ralph!” Andy continued, “We could deal with Septima because she reminded us of our grandmothers. We could deal with Dorothy [Dorothy Cotton, who co-directed with Andy Young Dr. King’s citizenship education program] because she reminded us of our sisters. But we could not deal with Ella Baker because she reminded us of our mothers. She held us accountable and tolerated no nonsense. None of us had come to grips yet with our mothers.”
Ella Baker was tough and disciplined and demanded the best of the young and older adults around her. I recently found a letter I had written to her apologizing for not getting a report I had promised in on time. She understood that movement building was about more than protests and meetings and speeches—it was hard, daily, persistent, behind-the-scenes work and infrastructure.
Mrs. Ella Baker was born in 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia. Like Septima Clark, she had a strict mother, a warm and caring father, and a large extended family of grandparents, uncles, and aunts who shared what they had with the poor. She was a fighter and as a child beat up White children who called her names. Since there was no schooling beyond elementary years where she lived, she went off to boarding school at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she graduated valedictorian of her high school and college classes. She moved to Harlem, got caught up in its excitement, and went everywhere to hear speeches, read in libraries, and to learn. After working as a domestic and as a waitress, she got a job with the Negro National News published by George Schuyler who later recommended her for a job at the NAACP. She rapidly rose through NAACP ranks. “Wherever she went,” her biographer and friend Joanne Grant wrote in Ella Baker: Freedom Bound, “she created a whirlwind, leaving a scatter of papers, notes, leaflets, church programs, and phone numbers in her wake…. She never let up her struggle to increase the role of the rank and file.”
Ella Baker pushed for structure and rules in the NAACP just as she did later at SCLC and SNCC. I met her during my senior year at Spelman College when she was working in Atlanta for SCLC.
It was Ella Baker who sat down with Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levinson to discuss how to create a continuing movement out of the Montgomery bus boycott that led to SCLC’s formation. It was Ella Baker who tried to put SCLC in operating order so that Dr. King was not just a leader who reacted to and jumped from one event to the other, and who worked to give SCLC the capacity to plan and implement and not just react to change. It was Ella Baker who convinced Dr. King to bring me and about two hundred other Black college students from around the South who had been arrested for engaging in sit-in protests to open up lunch counters to her alma mater Shaw University. It was Ella Baker who encouraged students to form our own organization rather than simply becoming the youth arm of SCLC. It was Ella Baker who warned against SCLC becoming “a cult of personality” for Dr. King rather than an organized means of empowering others.
I remember her counsel as I think about sustaining and strengthening the Children’s Defense Fund’s crucial mission in the twenty-first century. She taught me the crucial importance of training a successor generation of young servant leaders which is now an integral and urgent part of CDF’s mission and that of the Black Community Crusade for Children (BCCC) which CDF coordinates.
Like Septima Clark, Ella Baker was fully aware of but unintimidated by the men who resented her forcefulness, prodding, and “mothering.” She made no special effort to be ingratiating. She labored at SCLC as she had at the NAACP to raise money, conduct voter registration drives, speak to citizen groups (sometimes ten times a day), and travel to community after community to help people help themselves. She eventually left SCLC after deciding that movement building was more important than the specific organization and personalities involved.
With Bob Moses and Jane Stembridge, I drove Ella Baker in my brother Julian’s well-worn Volkswagen Beetle in August 1963 from New York City to Washington for the March on Washington. We stayed with my sister Olive and shared that period of hopefulness that Dr. King’s dream, which was our own, could be realized in America in our lifetimes with the help of our hands and feet and voices.
At a gathering celebrating Ella Baker’s seventy-fifth birthday, Bob Moses called her the “Fundi,” the person in the community who masters a craft with the help of the community and teaches it to other people. She died in 1988 on her eighty-third birthday.
In 1991 at BCCC’s invitation Black students convened at Howard University to organize a Black Student Leadership Network for Children (BSLN). Since then over 2,000 Black college-age youths have gone through training at BCCC’s Ella Baker Child Policy Institute. These young lea
ders have operated summer Freedom Schools for over 12,000 poor children. They teach reading, conflict resolution, chess, provide two nutritious meals, and engage parents in churches, schools, and community centers in over forty-five sites across the country. The young leaders also serve as important role models for the children in their communities. Children do not need Michael Jordan as a role model, as extraordinary as he is. They need someone who grew up near them in their own communities who faced and overcame some of the same tough problems they now face and must overcome and who are giving back. Ella Baker would be proud of these young servant-leaders if she were alive today. We hope from their ranks many potential Ella Bakers, Septima Clarks, Andy Youngs, and Bob Moseses will emerge. The BSLN has evolved into the SLNC—the Student Leadership Network for Children—as we seek to engage more Latino, White, and Asian as well as Black students in the crusade to Leave No Child Behind.
Black women must come together again and reach out to all women to build a powerful movement to sweep the guns and violence and poverty and poor education and drugs out of our homes and communities and replace them with hope and good schools, strong families and safe communities and a decent life for all children. It’s time to act on Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune’s advice to “stop playing bridge and start building bridges.”
It will be very hard.
Black women face a multiple challenge of not being taken seriously by many White men, White women, Black men, and even other Black women, and by the White male-dominated media. White men in power often do not consider something to be credible or important until a White man says or does it. When I returned from Hanoi as a member of the Woodcock Commission appointed by President Carter to seek information about and the return of any Americans missing in action, I went on the “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” to report on our trip, accompanied by a senior Defense Department official. I always over-prepare, particularly when studying a new issue, and was able to answer a question about the number and percentage of Americans missing in action in the Vietnam War compared to previous wars. Although the Defense official neither knew nor gave the answer, I was surprised when the written transcript of the show was shared with me by a friend to see that it attributed my answer to him. A brilliant senior Black woman foundation executive recounted how a White woman subordinate had asked not to report to her but rather directly to the White male foundation head so as not to lose her self-perceived status.
My greatest social peeve is reserved for White men who stand when White women enter the room and who do not stand when Black women enter the room. It is all right with me in this era of confused etiquette and of feminism if men do not stand or hold the door for any woman but it is not all right when they relay a message of unequal respect.
A very dear friend recounts how she learned the southern code of racial hypocrisy which so disturbed her. As a child she had been taught always to wait her turn in line. One day her mother stopped their car in front of the post office and told her to run inside and get a stamp to mail a letter. She got in line behind several Black women who had preceded her. When she returned to the car her mother impatiently demanded to know what had taken her so long. When she explained her mother replied that she had to wait her turn only when among White people.
Women are the backbone of the Black church without whom it would crumble. As in the Civil Rights Movement, Black women in the church are often asked and expected to take a back seat to the men who depend on but disempower them. An old friend who is a prominent Black Washington lawyer with whom I sometimes share great sermons and discuss great preachers astounded me not long ago by proclaiming that he and a leading Black preacher “do not like women preachers” after I had promised to send him sermons by two great women preachers I’d recently heard at the Alex Haley Farm. I could only relay my shock when I realized he was serious: “What kind of stupid backwards statement is that—and in 1998!”
He spontaneously revealed an attitude that too many men still hold, regarding women as instruments of their desires and needs and not as human beings of equal status due equal respect and opportunity. This powerful Black man is a reflection of the broader male societal disrespect for Black women and for women in general. When one speaks of shared power, shared parenting, shared responsibilities of husbands and wives in so many realms, men bristle and feel attacked. They often are unwilling to share power or control or to understand that a woman affirming herself is not disaffirming them.
Over the years I have been profoundly inspired by great women of all races who broke out of society’s boxes, found and raised their powerful voices, took risks, and sacrificed all as they sought to be God’s hands and feet on earth in a variety of ways. From Saint Clare, Saint Francis’s friend and fellow seeker, to Saint Theresa of Avila to Dorothy Day to Eleanor Roosevelt to her friend Mary McLeod Bethune and Marian Anderson, these women like so many others courageously used God’s gifts to lift themselves above manmade obstacles and to help transform their times. It is time, sisters of every race, class, faith, and place, to come together and build a new third millennial world fit for and worthy of our children.
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OUR CHILDREN AS MENTORS
I have learned many things from my teachers; I have learned many things from my friends; and I have learned even more from my students.
The Talmud
At that time Jesus said, I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.
Matthew 11:25–26
CHILDREN COME into the world trusting until they are taught to distrust by adults who cannot be trusted. Children come into the world without hate and racial prejudice until they are taught by adults who hate and are prejudiced.
Children come into the world resilient and full of joy and laughter until they are discouraged, demeaned, and stigmatized by the low expectations, unjust labels, and mistreatment of adults.
Children come into the world with promise and potential until they are pampered into laziness, purposelessness, and a sense of entitlement by too much wealth and too little challenge or trapped into failure by too much hunger, loneliness, poverty, and illiteracy.
Children come into the world with God’s commission to live and learn and sing and dance and grow, then too many are decommissioned by adults who prey on, neglect, abuse, exploit, disrespect, discourage, and mislead them.
Children come into the world as God’s gifts of life and love yet so many are spurned and not spared the ravages of war and gun violence that murder and maim and corrode their dreams and self-esteem.
“The human child,” Nobel Peace laureate Alva Myrdal said, “is the greatest miracle of creation. Every single child … is a world of subtle secrets, a personality, a unique occurrence, never to be repeated on this earth.” Yet our world and nation too often undermine these individual miracles bywords and deeds that divide rather than bring children together and make every child feel that he or she belongs.
In our nation and world, White children have been assigned more value as a group than Black and Brown and Asian and Native American children. Affluent children are accorded more respect and resources than children who are poor and need them more. Children in single-parent families or born to teen parents are assigned the stigma we often attach to the parents they did not choose. Children with special physical, mental, or emotional needs are sometimes shunned and made the butt of jokes and jeers. Girls as a group face many barriers that boys do not in a world still characterized more by male privilege than by gender equality and mutual respect. Some boys—especially Black boys—are accorded no respect and are expected to control their rage from unequal treatment without crying or protesting—legally or illegally. And most boys are imprisoned by “male values” that teach that strong men don’t cry and that life is a contest between winners and losers rather than between winners and winners and a struggle between self and God.
Children, because they are the primary respo
nsibility of the parents who bring them into the world and are dependent on adults not only in their homes, but in their schools, communities, states, and nation to care for and prepare them for adulthood, are assigned a lesser social and political status than adults. Because they do not vote, lobby, contribute to political action committees, or hold press conferences, and lack powerful self-interested membership organizations, their needs often come last in public and private investment and attention. How else can we explain the fact that every sixty-six-year-old is accorded health care but every six-or sixteen-year-old is not? We provide Social Security to every senior citizen and deny the social security of basic nutrition, shelter, health care, and quality childhood education to young children in the crucial early years of life when their brains are developing at a rapid pace.
Toni Morrison, the 1989 Nobel laureate for literature, said in 1984 that, “Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the Earth.” Yet our children, God’s gifts of hope and immortality, will inherit everything we have and are, and carry on—or not carry on—our values and institutions in the world to come. If we do not prepare them now for these responsibilities they will become our moral and economic Achilles heels who will trip and land America on its face rather than standing tall on its feet in the next century.
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