When Everything Changed (16 page)

Spelman was the most prestigious college for black women in the country.
A young Marian Wright
arrived in 1956, wary of “its reputation as a tea-pouring very strict school designed to turn black girls into refined ladies and teachers.” Its rigor was based, at least in part, on the widely held conviction that if black men had to be at least twice as good as whites to succeed, then black women had to be twice as respectable.
Students had a nine o’clock
curfew. The dress code required them to wear nylon stockings at all times—pants, of course, were banned. After Spelman dances ended, the students had fifteen minutes to get back to their dorms.
Alice Walker lasted two years
before transferring to Sarah Lawrence to get away from “a school that I considered opposed to change, to freedom, and to understanding that by the time most girls enter college they are already women and should be treated as women.” (Spelman was hardly alone in keeping its black coeds under a tight rein. Joyce Ladner, who started at Mississippi’s Jackson State in 1960, lived in a dorm where the housemother “was more strict than our parents had been…. We had to be in by six o’clock in the evening or at dark…. We had to go to vespers every Sunday, and she stood at the door and checked to see if we had hats and gloves on.”)

The women who joined the civil rights protests of the early ’60s were almost all the product of parents and teachers who believed that respectable black girls needed to be constrained, disciplined, perfect ladies. They had been raised to regard jail as the ultimate disgrace, something that happened to the other kind of black women—the ones who were living out all the worst white stereotypes. And they had not been encouraged to take the lead any more than white middle-class girls of the era were.
When Diane Nash was nominated
to chair the committee coordinating protests by students at the various black colleges in Nashville, she was so unnerved that she said she could not take the job because she had her period. She got the post anyway, and not long after, Nash led the students in a critical confrontation with Mayor Ben West that would become the high point of the Nashville movement. She skillfully drew West into declaring his general opposition to discrimination and bias, and then quickly asked whether that included the symbolic lunch counters. Cornered, the mayor had to agree it did, and by the end of the meeting on the city’s courthouse steps, West and the students were embracing one another, and the local paper was preparing its headline: “Integrate Counters—Mayor.”

“I
F YOU WERE GOING TO JAIL, YOU DRESSED UP
.”

Making the transition from ladylike student to jailbird was made easier by the fact that the early civil rights protests had all the decorum of a Spelman tea party. “If you were going to jail, you dressed up,” recalled Lenora Taitt-Magubane. “Nobody could ever see there were some ragamuffins who don’t deserve a hamburger at Woolworth’s.” Later, when the first Freedom Riders were preparing to challenge segregation on interstate transit with a trip that would leave them beaten, jailed, and nearly incinerated in a blazing bus, the organizers dictated that the men would wear coats and ties, and the women, dresses and high heels. “When I went to jail, I had on a skirt and a blouse, and probably a jacket,” said Taitt-Magubane. “When you went on a march, you were fittingly dressed.” As television cameras began to follow the students’ progress, the American public couldn’t help but see the contrast between the rowdy mob of white racists shrieking epithets and the well-clad black students, reading their textbooks while they sat silent and erect on the lunch-counter stools—seats that were fine for the time it took to eat a sandwich but that felt extremely uncomfortable after three or four hours.
The
Richmond News Leader,
an outspoken
opponent of integration, admitted to “a tinge of wry regret” at the scene. “Here were the colored students, in coats, white shirts, ties, and one of them was reading Goethe and one was taking notes from a biology text. And here, on the sidewalk outside, was a gang of white boys come to heckle, a ragtail rabble, slack-jawed, black-jacketed, grinning fit to kill…. Eheu! It gives one pause.”

Taitt-Magubane, who was then Lenora Taitt, got into the protests in 1960 via a musical. “I was in the drama club. My professor Howard Zinn said, ‘Lenora, would you like to see
My Fair Lady
?’ I said I would love to.” Zinn, who was white, was arranging to take a mixed-race group of students into Atlanta’s segregated downtown theater. When they sat down in the white section, the theater manager first threatened to cancel the production. “We said that would be very sad,” said Taitt-Magubane. “And we didn’t move.” He then called the mayor, who pragmatically suggested the lights be dimmed as quickly as possible. (“We
enjoyed
that play,” Taitt-Magubane recalled.) When the lights went back on, her group discovered all the nearby seats had been vacated. “So we wouldn’t contaminate them, I guess,” she added, laughing. Outside the theater, the press and photographers were waiting. “And the next day it was a front page story.”

There was, throughout the movement, always a question about the role of black women: were they comrades in the struggle or helpless dependents to be protected? (“
If anyone gets whupped
out here today, it ain’t gonna be our women,” a student demonstrator assured reporters later in Alabama.) When the Freedom Rides began, organizers were reluctant to allow black women to be put in what was going to be obvious peril and in the end limited the female contingent to three—two of them white. But the black women had no intention of staying out of the action. “A guy might be protective of you on the march—say, ‘You okay?’ or whatever. But I could get beaten just like he could,” said Joyce Ladner.
When the Nashville students
went off to the first big sit-in that was likely to result in mass arrests, James Bevel, one of the leaders, urged Diane Nash to avoid going to jail so she could coordinate from the outside. Nash thought the other students might wonder if she was a coward. If someone was not going to be arrested, she responded sensibly, it should be Bevel, who already had a reputation for fearlessness. And off to jail she went.

Angry whites didn’t much differentiate between the sexes once a protest began.
In February 1961 Lana Taylor
, a college sophomore, was sitting in at an Atlanta restaurant when an employee walked up behind her, grabbed her by the shoulders, and said, “Get the hell out of here, nigger.” But Taylor stayed put. “Lana was not going,” said Jane Stembridge, a white civil rights worker. “She put her hands under the counter and held…. I looked down at that moment at her hands… brown, strained… every muscle holding…. All of a sudden he let go and left…. He knew he could not move that girl—ever.” At another demonstration, a waitress threw a Coke bottle that just missed hitting 18-year-old Ruby Doris Smith.

Smith was another Spelman student
, although a young man who knew her at the time described her as “not the quintessential Spelman woman…. She was not the ladylike kind.” Her relatively poor family had scrimped to give their daughters extras, and Ruby had piano lessons and a debut at a ball in Atlanta sponsored by Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority. She was in many ways a typical teenager, worried about her figure, interested in clothes. Once, when a group of students were nervously preparing to leave for a protest that would inevitably lead to jail, Ruby Doris suddenly announced a delay: “My hair is not right,” she declared. “And I’m rolling it and I’m not leaving until it’s curled.” But her determination soon set her apart. In the summer of 1960, when most of the Atlanta college students had gone home, she helped organize picketing of a local grocery, often simply marching in front of the store alone, carrying her sign. She also took part in a series of “kneel-ins” at white churches. Stunned when she was barred admission to pray at one congregation, she “pulled up a chair in the lobby and joined in the singing and the worship services, which I enjoyed immensely.”

“S
OMEONE WILL RISE
. S
OMEONE WILL EMERGE
.”

Ella Baker was well into middle age
when the students started raising hell. She had gone to Shaw University, a proper Baptist school in Raleigh, at a time when the regulations made Spelman of 1960 look like a Woodstock reunion. Her most daring rebellion involved a petition that girls be permitted to wear silk stockings on campus. (Part of the uniform of the proper young African-American lady a generation later, silk stockings were regarded as a sign of vanity, and perhaps exhibitionism, in Baker’s college days.) The petition was denied, and the girls were required to spend extra time in chapel until they repented of their folly. It was typical of Baker that she did not actually care what she wore herself. She just wanted the students to stand up for themselves, and if stockings were their priority, that was fine.

One thing that marked young Ella as different was that she absolutely refused to consider a career in teaching. Every black woman was expected to give back to the community, and if you were middle class with an intellectual bent, you did it by teaching school until you married and turned your attention to good works in the church and proper women’s clubs. It broke her mother’s heart, but after college Ella left home and embarked on a career as a community organizer—a job that involved traveling by herself in an era when women were still expected to have a male protector when they were away from home. Baker joined a long and distinguished line of peripatetic American heroines. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, she seemed most at home on a train, with an overnight bag and a stack of work. Even when she married, she never nested, and even when she took on the responsibility of raising her young niece, she never stayed home. “I had to move fast to keep up with her,” her niece Jackie recalled. “I would sit in the back of meetings and do my homework many a night.”

In 1941 Baker was hired as an organizer for the NAACP, and two things quickly became clear. The first was that she was brilliant at the job. The chairman of the Virginia NAACP had protested when he heard a woman would be sent to organize the annual membership drive. But afterward, he described Baker’s visit as “one of the most important and wonderful things that has ever happened in Richmond.” Unlike the many male organizers who behaved like visiting superstars, Baker had what the Richmond leaders called a “wonderful and outstanding quality of mixing with any group of people.”

Her second defining characteristic was a dislike of top-down leadership. “She had an interest in the power of people,” said Lenora Taitt-Magubane. “She never gave answers. Miss Ella would ask questions: What about this? Have you thought about so and so? And then let you fight it out…. She felt leaders were not appointed but they rose up. Someone will rise. Someone will emerge.” It was an attitude Baker shared with some of the other older women in the movement, such as
Septima Clark, a venerable
educator and mentor to Rosa Parks who once sent Martin Luther King a letter urging him “not to lead all the marches himself but instead to develop leaders who could lead their own marches.” (It was not a successful intervention. “Dr. King read that letter before the staff. It just tickled them; they just laughed,” Clark said.)

Baker became one of the founders and acting director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was meant to keep alive the spirit of the Montgomery bus boycott. But the SCLC was defined by Martin Luther King’s charismatic leadership, and since Baker did not believe in charismatic leaders, she and King never hit it off. She was not offered the permanent directorship. Wyatt Tee Walker, the minister who got the job, said Baker was not even really considered: “It just went against the grain of the kind of person she was.” Ella had a similar, although blunter, take. “After all, who was I?” she said. “I was female. I was old. I didn’t have a PhD.” On another occasion, she attributed the lack of connection between her and the male leaders to the fact that she “wasn’t a fashion plate” at a time when black men—like white men—tended to judge all women by their aesthetic value. (
Septima Clark once referred
to the wives of early civil rights leaders as “just like chandeliers: shining lights, sitting up, saying nothing.”) While Baker was a handsome woman, her appearance was the last thing people talked about when they met her. “Miss Ella was, I guess, she was about five feet tall, but she seemed to me like she was twenty feet,” said Lenora Taitt-Magubane. “With her pillbox hat—always looking very crisp.”

It was the old story. Women worked behind the scenes; they were not expected to head organizations or give important speeches. Lucy Murray, whose father was a black labor activist in Washington during the 1960s, remembered hearing him say that the only woman in the “inner sanctum” of the movement was Dorothy Height, the head of the National Council of Negro Women.
Septima Clark felt the established
black leaders “didn’t have any faith in women, none whatsoever.” For the younger generation, the resistance to women leaders was perhaps more complicated.
Andrew Young, who was one
of Martin Luther King’s top aides, said that Ella Baker and other strong women in the movement made him feel defensive. “They were too much like my mother. Strong women were the backbone of the movement, but to young black men seeking their own freedom, dignity, and leadership perspective, they were quite a challenge.”

Baker’s response was to found a charismatic leader–free organization that would reflect her ideas of what the civil rights movement should be all about. She threw her lot in with the students, helped them organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and kept them out from under the arm of Dr. King and the ministers. Unsurprisingly, SNCC (which was always referred to as “Snick”) was more open to women’s leadership than any of the groups that had gone before. Its heyday lasted only a few years, but while it did, SNCC was not only fighting for civil rights but also struggling to create, within itself, a “Beloved Community” in which blacks and whites, men and women, poor and middle class, lived and worked together as equals. “
Remember, we are not
fighting for the freedom of the Negro alone, but for the freedom of the human spirit, a larger freedom that encompasses all mankind,” Baker told the students.