Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Ella Baker and the challenge of black rule

  • Article
  • Published:
Contemporary Political Theory Aims and scope

Abstract

What is African American Politics? What form should it take? How does it conceptualize white supremacy? In In the Shadow of Du Bois, Robert Gooding-Williams uses the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Fredrick Douglass to provide answers to these questions. While the choices of Douglass and Du Bois make a great deal of sense, they reproduce the tendency of confining political theory to literature – a move that bounds the genre in problematic ways. In this article, I in effect attempt to “unbound” the genre by considering Ella Baker, a civil rights era political organizer.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Anievas, A., Nivi, M., and Shilliam, R. (2014) Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Apel, D. (2014) “Hands up, don’t shoot”: Surrendering to liberal illusions. Theory & Event 17(3).

  • Baker, E. (1960) Bigger Than a Hamburger. Southern Patriot, June.

  • Baker, E. 1974) Interview with Ella Baker, Sept. 4, 1974. In Southern Oral History Program Collection, ed. E. Walker.

  • Baker, E. (1977) Interview with Ella Baker, Aprl 19, 1977. In Southern Oral History Program Collection, ed. S. Thrasher and C. Hayden.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baker, E. (1979) Interview with Ella J. Baker. ed. L. B. Hogan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baraka, I.A. (1963) Blues People; Negro Music in White America. New York: W. Morrow.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bates, B.T. (2001) Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Birch, J., and Heideman, P. (2017) The Trouble with Anti-Antiracism 2016 [cited December 6 2017]. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/adolph-reed-blm-racism-capitalism-labor/.

  • Blatt, J. (2018) Race and the Making of American Political Science. Philadelphia: PENN, University of Pennsylvania Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bloom, J.M. (1987) Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Booth, W.J. (2008) The color of memory: Reading race with ralph ellison. Political Theory 36(5):683–707.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bromell, N. (2013) Democratic indignation: Black American thought and the politics of dignity. Political Theory 41(2): 285–311.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown, E.B. (1995) Negotiating and transforming the public sphere: African American political life in the transition from slavery to freedom. In: T. B. P. S. Collective (ed.) The Black Public Sphere. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Camp, J.T. and Heatherton, C. (2016) Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carby, H.V. (1992) Policing the Black woman’s body in an urban context. Critical Inquiry 18(4): 738–755.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cobb, C.E. (2015) This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed : How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cohen, C. (2009) Black sexuality, indigenous moral panics, and respectability. In: G. Herdt (ed.) Moral panics, sex panics: Fear and the fight over sexual rights.

  • Coles, R. (2008a) Awakening to the call of receptive democratic progress. The Good Society 17(1): 43–51.

    Google Scholar 

  • Coles, R. (2008b) ‘To make this tradition articulate’: Practiced receptivity matters, or heading west of west with Cornel West and Ella Baker. In: S. Hauerwas and R. Coles (eds.) Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations between a Radical Democrat and a Christian. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Collins, P.H. (1990) Black Feminist Thought : Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cone, J.H. (1970) A Black Theology of Liberation. New York: J. B. Lippincott Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cooper, B.C. (2017) Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Crăiuţu, A. (2003) Liberalism under Seige: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Curry, T.J. (2014) Michael Brown and the need for a genre study of black male death and dying. Theory & Event 17(3).

  • Darby, D. and Shelby, T. (2005) Hip Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason. Chicago: Open Court.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davis, A.Y. (1983) Women, Race & Class. New York: Vintage Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davis, A.Y. (1998) Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Pantheon Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Donaldson, F. (1969) Geography and the Black American: The White Papers and the Invisible Man. Antipode 1(1): 17–33.

    Google Scholar 

  • Douglass, F. and Meyer, M. (1984) The Narrative and Selected Writings. 1st ed. New York: Modern Library.

    Google Scholar 

  • Du Bois, W.E.B. (1921) Darkwater; Voices from within the Veil. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

    Google Scholar 

  • Du Bois, W.E.B. (1994) The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Dover.

    Google Scholar 

  • Du Bois, W. E. B., Anderson, E. and Eaton, I. (1996) The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ellison, R. (1952) Invisible Man. New York,: Random House.

  • Ellison, R. (1964) Shadow and Act. New York: Random House.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ellison, R. and Murray, A. (2000) Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. 1st ed. New York: Modern Library.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foley, B. (2010) Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gaines, K.K. (1996) Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gates, H.L., and West, C. (1996) The Future of the Race. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

    Google Scholar 

  • Giddings, P. (1984) When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: Morrow.

    Google Scholar 

  • Giddings, P. (1988) In Search of Sisterhood : Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement. 1st ed. New York: Morrow.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gilroy, P. (1993) Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures. London: Serpent’s Tail.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gooding-Williams, R. (2001) Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gooding-Williams, R. 2009. In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gordon Nembhard, J. (2014) Collective Courage a History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grant, J. (1998) Ella Baker: Freedom Bound. New York: Wiley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hall, J.C. (2004) The African-American Musician as Intellectual. In: J. G. Watts (ed.) Harold Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual Reconsidered. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hanchard, M. (2006) Party/politics. New York: Oxford.

  • Hanchard, M. (2010) Contours of black political thought: An introduction and perspective. Political Theory 38(4): 510–536.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hanchard, M. (2012) You shall have the body: On Trayvon Martin’s slaughter. Theory & Event 15(3).

  • Hanchard, M.G. (2018) The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy. 1st ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harris, F. (1999) Something Within: Religion in African-American Political Activism. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Henderson, E.A. (1996) Black Nationalism and Rap Music. Journal of Black Studies 26(3): 308–339.

    Google Scholar 

  • Henderson, E.A. (2004) Misunderstanding Black Nationalism: Failures, Fixations, Facades and Fabrications. Paper read at American Political Science Association Annual Conference, at Chicago, Ill.

  • Henderson, E.A. (2013) Hidden in plain sight: Racism in international relations theory. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26(1): 71–92.

    Google Scholar 

  • Henderson, E.A. (2019) The Revolution Will Not Be Theorized : Cultural Revolution in the Black Power Era. Albany: State University of New York Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Higginbotham, E.B. (1993) Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Iton, R. (2008) In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Iton, R. (2011) Tricky Times and Liquid Spaces: Text, Play, and Diaspora. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. lecture.

    Google Scholar 

  • Iton, R. (2013) Still life. Small Axe 17(1 40): 22–39.

  • Jefferson, H.J. (2019) Policing Norms: Punishment and the politics of respectability among Black Americans. Dissertation, Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

  • Lawson, B.E. (2004) Booker T. Washington: A pragmatist at work. In: B. E. Lawson and D. F. Koch (eds.) Pragmatism and the Problem of Race. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

  • Lopez Bunyasi, T. and Smith, C.W. (2019) Do all black lives matter equally to black people? Respectability politics and the limitations of linked fate. The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 4(1):180–215.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lubiano, W. (1991) But compared to what?: Reading realism, representation, and essentialism in school daze, do the right thing, and the spike lee discourse. Black American Literature Forum 25(2): 253–282.

    Google Scholar 

  • Makalani, M. (2017) Black lives matter and the limits of formal black politics. South Atlantic Quarterly 116(3): 529–552.

    Google Scholar 

  • Markell, P. (2014) Call us by our names. Theory & Event 17(3).

  • Marshall, S.H. (2012) The political life of fungibility. Theory & Event 15(3).

  • Mickey, R.W. (2015) Paths out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944-1972. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mitchell, M. (2004) Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Morris, A.D. (1984) The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moses, R.P. and Cobb, C.E. (2001) Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights. Boston: Beacon Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moses, W.J. (2004) Creative Conflict in African American Thought: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey. New York: Cambridge University Press.

  • Nimtz, A.H. (2000) Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Norton, A. (2012) Fearful privilege. Theory & Event 15(3).

  • Owens, M.L. (2007) God and Government in the Ghetto: The Politics of Church-State Collaboration in Black America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Payne, C. (1989) Ella Baker and models of social change. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14(4): 885–899.

  • Payne, C.M. (1995) I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Polletta, F. (2002) Freedom is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ransby, B. (2003) Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reed Jr., A.L. (1997) W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line. New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Reed, T.V. (2005) The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rickford, R.J. (2016) We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Ridley, J. (2006) The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger.” Esquire, November 30, 2006.

  • Roberts, S. (2009) Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Robinson, J.A.G. and Garrow, D.J. (1987) The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rogers, M.L. and Turner, J. (2020) African American Political Thought: A Collected History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ross, M.B. (2004) Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era. New York: New York University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shelby, T. and Terry, B.M. (2018) To Shape a New World : Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shilliam, R. (2020) Theorising (with) Amy Ashwood Garvey. In: P. Owens and K. Rietzler (eds.) Women’s International Thought: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spence, L.K. (2011) Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-Hop and Black Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spence, L.K. (2015) Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics. New York City: Punctum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stears, M. (2010) Demanding Democracy: American Radicals in Search of a New Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Summers, M.A.. (2004) Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thelwell, M. (1993) The August 28th March on Washington: The Castrated Giant. In: G. Early (ed.) Speech and Power. Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Theoharis, J. (2013) The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Boston: Beacon Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thompson, D. (2017) An exoneration of black rage. South Atlantic Quarterly 116(3): 457–481.

    Google Scholar 

  • Threadcraft, S. and Terry, B. (2018) Gender Trouble: Manhood, Inclusion, and Justice. In: T. Shelby and B. Terry (eds.) To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Threadcraft, S. (2016) Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Threadcraft, S. (2017) North American Necropolitics and Gender: On #Blacklivesmatter and Black Femicide. South Atlantic Quarterly 116(3): 553–579.

    Google Scholar 

  • Turner, J. (2008) Awakening to Race: Ralph Ellison and Democratic Individuality. Political Theory 36(5): 655–682.

    Google Scholar 

  • Umoja, A.O. (2013) We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. New York: New York University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vitalis, R. (2015) White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Walton, H. (1970) Black Political Thought: The Problem of Characterization. Journal of Black Studies 1(2): 213–218.

    Google Scholar 

  • Walton, H. (1971) The Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Westport, CT: Greenwood Pub. Corp.

    Google Scholar 

  • Walton, H. (1985) Invisible Politics: Black Political Behavior. Albany: State University of New York Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Walton, H., Miller, C. and McCormick II, J.P. (1995) Race and Political Science: The Dual Traditions of Race Relations Politics and African American Politics. In: J. Dryzek, J. Farr and S. Leonard (eds.) Political Science and Its History: Research Programs and Political Traditions. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Watts, J.G. (1994) Heroism and the Black Intellectual : Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, R.F. (1998) Negroes with Guns. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, E. and Frasure, L. (2007) Still at the Margins: The Persistence of Neglect of African American Issues in Political Science. In: W. Rich (ed.) African American Perspectives on Political Science. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, J.M. (2014) ‘The ever-present now’: Frederick Douglass’s pragmatic constitutionalism. The Journal of African American History 99(1–2): 71–88.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wolcott, V.W. 2013. Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit: UNC Press Books.

  • Woods, C.A. (1998) Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Nolan Bennett and the members of the Georgetown University theory group, P. J. Brendese, Bryan Carter, Nathan Gies, Jay Gillen, Serra Hakyemez, Errol Henderson, Jim Johnson, Ainsley LeSure, Jon Masin-Peters, Barbara Ransby (for sharing four of Ella Baker’s interviews), Robbie Shilliam, the anonymous reviewers, and the editorial staff of CPT who provided such thoughtful suggestions. Finally I owe a great deal of gratitude to the organizers and activists in Baltimore and elsewhere working to keep the SNCC organizing tradition alive. (RIP Betty Garman Robinson.)

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA

    Lester K. Spence

Authors
  1. Lester K. Spence
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lester K. Spence.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Spence, L.K. Ella Baker and the challenge of black rule. Contemp Polit Theory 19, 551–572 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00448-8

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00448-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation