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Abstract
Scholars have done much to uncover the contributions of civil rights organizer Ella Baker. Her invitational rhetoric has been their primary focus. The titles of honor bestowed upon Baker say very little about her rhetorical discourse beyond this focus. In this essay, I analyze Baker's parallel employment of liberal, socialist, and radical feminist styles of rhetoric, alongside her invitational style. By examining a body of work that includes two Baker primary sources, pertinent quotes from several of her speeches, and several other sources, I substantiate my argument that Baker did not employ invitational rhetoric exclusively but often projected it along parallel paths with other types of rhetoric as she fought against patriarchy and sexism as a civil rights activist.
Notes
[1] Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 373.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Marilyn Bordwell deLaure, “Planting Seeds of Change: Ella Baker's Radical Rhetoric.” Women's Studies in Communication 31, no. 1 (2008): 1–28.
[5] Also referred to as the Movement in this essay.
[6] Lorraine Code, as quoted in Kathleen J. Ryan and Elizabeth J. Natalle, “Fusing Horizons: Standpoint Hermeneutics and Invitational Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31 (2002): 75.
[7] Jennifer Emerling Bone, Cindy L. Griffin, and T.M. Linda Scholz, “Beyond Traditional Conceptualizations of Rhetoric: Invitational Rhetoric and a Move Toward Civility,” Western Journal of Communication 72, no. 4 (2008): 434–462.
[8] Sonja A. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 5.
[9] Ellen Cantarow, Susan Gushee O'Malley, and Sharon Hartman Strom, “Ella Baker: Roots” in Moving the Mountain: Women Working for Social Change (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1980), 58.
[10] Ransby, Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement, 78.
[11] Catherine M. Orr, “Ella Baker,” in Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1925–1993, ed. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 14.
[12] Ransby, Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement, 83.
[13] Baker never defined herself as a feminist but, clearly, her rhetorics and philosophies fit the feminist profile.
[14] Foss and Griffin, “Beyond Persuasion,” 5.
[15] Cantarow et al., “Ella Baker: Roots,” 61.
[16] Ransby, Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement, 144.
[17] Ibid., 146.
[18] Ibid., 143.
[19] Wyatt T. Walker, quoted in Fundi: The Ella Baker Story, directed by Joanne Grant (Brooklyn, NY: Icarus Films, 1981), DVD.
[20] Ella Baker, quoted. in deLaure, “Planting Seeds of Change,” 19.
[21] Gloster Current, quoted in Fundi: The Ella Baker Story..
[22] Cantarow et al., “Ella Baker: Roots,” 53.
[23] Ella Baker, “The Black Woman in the Civil Rights Struggle,” address given at Institute for the Black World, Atlanta, Georgia, 1969; Joanne Grant, “Appendix,” in Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (New York: John Wiley, 1998), 227–231.
[24] Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long?: African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 95.
[25] Ibid., 94.
[26] Ella Baker, quoted in Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods, Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 67.
[27] Ella Baker, quoted in Ransby, Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement, 246.
[28] For more information on the relationship between civility and invitational rhetoric, see Bone, Griffin, and Scholz, “Beyond Traditional Conceptualizations”; Nina M. Lozano-Reich and Dana L. Cloud, “The Uncivil Tongue: Invitational Rhetoric and the Problem of Inequality, Western Journal of Communication 73, no. 2 (2009): 220–226.
[29] Lozano-Reich and Cloud, “The Uncivil Tongue,” 222.
[30] Nancy R. Goldberger, quoted in Kathleen J. Ryan and Elizabeth J. Natalle, Fusing Horizons: Standpoint Hermeneutics and Invitational Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31 (2001): 72.
[31] Ella Baker, as quoted in Crawford et al., Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 99.
[32] Ryan and Natalle, “Fusing Horizons,” 74.
[33] Crawford et al., Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 195.
[34] Ella Baker, quoted in Ransby, Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement, 273.
[35] Jim Schlosser, “The Story of the Greensboro Sit-ins” (May 1998), http://www.sitins.com/story.shtml.
[36] Ella Baker, “Bigger Than A Hamburger,” The Southern Patriot, May 1960, http://www.crmvet.org/docs/sncc2.htm.
[37] Ransby, Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement, 171.
[38] Baker, “Bigger Than a Hamburger.”.
[39] Julia T. Wood, “Enlarging Conceptual Boundaries: A Critique of Research in Interpersonal Communication” in Transforming Vision: Feminist Critiques in Communication Studies, eds. Sheryl Perimutter Bowen and Nancy Wyatt (Cresshill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1993), 22.
[40] Foss and Griffin, “Beyond Persuasion,” 13.
[41] Ella Baker, “Bigger Than a Hamburger.”.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Ibid.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Ransby, Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement, 327–329.
[46] Seyla Benhibib, quoted in Foss and Griffin, “Beyond Persuasion,” 12.
[47] Ibid., 4.
[48] Foss and Griffin, “Beyond Persuasion,” 11.
[49] Ransby, Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement, 326.
[50] Fundi: The Ella Baker Story..
[51] Ransby, Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement, 46.
[52] Fundi: The Ella Baker Story..
[53] Robert Parris Moses, quoted in Richard. J. Jenson and John C. Hammerback, “Working in ‘Quiet Places': The Community Organizing Rhetoric of Robert Parris Moses,” The Howard Journal of Communication 11 (2000): 2.
[54] Cantarow et al., “Ella Baker: Roots,” 93.