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Silk stockings. They were the rage in the early 1920s and the young Black women at Shaw University wanted the school's strict dress code relaxed so they could wear them. They asked Ella Baker to take up their cause. Still a high school senior at Shaw Academy, and not particularly passionate about stockings, Baker petitioned the administration, as her biographer Barbara Ransby reports, because "I felt it was their right to wear stockings if they wanted to." Shaw's dean of women apparently differed on the matter, rejecting the request, she ordered the women involved to attend chapel every night as punishment and demanded Baker's contrition for having written the petition letter. Baker refused, at one point so frustrating the dean that she fainted.
Four years later, Baker was the valedictorian of her university class and women at Shaw were wearing their silk hose. Reflecting on her time at the school in Raleigh, N.C., Baker says she did not break the rules as much as challenge them. So be it. As Ransby details in Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, the activist would spend the rest of her life breaking rules, written and unwritten, as one of the most dynamic, if relatively unsung, figures in the African American struggle for democracy and equality.
The courageous Rosa Parks is often hailed as the mother of the Civil Rights Movement, but it was her friend Ella Baker (1903-1986) who was probably the most significant woman of that era. Her career as an organizer, intellectual and teacher spanned half a century from 1930 to 1980. She worked alongside leaders such as the NAACP's Walter White, Thurgood Marshall and W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) - the activism for which she is most recognized.
Ransby, an associate professor...