Baker, mother, and brother move back to Warren County, North Carolina
After her aunt moved to Philadelphia, Baker, her mother, and her brother moved back to North Carolina while her father remained in Norfolk to work. She describes the racial geography of the town where they lived and what the black community's culture was like when she was growing up. After the end of this passage, she describes her school in greater detail.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Ella Baker, April 19, 1977. Interview G-0008. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- SUE THRASHER:
-
How old were you then when you moved with your mother back to North
Carolina?
- ELLA BAKER:
-
About six. The first time I was in school was in Norfolk. My mother had a
friend, a classmate or something like that, who was in Norfolk also in
the same neighborhood and who had started something like a kind
ergarten, a school for the smaller children of friends. And so my
brother had started there. And because he seemingly was bright and
people said he couldn't possibly be as good as he seemed to
have been, and that he should be going to the little public school.
Imagine that. So my father, who was not much to bother about
that…. He didn't insist on too many things,
because after all he wasn't home except on every other day.
Every night he was on the water, except the few days he'd
take for a little holiday. So he apparently was impressed with this
concern and sent him to public school. And I was not, I don't
guess, eligible to go, but my brother was thin, tall, and not combative,
whereas I was the opposite as far as being
combative. And when they began to rough him up, they wouldn't
do anything but roll him in the dirt, and he'd come home with
his clothes soiled. So I was sent to school to take care of the
situation. [Laughter]
- SUE THRASHER:
-
That was in Norfolk.
- ELLA BAKER:
-
In Norfolk. I was then between six and seven, I suppose. But it
didn't bother me. I reacted, you see. What size you were
didn't interfere with my reacting if I thought you were
imposing. And so it got to the point that we could come home in
peace.
- SUE THRASHER:
-
So there was a year there in Norfolk that you were in school before you
went to North Carolina.
- ELLA BAKER:
-
Yes, I think it must have been that.
- SUE THRASHER:
-
So then when you moved back to North Carolina, was that when you lived at
your aunt's house?
- ELLA BAKER:
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You mean when they moved back
- SUE THRASHER:
-
Yes. They moved to Philadelphia, and you moved to their place.
- ELLA BAKER:
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Yes, that's correct.
- SUE THRASHER:
-
And did you go then to a public school in North Carolina?
- ELLA BAKER:
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Yes.
- SUE THRASHER:
-
I'm interested in the time between then and when you went to
Shaw.
- ELLA BAKER:
-
I went to the public school and the teacher across the street and
Professor So-and-so. For all the time that I was in North Carolina, I
went to a public school.
- SUE THRASHER:
-
This was the town of Littleton?
- ELLA BAKER:
-
Littleton. The Norfolk Journal and Guide was started
there. This is the claim to fame. And it was right across from where we
were, they say. It had left when we got there, though. However, its name
is very indicative of the size of the place.
- SUE THRASHER:
-
It was really a very small place. Sort of a country settlement, or a
little larger than that?
- ELLA BAKER:
-
It was and still is a small town. You had blacks on East End. We were
what are called East End Avenue; that just meant the eastern part of the
town, the main road. And then you had a West End of blacks, and then on
certain parts of it the white community. I don't guess the
poorer whites lived right there in town, because it was dominated by a
family, and they lived in the better part, and this was Littleton.
- SUE THRASHER:
-
Was it built up around a farming community, or was there a mill there or
anything?
- ELLA BAKER:
-
It was largely farm. It was owned and controlled to a large extent by one
family, and the basic name of that family were the Johnsons. And then
the sisters, as they married, they were some of the dominant forces in
the economy of that little town, which didn't really change
very much in the sixty-odd years since we've been there. They
just stayed right there and tried to control things; that's
all. But it was basically a farm community. People would bring the
cotton in to the gin or cotton in that had been ginned.
They'd bring it to Littleton to be sold. Things like that.
Buy whatever you bought. Those who lived around
farm community.
- SUE THRASHER:
-
Was your family unusual in that it owned land? Did a lot of people
sharecrop or rent?
- ELLA BAKER:
-
There were a number of people who sharecropped and rented, but there were
also in certain pockets, like the little community Elums, where my
mother grew up and where my grandfather, who had bargained or whatever
else for a large tract of the old slave plantation which was broken up
into plots of forty and fifty acres. And his relatives settled on it.
This was to a large extent, by comparison, an independent community;
they were independent farmers. But they also went in for the practice of
cooperative…. Helping each other. When I came along, for
instance, I don't think there was but one threshing machine
for threshing the wheat. And so today they might be on
Grandpa's place, and all the people who had wheat who needed
the thresher would be there, or at least some from those families. And
then they would move around. There was a great deal of what might have
been a cooperative type of relationship at that stage, which does not
obtain now and did not last through my early adulthood. By the time I
was in college, King Cotton reigned supreme, and you had black farmers
who would raise fifty and sixty bales of cotton. And still they raised
all of their meat. Some of them would have and kill, in addition to hogs
(which was the common commodity), beef. And there was not too much
refrigeration, so you killed it and ate it, or with the hogs there were
certain parts which you'd cure like the hams and the lard and
all of that.
- SUE THRASHER:
-
Did the Johnsons own most of the land around there?
- ELLA BAKER:
-
Yes, they did. They owned it and they controlled it. They owned most of
it, especially in the town and out in the country. But that's
a long while ago. It's been sixty or more years since we
moved there.
But there was this section where we lived where the blacks, our
neighbors, each had their own place. Next to us was the Reverend Mr.
Hawkins, who, in addition to being a minister, was a bricklayer. And men
were artisans like brick plastering and so forth. And somebody else was
a carpenter. So you had at that time an intermixture. All of the heads
of the families and their wives who lived in the section we called East
End were at least literate. They had been to school somewhere, and many
of them had been to what might have been considered college or an
academy, because some of them had graduated from schools that are now
like Shaw University. Shaw was one of the earlier schools in North
Carolina established for blacks. So you had a high degree of literacy
and effectiveness in terms of public relations: speechmaking, leadership
qualities and the like.
- SUE THRASHER:
-
How big was the public school that you went to in North Carolina?
- ELLA BAKER:
-
We had two rooms. One was one big room. And I don't know how
many classes were in there, because I'd listen to all of
them.