Oral history interview with Elaine DeLott Baker, 2001

Biographical Note

Elaine DeLott Baker was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Jewish family of Russian descent. She attended Radcliffe College and took part in the Freedom Summer of 1964 as a teacher and community organizer. She joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and worked in Batesville, Mississippi, helping local farmers organize cooperatives. Baker wrote "The Position of Women in the Movement" with Casey Hayden, Mary King, and other early feminists. She moved to New York before enrolling in the University of Colorado's doctoral program in Educational Leadership and Innovation. Baker is an expert in career pathways for low-skilled adults and accelerated developmental education learning communities. She works as the Acceleration Specialist for the Colorado Community College System's Trade Adjustment Act and serves on the system's Developmental Education Task Force

Scope and Contents

Baker discusses her family and her childhood; the early influence of her grandmother; and her parents' experience living and working in the Deep South. Baker describes her attitudes towards sexuality, her expulsion from Radcliffe College, and her participation at the Tougaloo College summer school program in Jackson, Mississippi. She describes designing surveys during the 1964 Freedom Summer and the importance of the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service elections. Other topics of discussion include: her arrest; farming cooperatives for black farmers; Baker's identity as a white woman and its impact on her work; the emotional stress and physical danger of activism; and the role of white participants in the civil rights movement. Baker explains the movement's relationship with integration, Black Power, and black leadership. She reflects on the importance of her activism and its influence on her personal identity

Subjects

• African American farmers--United States.
• African Americans--Suffrage--Mississippi.
• Baker, Elaine DeLott--Interviews.
• Civil rights movements--United States--History--20th century.
• Civil rights workers--Mississippi--History--20th century.
• Interviews.
• Michaels, Sheila, 1939-2017, interviewer.
• Oral histories (literary works)
• United States--Race relations--History--20th century.