Ohio State Newark Honors Ella Baker
The work, by sculptor Dana King, is the first of the Civil Rights activist.
A nearly decade-long effort to recognize Civil Rights activist Ella Baker was finally realized on Oct. 15 at Ohio State Newark. Ten years ago a committee of faculty, students and staff met to discuss a possible addition to the campus’s public art collection; they were hoping for a work consistent with those in the Great Contributors series, a sculptural gathering of historical figures on long-term loan to the university from the Reese family via their Thomas J. Evans Foundation.
Selecting Ella Baker
In 2017, the committee, working with representatives from Student Government, selected Baker as the figure they wanted to commemorate. Largely as a result of the pandemic, it was another five years before a call for proposals was sent out, and another 18 months beyond that before sculptor Dana King’s proposal for a statue of Baker titled A Luta Continua (“The Struggle Continues”) was finally selected.
The Artist and the Statue
King was chosen in part because of her previous work. She had already made sculptures of California Assemblyman William Byron Rumford for the city of Berkeley; 19th-century engineer and entrepreneur William Lanson for New Haven, Connecticut; and professional baseball player Toni Stone, the first woman to play in the Negro Leagues, whose statue now stands in a San Francisco square adjacent to the Giants’ stadium.
As that list indicates, King has an affinity for those people, specifically Black Americans, whose recognition, like that of Ella Baker, is long overdue. A Luta Continua is Ms. King’s ninth public artwork in the U.S., but the very first by anyone, anywhere of Ella Baker.
The design for A Luta Continua went through several iterations before arriving at its final version. The realized work includes, among the protest posters that surround Baker, a burnished mirror and a quote from Baker herself: “The struggle is eternal. The tribe increases. Somebody else carries on.” Below those words King added her own: “Will it be you?”
“The mirror is a really powerful addition,” said Vice Provost for the Arts Lisa Florman. “It addresses us individually but asks us to join with others in making positive change. And it does so here on the campus of Ohio State Newark, so that its audience is comprised primarily of students, the young people that Ella Baker saw as the hope of any movement.”
Ella Baker’s Legacy
Baker was involved in political activism for over 50 years, right up until her death in 1986. She is perhaps best known for the work she did in 1960, when at the age of 57 she took leave from her position as executive secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta to go to Greensboro, North Carolina, where students from North Carolina A&T University were staging a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter from which they had been refused service.
Miss Baker, as she was affectionately known to the students, not only supported them then but subsequently helped to organize a meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina at her alma mater, Shaw University, for the A&T protestors as well as other young activists from across the south. From that event, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was born.
Although SNCC would never have taken shape without Baker’s involvement, she insisted that the organization be student-led and that it center the group rather than any individual leader. In that sense, Baker is almost always described as having worked behind the scenes, but it might be better to say that she was committed to a non-hierarchical organizational structure. She pledged herself to the idea that every single person has within themselves the capacity to strengthen their communities and thereby shape the future. “Strong people,” she said, “don’t need strong leaders.”