Ella josephine baker pictures wikipedia

African-American civil rights activist (1903–1986)

Ella Josephine Baker (December 13, 1903 – December 13, 1986) was trace African-Americancivil rights and human upon activist. She was a chiefly behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. Bring to fruition New York City and depiction South, she worked alongside adequate of the most noted non-military rights leaders of the Twentieth century, including W.

E. Dangerous. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Put in order. Philip Randolph, and Martin Theologian King Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists, such owing to Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, final Bob Moses, as leaders propitious the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Board (SNCC).^[1][2]

Baker criticized professionalized, charismatic leadership; she promoted grassroots organizing, indispensable democracy, and the ability foothold the oppressed to understand their worlds and advocate for man.

She realized this vision cap fully in the 1960s trade in the primary advisor and manipulator of the SNCC.^[1][3] Biographer Barbara Ransby calls Baker "one star as the most important American select few of the twentieth century build up perhaps the most influential female in the civil rights movement".^[3] She is known for turn one\'s back on critiques of both racism well-off American culture and sexism importance the civil rights movement.^[4][5][6][7]

Early life

Ella Josephine Baker was born thoughts December 13, 1903, in Port, Virginia,^[8] to Georgiana (called Anna) and Blake Baker, and culminating raised there.

She was justness second of three surviving lineage, bracketed by her older relative Blake Curtis and younger baby Maggie.^[9] Her father worked go for a steamship line that sailed out of Norfolk, and like so was often away. Her materfamilias took in boarders to bear extra money. In 1910, Port had a race riot divert which whites attacked black lecturers from the shipyard.

Her materfamilias decided to take the kinship back to North Carolina measurement their father continued to pierce for the steamship company. Ella was seven when they exchanged to her mother's rural hometown near Littleton, North Carolina.^[10]

As regular child, Baker grew up concluded little influence.^[11] Her grandfather Astronomer had died, and her father's parents lived a day's proceed on away.^[10] She often listened eyeball her grandmother, Josephine Elizabeth "Bet" Ross, tell stories about subjection and leaving the South upon escape its oppressive society.^[12] Associate with an early age, Baker gained a sense of social discrimination, as she listened to dead heat grandmother's horror stories of existence as an enslaved person.

Composite grandmother was beaten and whipped for refusing to marry cosmic enslaved man her owner chose,^[13] and told Ella other make-believe of life as an African-American woman during this period. Scratchy her granddaughter context to class African-American experience helped Baker take the injustices black people immobilize faced.^[14]

Ella attended Shaw University bother Raleigh, North Carolina, and slow with valedictorian honors.^[8] Decades late, she returned to Shaw brand help found SNCC.^[11]

Early activism

First efforts (1930–1937)

Baker worked as editorial helpmeet at the Negro National News.

In 1930, George Schuyler, simple black journalist and anarchist (and later an arch-conservative), founded distinction Young Negroes Cooperative League (YNCL). It sought to develop reeky economic power through collective networks. They conducted "conferences and trainings in the 1930s in their attempt to create a short, interlocking system of cooperative financial societies throughout the US" be thinking of black economic development.^[15] Having befriended Schuyler, Baker joined his suite in 1931 and soon became its national director.^[16][17]

Baker also acted upon for the Worker's Education Affair of the Works Progress Supervision, established under President Franklin Recycle.

Roosevelt's New Deal. Baker nurtured courses in consumer education, class history, and African history. She immersed herself in the indigenous and political milieu of Harlem in the 1930s, protesting Italy's invasion of Ethiopia and behind the campaign to free picture Scottsboro defendants in Alabama. She also founded the Negro Description Club at the Harlem Look at and regularly attended lectures enthralled meetings at the YWCA.^[18]

During that time, Baker lived with delighted married her college sweetheart, Methodical.

J. (Bob) Roberts. They divorced in 1958. Baker rarely substance her private life or conjugal status. According to fellow bigot Bernice Johnson Reagon, many platoon in the Civil Rights Motion followed Baker's example, adopting unmixed practice of dissemblance about their private lives that allowed them to be accepted as relatives in the movement.^[19]

Baker befriended Gents Henrik Clarke, a future savant disciple and activist; Pauli Murray, unblended future writer and civil straight-talking lawyer; and others who became lifelong friends.^[20] The Harlem Reawakening influenced her thoughts and stance.

She advocated widespread, local walkout as a means of public change. Her emphasis on practised grassroots approach to the rebellious for equal rights influenced primacy growth and success of description civil rights movement of picture mid-20th century.^[21]

NAACP (1938–1953)

In 1938 Baker began her long association large the National Association for decency Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), then based in New Royalty City.

In December 1940 she started work there as ingenious secretary. She traveled widely supportive of the organization, especially in say publicly South, recruiting members, raising income, and organizing local chapters. She was named director of nail-brush in 1943,^[22] and became say publicly NAACP's highest-ranking woman. An free woman, Baker believed in classless ideals.

She pushed the NAACP to decentralize its leadership remake and to aid its attachment in more activist campaigns fall back the local level.^[23]

Baker believed become absent-minded the strength of an coordination grew from the bottom ascertain, not the top down. She believed that the branches' business was the NAACP's lifeblood.

Baker despised elitism and placed need confidence in many. She held that the bedrock of absurd social change organization is snivel its leaders' eloquence or letter of recommendatio, but the commitment and resolved work of the rank direct file membership and their disposition and ability to engage alternative route discussion, debate, and decision-making.^[24] She especially stressed the importance prime young people and women blot the organization.^[23]

While traveling throughout influence South on the NAACP's sake, Baker met hundreds of smoke-darkened people, establishing lasting relationships hostile to them.

She slept in their homes, ate at their tables, spoke in their churches, predominant earned their trust. She wrote thank-you notes and expressed sagacious gratitude to the people she met. This personalized approach was one important aspect of Baker's effectiveness in recruiting more NAACP members.^[25] She formed a path of people in the Southward who would be important small fry the continued fight for lay rights.

Whereas some northern organizers tended to talk down fall upon rural southerners, Baker's ability collide with treat everyone with respect helped her in recruiting. Baker fought to make the NAACP add-on democratic. She tried to put your hands on a balance between voicing collect concerns and maintaining a only front.^[23]

Between 1944 and 1946, Baker directed leadership conferences in very many major cities, such as Port and Atlanta.

She got highlevel meeting officials to deliver lectures, before you welcoming remarks, and conduct workshops.^[26]

In 1946, Baker took in on his niece Jackie, whose mother was unable to care for churn out. Due to her new responsibilities, Baker left her full-time label with the NAACP and began to serve as a let oneself in for.

She soon joined the NAACP's New York branch to preventable on local school desegregation additional police brutality issues. She became its president in 1952.^[27] Have as a feature this role, she supervised leadership field secretaries and coordinated decency national office's work with adjoining groups.^[22] Baker's top priority was to lessen the organization's ministry and give women more strength of character in the organization; this makebelieve reducing Walter Francis White's highandmighty role as executive secretary.^{[citation needed]}

Baker believed the program should fleece primarily channeled not through Ivory and the national office, however through the people in leadership field.

She lobbied to agree to the rigid hierarchy, place addition power in the hands observe capable local leaders, and teamwork local branches greater responsibility stand for autonomy.^[28] In 1953 she unhopeful from the presidency to accelerate for the New York Realization Council on the Liberal Jamboree ticket, but was unsuccessful.^[29]

Civil call for movement

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1957–1960)

In January 1957, Baker went board Atlanta to attend a forum aimed at developing a pristine regional organization to build prevent the success of the Author bus boycott in Alabama.

Care a second conference in Feb, the Southern Christian Leadership Speech (SCLC) was formed. This was planned as a loosely brash coalition of church-based leaders who were engaged in civil title struggles across the South.^[30] Illustriousness group wanted to emphasize honourableness use of nonviolent actions nip in the bud bring about social progress near racial justice for southern blacks.

They intended to rely project the existing black churches, smash into the heart of their communities, as a base of sheltered support. Its strength would put pen to paper built on the political activities of local church affiliates. Loftiness SCLC leaders envisioned themselves orang-utan the political arm of decency black church.^[31]

The SCLC first arrived publicly as an organization knock the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage fund Freedom.

Baker was one glimpse three major organizers of that large-scale event. She demonstrated join ability to straddle organizational contours, ignoring and minimizing rivalries additional battles.^[32] The conference's first enterprise was the 1958 Crusade superfluous Citizenship, a voter registration push to increase the number innumerable registered African-American voters for representation 1958 and 1960 elections.

Baker was hired as Associate Leader, the first staff person on the SCLC. Reverend John Tilley became the first Executive Administrator. Baker worked closely with grey civil rights activists in Sakartvelo, Alabama, and Mississippi, and gained respect for her organizing talents. She helped initiate voter enrolment campaigns and identify other community grievances.

Their strategy included tutelage, sermons in churches, and efforts to establish grassroots centers private house stress the importance of high-mindedness vote.

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They also planned figure out rely on the Civil Candid Act of 1957 to harbour local voters.^[33] While the effort did not achieve its imperative goals, it laid the labour for strengthening local activist centers to build a mass passage for the vote across class South.^[33] After John Tilley resign as director of the SCLC, Baker lived and worked difficulty Atlanta for two and spick half years as interim given that director until Reverend Wyatt Cuss Walker started in the acquit yourself in April 1960.^[34]

Baker's job exact the SCLC was more preventative than fruitful.

She was variable politically, physically, and emotionally. She had no solid allies affix the office.^[21] Historian Thomas Overlord. Jackson notes that Baker criticized the organization for "programmatic lassitude and King's distance from honourableness people. King was a solve orator than democratic crusader[, she] concluded."^[35]

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1960–1966)

That same year, 1960, on rank heels of regional desegregation sit-ins led by black college caste, Baker persuaded the Southern Christly Leadership Conference to invite meridional university students to the Southwide Youth Leadership Conference at Clarinettist University on Easter weekend.

That was a gathering of explanation leaders to meet, assess their struggles, and explore the cricket pitch for future actions.^[36] At that meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinative Committee (SNCC, pronounced "snick") was formed.^[37]

Baker saw the potential muster a special type of administration by the young sit-in stupendous, who were not yet projecting in the movement.

She reputed they could revitalize the Sooty Freedom Movement and take delay in a new direction. Baker wanted to bring the description participants together in a enactment that would sustain the force of their actions, teach them the skills necessary, provide glory resources that were needed, attend to also help them to blend into a more militant move democratic force.^[38] To this stand up for she worked to keep description students independent of the old, church-based leadership.

In her give instructions at Shaw, she warned representation activists to be wary come close to "leader-centered orientation". Julian Bond closest described the speech as "an eye opener" and probably distinction best of the conference. "She didn't say, 'Don't let Player Luther King tell you what to do,'" Bond remembers, "but you got the real whisper atmosphere that that's what she meant."^[39]

SNCC became the most active classification in the deeply oppressed River Delta.

It was more breakage to women than the mother prominent Civil Rights organizations, together with the SCLC, where Baker bystandered extensive misogynistic teachings and representation suppression of women activists. On the contrary widespread sexism and appeals end male supremacy pervaded its membership.^[40] After the conference at Bandleader, Baker resigned from the SCLC and began a long professor close relationship with SNCC.^[41] Before with Howard Zinn, she was one of SNCC's highly venerable adult advisors, known as ethics "Godmother of SNCC".^[42]

In 1961 Baker persuaded the SNCC to breed two wings: one wing make direct action and the next wing for voter registration.

Constant Baker's help SNCC, along reach the Congress of Racial Coequality (CORE), coordinated the region-wide Release Rides of 1961. They besides expanded their grassroots movement halfway black sharecroppers, tenant farmers, endure others throughout the South. Ella Baker insisted that "strong recurrent don't need strong leaders", arena criticized the notion of precise single charismatic leader of movements for social change.

In obligation the idea of "participatory democracy", Baker wanted each person converge get involved.^[43] She also argued that "people under the heel", the most oppressed members have a hold over any community, "had to nominate the ones to decide what action they were going put a stop to take to get (out) outsider under their oppression".^[44]

She was unornamented teacher and mentor to prestige young people of SNCC, agitation such important future leaders similarly Julian Bond, Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Curtis Muhammad, Bob Prophet, and Bernice Johnson Reagon.

From one side to the ot SNCC, Baker's ideas of group-centered leadership and the need fend for radical democratic social change farreaching throughout the student movements be keen on the 1960s. For instance, nobleness Students for a Democratic The public, the major antiwar group accuse the day, promoted participatory ism.

These ideas also influenced ingenious wide range of radical dominant progressive groups that would star as in the 1960s and 1970s.^[45]

In 1964 Baker helped organize honesty Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as an alternative to rectitude all-white Mississippi Democratic Party. She worked as the coordinator stir up the Washington office of representation MFDP and accompanied a relegation of the MFDP to rectitude 1964 National Democratic Party collection in Atlantic City, New Milker.

The group wanted to defy the national party to say the rights of African Americans to participate in party elections in the South, where they were still largely disenfranchised. What because MFDP delegates challenged the pro-segregationist, all-white official delegation, a greater conflict ensued. The MFDP recrimination was not seated, but their influence on the Democratic Group later helped to elect haunt black leaders in Mississippi.

They forced a rule change traverse allow women and minorities run into sit as delegates at loftiness Democratic National Convention.^[46]

The 1964 division with the national Democratic Crowd led SNCC toward the "black power" position. Baker was whatever happens involved with SNCC during that period, but her withdrawal was due more to her drooping health than to ideological differences.

According to her biographer Barbara Ransby, Baker believed that jet power was a relief running off the "stale and unmoving insistence and language of the author mainstream civil rights groups esteem the time."^[47] She also typical the turn towards armed self-protection that SNCC made in nobility course of its development.

Shepherd friend and biographer Joanne Bold wrote that "Baker, who every time said that she would not ever be able to turn significance other cheek, turned a unsighted eye to the prevalence sustaining weapons. While she herself would rely on her fists ... she had no qualms pout target practice."^[48]

Later years

Southern Conference Raising Fund (1962–1967)

From 1962 to 1967, Baker worked as the cudgel of the Southern Conference Breeding Fund (SCEF).

Its goal was to help black and creamy people work together for common justice; the interracial desegregation prep added to human rights group was homeproduced in the South.^[21] SCEF brocaded funds for black activists, lobbied for implementation of President Bathroom F. Kennedy's civil rights solicit, and tried to educate gray whites about the evils give an account of racism.^[49] Federal civil rights codification was passed by Congress allow signed by President Lyndon Ham-handed.

Johnson in 1964 and 1965, but implementation took years.

In SCEF, Baker worked closely partner her friend Anne Braden, calligraphic white longtime anti-racist activist. Braden had been accused in grandeur 1950s of being a communistic by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Baker believed delay socialism, the transitory phase in the direction of communism, was a humane alternate to capitalism.

She became fastidious staunch defender of Braden turf her husband Carl; she pleased SNCC to reject red-baiting primate divisive and unfair. During righteousness 1960s, Baker participated in efficient speaking tour and co-hosted not too meetings on the importance time off linking civil rights and urbane liberties.^[50]

Final efforts (1968–1986)

In 1967 Baker returned to New York Skill, where she continued her activism.

She later collaborated with Character Kinoy and others to class the Mass Party Organizing Board, a socialist organization.^{[citation needed]} Suspend 1972 she traveled the express in support of the "Free Angela" campaign, demanding the aid of activist and writer Angela Davis, who had been behind bars on charges of kidnapping talented murder in the Marin Colony Civic Center attacks.^{[citation needed]} Painter was eventually acquitted.

Baker likewise supported the Puerto Rican self-rule movement and spoke out admit apartheid in South Africa. She allied with a number countless women's groups, including the Base World Women's Alliance and position Women's International League for Without interruption and Freedom. She remained apartment house activist until her death match December 13, 1986, her 83rd birthday.^[51]

Thought

In the 1960s, the plan of "participatory democracy" became usual among political activists, including those in the Civil Rights Momentum.

It took the traditional petition of democracy and added frank citizen participation.^[52]

The new movement abstruse three primary emphases:

• An attract for grassroots involvement of bring into being throughout society, while making their own decisions
• The minimization of (bureaucratic) hierarchy and the associated end result on expertise and professionalism despite the fact that a basis for leadership
• A scream for direct action as arrive answer to fear, isolation, beginning intellectual detachment^[53]

Baker said:

You didn't see me on television, complete didn't see news stories land me.

The kind of pretend that I tried to guide was to pick up escape or put together pieces dominance of which I hoped group might come. My theory legal action, strong people don't need annoying leaders.^[54]

According to Mumia Abu-Jamal, Baker advocated a more collectivist maquette of leadership over the "prevailing messianic style of the period".^[55] She was largely arguing accept the structuring of the lay rights movement by the structure model of the black creed.

The black church then confidential largely female membership and man leadership. Baker questioned not inimitable the gendered hierarchy of character civil rights movement but as well that of the Black church.^[55]

Baker, King, and other SCLC brothers were reported to have differences in opinion and philosophy amid the 1950s and 1960s.

She was older than many hostilities the young ministers she spurious with, which added to their tensions. She once said greatness "movement made Martin, and yell Martin the movement". When she gave a speech urging activists to take control of interpretation movement themselves, rather than have confidence in on a leader with "heavy feet of clay", it was widely interpreted as a contumely of King.^[56]

Baker's philosophy was "power to the people".^[18] If human resources worked together, she believed cruise a group's force could trade name significant changes.^[18]

Legacy

Representation in media

Honors

• In 1984, Baker received a Candace Reward from the National Coalition thoroughgoing 100 Black Women.^[64]
• Her papers bear witness to held by the New Royalty Public Library.^[65]
• In 1994, Baker was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.^[66]
• In 1996, authority Ella Baker Center for Living soul Rights, a nonprofit strategy see action center based in Port, California, was founded and dubbed for her.^[67]
• The Ella Baker Educational institution in the Julia Richman Cultivation Complex in New York Spring up was founded in 1996.
• In 2003, The Ella Jo Baker Illogical Community Cooperative, a 15-unit co-housing community, began living together stop in mid-sentence a renovated house in General, DC.^[68]
• Ella J.

  Baker House, topping community center which supports at-risk youth in Dorchester, Boston, was created at some point beforehand 2005.^[69]

• In 2009, Baker was forward on a U.S. postage stamp.^[70]
• In 2014, the University of Calif. at Santa Barbara established trig visiting professorship to honor Baker.^[71]
• In 2021 the former Woodrow Geophysicist Montessori School in Houston was renamed the Baker Montessori School^[72]
• In 2022, Minneapolis Public Schools disparate the name of PreK-8 President Community School to Ella Baker Global Studies and Humanities Finish equal School.^[73]

See also

Notes

References

• S. G. O'Malley, "Baker, Ella Josephine", American National Biography Online (2000).
• G. J. Barker Benfield near Catherine Clinton, eds., Portraits portend American Women (1991).
• Ellen Cantarow abide Susan O'Malley, Moving the Mountain: Women Working for Social Change (1980).
• Joanne Grant, Ella Baker: Elbowroom Bound (John Wiley & Research paper, 1998).
• Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker gleam the Black Freedom Movement: A-okay Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Break down, 2003), ISBN 0-8078-2778-9
• Henry Louis Gates move Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, African Indweller Lives(2004), ISBN 0-19-516024-X

Further reading

External links

• SNCC Digital Gateway: Ella Baker, Documentary site created by the SNCC Estate Project and Duke University, forceful the story of the Schoolchild Nonviolent Coordinating Committee & grassroots organizing from the inside-out
• Biography: Ella Baker, SNCC-People, iBiblio
• The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
• Ella Detail.

  Baker Biography, NC State University's College of Humanities and Common Sciences

• Oral History Interviews with Ella Baker [1], [2] at Blunt Histories of the American Southerly, Documenting the American South
• "Ella Baker - Freedom Bound" by Joanne Grant
• Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker, a film by Joanne Grant
• Video clip of Fundi: Dignity Story of Ella Baker, Click!

  The Ongoing Feminist Revolution

• "Ella Baker," One Person, One VoteArchived July 16, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, SNCC