BHM Spotlight: Ella Baker
posted by Tyjahn Stokes | February 12, 2021 | In Arts and Culture, NewsBefore she was a major founder of many of the organizations and demonstrations that drove the Civil Rights Movement, Ella Josephine Baker was local to the same geography as Fayetteville State University.
Baker was born in 1903 in Norfolk, VA, but her family eventually moved to Littleton, North Carolina which is two hours from Fayetteville. She went to college at another HBCU, Shaw University, where her good grades led to her becoming valedictorian.
Since she was born before the Civil Rights Movement, she was not too far removed from slavery. In fact, her grandmother was a slave and her grandmother’s slave owner picked another slave for her to marry, but she refused and was ultimately whipped for disobeying her slave owner.
All of her grandmother’s stories lit a fire in her to become a Civil Rights activist. After college in 1927, she moved to the New York City to find a job, however, she was shocked to discover a lot of people during this time were unemployed and even worse, living in poverty because of the Great Depression. This causes her to find her passion, which was social justice.
In the beginning of the 1930s, she ended up playing a role in setting up the Young Negroes Cooperative League to help Black people achieve economic power with jobs and help provide them with resources and affordable goods and services to members.
She was so passionate and adamant about helping all people, not only Black people by saying, “People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job.”
Baker then began to work with the NAACP in the late 1930s and joined the staff for their advancement for Black people in 1940. She began as a field director then later on served as a director of branches from 1943 to 1946, and decided to work in trying to integrate New York City schools to help young Black children.
As time went on, the Civil Rights Movement was formulating and the fight for change was becoming more and more a reality. Baker became inspired by the Montgomery boycotts in 1955 and started an organization called “In Friendship” to raise money to fight against Jim Crow Laws. Then, she moved to Atlanta in 1957 to help Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s organization Southern Christian Leadership Conference and even fought for Black people to be able to register to vote without difficulty due to the color of their skin.
In February 1,1960 a group of students from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University conducted a sit-in in Greensboro, where the students were denied service. When Baker got a-hold of this she decided leave SCLC, and organized a meeting at Shaw University because she believed the younger generation could be a key component in fighting for change. This caused her to help form another organization called SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) going the MLK route with nonviolence. This helped create the 1961 Freedom Rides and, in 1964, the organization created Freedom Summer to help register blacks to vote, and to put an emphasis and show Mississippi’s deep-rooted issue with racism.
Thus, Baker believed in the young generation to carry the torch for freedom. She believed this so much, so she acquired a nickname called “Fundi” which means a person who teaches a craft to the next generation. It is important to keep fighting for change, and even more to instill the next generation with values and morals and to always keep fighting for change whether it affects you directly or not.
Photo Illustration courtesy of Ron Cogswell
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.