Feeling Rebloggy
ELLA BAKER
ONE OF MANY
SELF-MADE FEMALE CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS
Born: December 13, 1903, Norfolk, VA
ELLA BAKER
ONE OF MANY
SELF-MADE FEMALE CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS
Born: December 13, 1903, Norfolk, VA
Died: December 13, 1986, New York City, NY
Ella Baker began her involvement with the NAACP in 1940. She worked as a field secretary and then served as director of branches from 1943 until 1946.
Inspired by the historic, [black female created] bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, Baker co-founded the organization In Friendship to raise money to fight against Jim Crow Laws in the deep South.
In 1957, Baker moved to Atlanta to help organize Martin Luther King's new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She also ran a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for Citizenship.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
- On February 1, 1960, a group of black college students from North Carolina A&T University refused to leave a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina where they had been denied service.
- Baker left the SCLC after the Greensboro sit-ins. She wanted to assist the new student activists because she viewed young, emerging activists as a resource and an asset to the movement. Miss Baker organized a meeting at Shaw University for the student leaders of the sit-ins in April 1960. From that meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee -- SNCC -- was born
- Adopting the Gandhian theory of nonviolent direct action, SNCC members joined with activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to organize the 1961 Freedom Rides.
- In 1964 SNCC helped create Freedom Summer, an effort to focus national attention on Mississippi's racism and to register black voters.
~Ella Baker Center
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