Isabel Wilkerson Ella Josephine Baker, the quiet shepherd of the Civil Rights Movement, who worked alongside Martin Luther King and W.E.B. DuBois, helped found SNCC and mentored the likes of Stokely Carmichael and Rosa Parks, was born on this day, Dec. 13,1903, in Norfolk, VA. She grew up in North Carolina, and, after finding little opportunity in the Jim Crow South upon graduating Shaw University in Raleigh, she fled to New York during the Great Migration. She helped guide and organize most every major event in the civil rights era -- from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the March in Selma to the Freedom Rides and the student sit-ins of the 1960s that have inspired the die-ins across the country today in protest over police brutality. She had worked as a waitress, factory worker and editorial assistant on a black newspaper before becoming active in the NAACP in New York, eventually becoming national director. She would devote her life to working at the ground level in the South to recruit, inspire, and strategize the nonviolent demonstrations that would help change the region she had fled. It was her deep understanding of the nature of the caste system in the South and the North that helped her strategize so effectively at key moments. After the victory of the 381-day bus boycott, Baker suggested that Dr. King take the movement beyond Montgomery to press for equality throughout the South. The NAACP was based in New York, and she knew that a movement would need to be southern in origin so that participants wouldnt be dismissed as northern troublemakers or agitators. Dr. King was at first was reluctant to push his followers after the draining boycott, but she insisted that it was crucial that to keep up the momentum. The modern Civil Rights Movement had only just begun. She would direct and inspire students and sharecroppers, ministers and intellectuals, but held a fervent belief in the power of ordinary people to change their destiny. That was, after, all, what she and six million other African-Americans did in defecting the Jim Crow South during the leaderless revolution known as the Great Migration. Strong people do not need strong leaders, she once said. Give light and people will find the way. She died in New York at age 83 on Dec. 13, 1986, the same date that she had been born. Watch her speaking in this video from the Ella Baker Center: https://m.youtube/watch?v=OjCibLwkOaw For more on her life, read the definitive biography, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, by historian Barbara Ransby. -- The1
Posted on: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 09:57:34 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015