Ella Baker

Ella Josephine Baker, also known as Ella Jo Baker ( born December 13, 1903 in Norfolk ( Virginia), † December 13, 1986 in New York City ) was an African American civil rights activist.

Life and work

Childhood and education in North Carolina (1903-1927)

Ella Baker was born in Norfolk, where she spent the first years of life. Her father Blake Baker worked as a waiter on a steamboat, between Norfolk and Washington, DC drove. Her mother Georgianna Baker, born Ross, had been active before marriage as a teacher. The family also included Ella Baker's older brother Curtis Blake (* 1901) and her younger sister Margaret Odessa ( b. 1908 ). As Ella Baker was eight years old, she moved with her mother and her siblings to Littleton in North Carolina, while her father remained and further pursued his profession. In Littleton, she attended the Primary school. Through its also living there grandparents who were former slaves, Ella Baker learned early on from those associated with slavery human rights violations and the resistance of African-American slaves. So her grandmother Josephine Elizabeth Ross had been flogged, among other things, because she refused to marry a man whom the slave owners had selected for them. Ella Baker's grandfather Mitchell Ross had also been born a slave, was freed after the Civil War and bought his family a piece of land on which he had previously worked as a slave. He also preached for the local Baptist church. Baker was heavily influenced in their views by their grandparents.

Since there was no secondary school in Littleton, Baker moved to Raleigh in 1918, where she attended a boarding school, which was run by the Shaw University and the American Baptist Home Mission Society. First, she earned her high school diploma there. She then studied at the Shaw University, which specialized in contrast to many other open universities for African Americans on humanities rather than vocational training. Baker holds a bachelor's degree with a major in sociology as well as the fields of philosophy, languages ​​and mathematics, which she completed in 1927 after four years as valedictorian.

Living and working in New York (1927-1938)

Baker hoped to continue her studies in sociology at the University of Chicago, but the cost of living there could not afford. Instead, she went to New York City, where she at her cousin Martha Grinage († 1945) found shelter. Both had a close relationship to each other, since Grinage had lived after the death of her mother at the Bakers in North Carolina. In New York, Baker was a member of several feminist and socially committed organizations. Despite their good statements she found when blacks until 1929 only unskilled factory and waiter jobs. Then she worked as an editor of the American West Indian News and 1932 for the National News.

Through her work she met many African-American journalists, including George Schuyler ( 1895-1977 ). She joined the Young Negroes, which he founded in 1930 Cooperative League ( YNCL ), which campaigned for greater economic strength and well-paying jobs for African Americans. This objective should be achieved by a network of regional consumer cooperatives. In 1931, Baker directing the YNCL. She has toured cities in the eastern United States and helped there to establish consumer cooperatives of YNCL.

In October 1936 Baker accepted a position as a teacher of consumer education at the Workers' Education Project (WEP ) of the Works Progress Administration to, a newly established during the New Deal job creation authority. Soon after, she was deputy project manager of the WEP in Manhattan. In this role, coordinated and led workshops and they wrote pamphlets on consumer issues. To attract more African Americans to the project, she became involved in particular in Harlem. They also visited in 1936 the boundary School for Social Science in Manhattan and was there in the following year and even weekly classes for consumer questions which were addressed to women. Both in the office of the WEP and on the edge of Baker School had numerous contacts with political activists and became increasingly a part of the leftist circles of New York.

1938 Baker married her longtime boyfriend TJ Roberts, whom she had met during her final year at the university and worked in the refrigeration industry. It retained, however, contrary to the conventions of their last names on and kept covered in public about their marriage. The couple lived for almost twenty years in an apartment in Harlem. It had no biological children, but moved a few years Jacqueline Brockington on, the daughter of Baker's sister. She had been adopted by Baker and came in 1946 with nine years to them. In 1958, Baker and Roberts divorced.

Work in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1938-1946)

Baker came in 1938 when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ). She sat down now increasingly not only for consumer rights, but civil rights in general a. In 1941, she was the field secretary of the NAACP and was half a year in the southern United States on the way to attract new members. They grappled with both unskilled work as well as professionals and targeted cross-linking of the different layers to. During her travels, she also presented the future, including valuable contacts with African-American leaders of the civil rights movement. In their absence, appointed CEO Walter Francis White (1893-1955) it without first obtaining their consent in 1943 as Director of the national office of the NAACP. She took to the task and established in this position, among other regional Leadership Training Conferences, which served the formation of the NAACP leaders. From New York, this new training system was soon extended to other regions such as Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey. 1946 Baker announced with the official rationale of having to take care of her niece, what a long business trips excluded. However, there were other reasons for this decision. These included differences over the strategy of the NAACP between her and other leaders of the organization. In particular, with White often led to confrontations and Baker did not appreciate it to be against him accountable in all matters. While the NAACP consisted primarily to legal proceedings to enforce the goals, they preferred a more active, more direct policy and inclusion of members beyond the purely financial sponsorship.

Work in other civil rights organizations ( 1946 )

After Baker had quit her post of director at the NAACP, she worked as a fundraiser for the National Urban League Service Fund and various national health organizations. She became politically active and sat among others against the Immigration and Nationality Act. In 1951, she ran unsuccessfully as a member of the Liberal Party for a seat in the Legislative New York City Council. She was also re- worked for the NAACP the early 1950s, as a consultant and later President of the New York Youth Council. Later she worked in the Commission initiated junior by Mayor Robert F. Wagner for school integration and fought for desegregation and better possibilities to influence the parents of African-American school children.

Influenced by the Montgomery Bus Boycott, she was a co-founder of the organization In Friendship, collected the money for the fight against Jim Crow Laws. In 1957 she moved to Atlanta to coordinate the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC ), founded just by Martin Luther King. It built on the local head office of the SCLC and organized campaigns such as the Crusade for Citizenship, which was doubling the number of black voters within one year to the destination. You made ​​numerous trips through the southern United States, making speeches in front of thousands of interested and distributed brochures to convince the participants of the ideas of the movement.

In August 1960 Baker returned to the Shaw University. There she was involved until 1964 instrumental in the construction of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC ). She was represented at the idea of participatory democracy and thus influenced students and staff like Tom Hayden. She promoted active action against abuses and campaigns such as Freedom Summer, in which as many African American voters should be registered in Mississippi to vote.

Subsequently, Baker supported the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, founded in 1964, in which organized some of the newly registered voters. You gave a keynote speech at the nationwide conference in Jackson and helped in setting up the party 's offices in Washington. In 1967, she was employee of the Southern Conference Educational Fund ( SCEF ), one of Carl and Anne Braden founded ( 1924-2006 ) organization which campaigned against racial segregation. From 1972, she was Vice President of the Marxist Mass Party Organizing Committee. She advised numerous organizations campaigning for human rights and freedom.

Baker died at her 83rd birthday at a severe asthma attack in Harlem, New York. Her grave is located on the Flushing Cemetery in Queens. An archive of the New York Public Library held their estate.

Commemoration

Ella Baker is honored by various institutions in the United States through the use of their name. So has the New York Center for Constitutional Rights since 1987 Ella Baker Summer Internship Program, the law students with emphasis supported by courses and scholarships on social justice.

In Manhattan there are a leading up to the 8th grade Ella Baker School.

In Oakland is the seat of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, an organization founded in 1996, which campaigns for social justice in the United States.

On the occasion of its centenary a nationally available stamp sheet with six 42 -cent stamps were the NAACP in 2009 out on which, among other pioneers of the American civil rights movement, Ella Baker is shown together with Ruby Hurley ( 1909-1980 ).

1981 turned Joanne Grant a documentary about the life of Ella Baker. Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker won several awards at international film festivals and in 1983 nationwide broadcast on Public Broadcasting Service.