Ella Baker

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 .

Live and act

Childhood and Education in North Carolina (1903-1927)

Ella Baker was born in Norfolk, where she also spent the first years of life. Her father, Blake Baker, worked as a waiter on a steamboat that ran between Norfolk and Washington, DC . Her mother, Georgianna Baker, nee Ross, had been a teacher before the marriage. The family also included Ella Baker's older brother Blake Curtis (* 1901) and her younger sister Margaret Odessa (* 1908). When Ella Baker was eight years old, she moved to Littleton , North Carolina with her mother and siblings , while her father stayed behind and continued to work. In Littleton she attended primary school . Through her grandparents, who were also former slaves , who also lived there , Ella Baker learned early on of the human rights violations associated with slavery and the resistance of African-American slaves . Her grandmother, Josephine Elizabeth Ross, had been flogged, among other things, for refusing to marry a man chosen for her by the slave owner. Ella Baker's grandfather, Mitchell Ross, was also born a slave, was set free after the Civil War and bought a piece of land for his family on which he had previously worked as a slave. He also preached for the local Baptist church . Baker was strongly influenced in her outlook by her grandparents.

Since there was no secondary school in Littleton, Baker moved to Raleigh in 1918 , where she attended a boarding school supported by Shaw University and the American Baptist Home Mission Society. First she graduated from high school there . She then went to Shaw University, which, unlike many other African American colleges, specialized in the humanities rather than vocational training. Baker completed a bachelor's degree with a major in sociology and philosophy, languages ​​and mathematics, which she graduated in 1927 after four years as the best of the year.

Living and working in New York (1927–1938)

George Schuyler (1941), founder of the Young Negroes Cooperative League , which Baker directed from 1931

Baker hoped to continue her sociology studies at the University of Chicago , but could not afford the cost of living there. Instead, she went to New York City , where she found accommodation with her cousin Martha Grinage († 1945). The two were closely related, as Grinage had lived with the Bakers in North Carolina after her mother's death. In New York, Baker became a member of various feminist and socially engaged organizations. Despite her good graduation, as a black woman she only found unskilled factory and waiter jobs until 1929. Then she worked as an editor for the American West Indian News and in 1932 for the National News .

Through her work she met many African American journalists, including George Schuyler (1895–1977). She joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League (YNCL) he founded in 1930 , which campaigned for more economic power and well-paid jobs for African Americans. This goal should be achieved through a network of regional consumer cooperatives . In 1931 Baker took over the management of the YNCL. She toured cities in the eastern United States and helped establish the YNCL's consumer cooperatives there.

In October 1936, Baker took a position as a consumer education teacher with the Workers' Education Project (WEP) of the Works Progress Administration , a newly formed employment agency as part of the New Deal . Soon after, she became deputy project manager for the WEP in Manhattan. In this role she coordinated and led workshops and wrote brochures on consumer issues. In order to introduce more African-Americans to the project, she was particularly involved in Harlem. She also attended the Rand School for Social Science in Manhattan in 1936, where she also gave weekly courses in consumer issues aimed at women the following year. Both in the WEP office and at the Rand School, Baker had numerous contacts with politically active people and increasingly became part of the left-wing circles of New York.

In 1938, Baker married her longtime boyfriend, TJ Roberts, whom she met during her senior year at university and who worked in the refrigeration industry. However, contrary to convention, she kept her last name and kept quiet about her marriage in public. The couple lived in an apartment in Harlem for almost twenty years . She had no biological children, but raised Jacqueline Brockington, the daughter of Baker's sister, for a few years. She had been adopted by Baker and joined them in 1946 when she was nine years old. In 1958, Baker and Roberts divorced.

Served in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1938–1946)

Walter Francis White (1942), executive director during Baker's work for the NAACP

Baker joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1938 . She now increasingly advocated not just consumer rights, but civil rights in general. In 1941 she became area secretary of the NAACP and spent six months in the southern United States to win new members. In doing so, she dealt with both unskilled workers and skilled workers and sought to network the different layers. During her travels, she also established important contacts with Afro-American leaders of the civil rights movement. In her absence, managing director Walter Francis White (1893–1955) appointed her director of the NAACP's national branch in 1943, without having obtained her prior consent. She accepted the task and in this position established, among other things, regional leadership training conferences that served to train NAACP executives. From New York, this new training system was soon expanded to other regions such as Pennsylvania , Maryland and New Jersey . In 1946 Baker resigned on the official grounds that he had to look after her niece, which ruled out long business trips. However, there were other reasons for this decision. This included differences between the NAACP and other leaders of the organization about the strategy of the NAACP. Confrontations with White in particular were frequent, and Baker did not appreciate being accountable to him on all matters. While the NAACP relied primarily on litigation to enforce its goals, it preferred a more active, direct policy and involvement of members beyond purely financial support.

Work in other civil rights organizations (from 1946)

After Baker quit her director position at the NAACP, she initially worked as a fundraiser for the National Urban League Service Fund and various national health organizations. She was politically active and campaigned against the Immigration and Nationality Act , among other things . In 1951 she ran unsuccessfully as a member of the Liberal Party for a seat on the legislative New York City Council . She worked again for the NAACP in the early 1950s, as a consultant and later president of the New York Youth Council . Later she worked in the commission for school integration initiated by Mayor Robert F. Wagner junior and advocated desegregation and better influence of the parents of African-American school children.

Influenced by the Montgomery bus boycott , she co-founded In Friendship , an organization that raised money to fight the Jim Crow Laws . In 1957 she moved to Atlanta to watching from Martin Luther King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to coordinate (SCLC). She set up the SCLC's main office there and organized campaigns such as the Crusade for Citizenship , which aimed to double the number of black voters within a year. She made numerous trips through the southern United States, gave speeches to thousands of interested people and distributed brochures to convince participants of the movement's ideas.

In August 1960, Baker returned to Shaw University. Until 1964 she was instrumental in setting up the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She represented the idea of participatory democracy and thus influenced students and employees like Tom Hayden . She promoted active action against grievances and campaigns such as Freedom Summer , in which as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi should be registered to vote.

Baker then supported the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party , founded in 1964 , in which some of the newly registered voters organized. She gave a keynote address at their Jackson statewide session and helped establish the party's Washington office. In 1967 she became an employee of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), an organization founded by Carl and Anne Braden (1924-2006) that campaigned against racial segregation . From 1972 she was Vice President of the Marxist Mass Party Organizing Committee . She advised numerous organizations that campaign for human rights and freedom.

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

Commemoration

Ella Baker with Malcolm X , Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass on a mural in Philadelphia , titled with a quote from Baker: "We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest"

Ella Baker is honored by the use of her name by various institutions in the United States. The New York Center for Constitutional Rights has been running an Ella Baker Summer Internship Program since 1987 , which supports law students with a focus on social justice through courses and scholarships.

In Manhattan there is an Ella Baker School that runs up to 8th grade.

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

On the occasion of its centenary in 2009, the NAACP issued a nationwide sheet of stamps with six 42-cent stamps, on which Ella Baker and Ruby Hurley (1909–1980) are shown along with other pioneers of the American civil rights movement .

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

literature

  • Christa Buschendorf: "Black Leadership: Prophetic Voices of Resistance". In: Michael Butter , Astrid Franke and Horst Tonn (eds.): From Selma to Ferguson: Race and Racism in the USA . Transcript, Bielefeld 2016, ISBN 978-3-8376-3503-4 . Pp. 215-230.
  • Renate Wanie: On the influence of the Afro-American civil rights activist Ella Baker in the non-violent resistance against racism in the USA in the 1960s and the discrimination of women in their own ranks , FriedensForum 5/2004 online
  • Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson: From Protest to Politics. Women in the black civil rights movement and in the United States Congress . North American Studies. Campus publishing house. Frankfurt / M. 1998
  • Clayborne Carson: Times of Struggle. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Awakening of African-American Resistance in the 1960s . Verlag Graswurzelrevolution. Münster, 2004. 638 pp., 28.80
  • Barbara Ransby: Ella Baker And The Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 2003, ISBN 0-80786-270-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Who Was Ella Baker? ellabakercenter.org. Retrieved February 27, 2013.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Michael D. Cary: Baker, Ella (1903–1986) In: Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia Gale Group, Detroit 2000.
  3. ↑ a b c Shaw University Archives, RG / 05 Office of Alumni Affairs, Ella Josephine Baker (PDF; 105 kB) shawu.edu. Retrieved February 27, 2013.
  4. ↑ Barbara Ransby: Ella Baker And The Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. P. 144.
  5. ^ Sarah M. Iler: The Libertarian Sage: The Conservatism of George S. Schuyler. November 2010, p. 36. Retrieved February 27, 2013.
  6. ↑ Barbara Ransby: Ella Baker And The Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Pp. 91-94.
  7. ↑ Barbara Ransby: Ella Baker And The Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. P. 145.
  8. ↑ Barbara Ransby: Ella Baker And The Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. P. 103.
  9. ^ Oral History Interview with Ella Baker, Reasons for leaving the NAACP. Southern Oral History Program Collection, April 19, 1977. Retrieved February 27, 2013.
  10. ↑ Ellen Cantarow, Susan Gushee O'Malley, Sharon Hartman Strom, Florence Luscomb, Ella Baker, Jessie Lopez De La Cruz: Moving the Mountain: Women Working for Social Change. Feminist Press at CUNY, 1980, ISBN 0-91267-061-4 , p. 54.
  11. ↑ Ella Josephine Baker In: Find a Grave . Retrieved February 27, 2013.
  12. ↑ Ella Baker papers, 1926-1986 nypl.org. Retrieved February 27, 2013.
  13. ^ Ella Baker Summer Internship Program ccrjustice.org. Retrieved February 27, 2013.
  14. ↑ Ella Baker School ellabakerschool.net. Retrieved February 27, 2013.
  15. ↑ About Us ellabakercenter.org. Retrieved February 27, 2013.
  16. ↑ NAACP continues 100th Anniversary Celebration with Release of Civil Rights Pioneer Stamps ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. naacp.org. Retrieved February 27, 2013.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.naacp.org
  17. ↑ Ella Baker's lifework to be nationally aired. In: The Afro American February 5, 1983, p. 12. Retrieved February 27, 2013.
personal data
SURNAME Baker, Ella
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Baker, Ella Josephine; Baker, Ella Jo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American civil rights activist
DATE OF BIRTH December 13, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Norfolk
DATE OF DEATH December 13, 1986
Place of death New York City