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Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement
"Strong people don't need strong leaders,"


Ella Baker was part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) along with Martin Luther King Jr. She felt that the SCLC was not treating her as an equal because she was a woman. There was a job opening for Permanent Executive Director, and Baker felt she was never seriously considered for the job. She had background work that showed she could handle the job, yet was only used as a temp.

As a child Ella attended missionary meetings with her mother, and when she joined up working with King they clashed. Ella felt that what the black community needed was to uplift itself. In the Black Freedom Movement, King was seen as a "Messiah" and the black people looked at him as if he was not human. Baker thought that the efforts and focus should be on each person in the movement and the movement as a whole. Ella believed that it was the people in the pews that made the difference. She looked at ordinary people like Rosa Parks who was just tired and didn't give up here seat, and in return started the Montgomery Boycott, the students in Greensboro at the lunch counter. Those were the people you sit beside at church not the people preaching to you, and she felt they were to be looked at as the leaders of the movement no matter what their class status was, no matter their age or sex.

Ella Baker and Martin Luther King Jr. had a very significant relationship. They worked together to bring the movement up, and when King was stabbed it was Ella that took over his touring and gave speeches. She even took care of his book profits and sales, yet when it was back to the issues of the movement Baker felt King had created a hierarchy in the conference and was making the movement a black mirror of the system it was working against.





-Jayka Montoya