February 15 - Ella Baker (1938-1953)

"Her political activism began in Harlem in the 1930s. She worked with the cooperative movement during the Great Depression; supported the campaign against Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia; and opposed the racist conviction of the famed Scottsboro boys.

Baker was a field secretary and director of branches for the N.A.A.C.P. in the 1940s, and she traveled throughout the Jim Crow South, organizing against discrimination and recruiting people to the Civil Rights Movement. She worked alongside King and others in the Southern Christian Leadership Council in the 1950s and was a mentor to the young activists who founded the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in 1960. S.N.C.C. went on to lead the 'Freedom Rides,' in which participants risked life and limb to desegregate interstate transportation, and then to organize 'Freedom Summer,' a massive voter registration drive targeting disenfranchised black southern voters." (Ransby, B., 2020)

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Caitlyn CobbVoting Rights, #VRABlackHistory, alabama, SCLC, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Fred Shuttlesworth, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Martin Luther King Jr., Martin Luther King, MLK, James Bevel, Children's Crusade, The Children's Crusade, Dorothy Cotton, Civil Rights Movement, BlackHistoryMonth, Black History Month 2020, Black women in the women's suffrage movement, Ella Baker, Ella Josephine BakerComment