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"I have a dream."
Those words may be the most famous words ever spoken.
Doctor Martin Luther King roused a nation with those words in Washington D.C. in
1963.
He dreamed of all God's children: black and white, Jew and gentile,
Protestant and Catholic.
This speech was the highlight of ten years of protests and boycotts and legal
challenges.
The protests were peaceful.
They met fire hoses with the quiet energy of peaceful resistance.
They met ferocious dogs and sheriff's deputies with the extraordinary calm.
They were organized.
They were thoughtful.
They were guided by the light of reason and love for each other and their
country.
Can you imagine what it must have been like
to organize all those protests?
Who decided where to rally?
Who got the permits?
Who prepared bail
for all of the arrests?
Who called the media?
Who wrote the speeches?
What was it like behind the scenes
of the lunch counter sit in
or rally at the park?
Who made sure grandma and grandpa would be there,
standing tall
for equality?
I'll tell you.
It was Ella Josephine Baker.
Ella Baker was the campion
behind the scenes of the fight for equality.
The 1960s brought great change and great turmoil.
They also presented the great turning point in American history,
where people of color demanded and won equality with all Americans.
The Civil Rights movement was massive:
boycots and protests,
sit-ins in restaurants, legal challenges in the courts--all led to the
1954
Brown vs. Board of Education,
ending segregation in schools.
The Civil Rights Act passed ten years later
gave people of all races equal rights to work, live, and be free
in their own country.
The modern Civil Rights movement that broke the barriers of segregation
featured many familiar faces:
Thurgood Marshall,
Rosa Parks,
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
But protest movements are often fought in the trenches,
organizing protests and sit-ins,
lectures and conferences that inspire and create the blueprint of a movement.
Throughout all of it,
Ella Josephine Baker--
steadfast and headstrong--
pushed organizations like the NAACP
and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference into action.
It took someone with incredible vision, strength, and organizational skills to be
able to put those things together. Ella Baker, I think, was unique in the fact
that she was able to
do all of those things.
Ella Baker was one of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee,
which showed the American people just what kind of injustice was being dealt
to American citizens of color.
Most of her experience
on the job was organizing committees in protest, so that was her background.
Their peaceful resistance to harrassment, arrest,
and violence
helped generate sympathy and move public opinion away from segregation and toward
equality.
The underlying message that Martin Luther King was pushing--and that was
that of nonvoilence--he learned it
from Mahatma Ghandi, that you don't
exhibit violence for violence.
As though we were...we had that
from the very beginning: "If you're not going to be this way,
then we don't want you as a part of this movement, because
you've got to be strong enough
to deal with this." When you talk about this nonviolent
posturing that we see being taken on by Dr. King
and members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
understand that it was a real strategy. It was a strategy to put the onus on
that other person; they then become the aggressor
if you're the one who is sitting there simply trying to exercise your right
to eat hamburger in a lunch counter.
Though she never gained a kind of fame that so many civil rights leaders of the
time did,
those leaders listened to Ella Josephine Baker.
An eloquent writer and forceful speaker,
Ella challenged her African-American brothers and sisters
to face violence with nonviolence.
They put aside their fears to confront what were known as Jim Crow Laws,
a set of legal standards that kept African-Americans from having equal
rights to vote, work,
and live freely in society.
I think you'd had to instill a sense
of concern in any human being that had
an ounce of of love in their heart,
that this is not right. This is definitely wrong.
Something has got to be done.
She was a guru of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
and she had a philosophy
which was very straightforward. She didn't believe
in one person being the leader.
And whenever they got in
to a campaign, they would always turn to Ella Baker for advice and counsel.
And I think that was a great contribution
through the struggle of the sixties.
To her dying breathe, Ella Baker
fought for justice.
She said late in her life,
"In order for us as poor and repressed people,
to become a part of a society that is meaningful,
the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed."