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management-in-all-1222-blog · 8 years ago

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In honor of Black History Month I wanted to post some ladies who are making moves today that will no doubt land them in the history books of the future

Shonda Rhimes Writer and owner of ShondaLand production company which boasts credits of the shows Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away With Murder. Shonda has received a Golden Globe Award as well as Awards from the Writer’s, Producer’s and Director’s Guilds of America. As well as having shows that resulted in three women of color winning the Screen Actor’s Guild Award for Best Actress in a Drama Series. Her TGIT line-up on ABC is chipping away at the public’s conceptions of leading ladies with diverse casts and captivating story lines.

Serena Williams has been ranked No. 1 in women’s singles Tennis on six separate occasions. After recently winning the 2015 Australian Open she now holds 19 Grand Slam single titles. She has never lost a women’s double competition, and always partnered with her sister, Venus Williams. She has also won four Olympic medals and is the most recent player to hold all four Grand Slam titles at once.

Laverne Cox Producer and actress. The first openly transgender person to appear on the cover of Time magazine. She is also the first transgender woman to ever be nominated for an Emmy award for her portrayal of Sophia Burset on the Netflix series Orange is the New Black. She is also the first African American transgender person to produce and star in her own show, TRANSform Me. She also created a documentary called Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word that aired on MTV and Logo and told the stories of transgender youths.

Quvenzhané Wallis At only 11 years old Quvenzhané has made more history than most people accomplish in their life time. She is the youngest actress to ever receive an Oscar nomination as granted for her role as Hushpuppy in Beasts of the Southern Wild. She also starred in the 2014 remake of Annie as the first African American Annie in any of the three major movies created from the title. The role resulted in her first Golden Globe nomination. She is also the first major child celebrity to be the face of a luxury brand by holding the spot as the face of Armani Junior.

Beyoncé With a career spanning over 18 years Beyoncé has managed to keep her influence fresh and powerful the entire time. She is the most nominated woman in Grammy Award history and has the second most wins for a black woman (behind Aretha Franklin) and the third most wins for women overall. She is the highest paid black musician in history. She was the Top Certified artist in Billboard during the 2000s decade. Her 4 album was reported as the most illegally downloaded album of 2011 with over 10 million downloads. It may not mean anything money wise, but it does show that people everywhere are clamoring for her music.

Chandra Wilson has garnered acting and directing credits in her long standing career. She has been nominated for 23 different titles and is the first African American woman to win the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series for playing Dr. Miranda Bailey, a character originally envisioned as white woman, on Grey’s Anatomy. She also made her directing debut with Season 6 Episode 7 of Grey’s Anatomy.

Viola Davis Just one 11 minute performance was enough to land Viola an Oscar nomination for the movie Doubt and just two years later she was nominated for another Oscar for her performance in The Help. Viola has also won two Tony Awards and recently added a Screen Actors Guild Award under her belt. Viola also stars as the groundbreaking Annalise Keating in How to Get Away With Murder. A character who, while being older than your typical leading lady, and lacking all the usual paleness associated with those considered the most desirable in Hollywood is complex, sexy, smart, cunning, and vulnerable.

Janet Mock Author of the New York Time’s best selling publication Redefining Realness that chronicles her life as a transgender woman. Mock was the first person in her family to go to college and works in creating education programs specific to transgender people. She was honored at the 2012 GLAAD Media Awards for her work in transgender activism. She is also a contributing editor at Marie Clare magazine and has been featured on the cover of CANDY magazine.

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management-in-all-1222-blog · 8 years ago

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“Nobody is free until everybody is free”

When young civil rights workers arrived in Ruleville in the Mississippi Delta in 1962, they were looking for local black people who could help convince their neighbors to register to vote. They found forty-four-year-old Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer was attracted to the young people, especially those in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). “They treated us like we were special and we loved ‘em,” she said. “We trusted ‘em.” For the rest of her life, Hamer would work in the Civil Rights Movement on both the state and national stage. She felt that civil rights was her calling, her mission.

After the meeting at Williams Chapel Church in Ruleville, seventeen people went with Hamer to the Sunflower County seat of Indianola to try to register on August 31, 1962. The prospective voters felt threatened by men with rifles in the back of their pickup trucks who circled the courthouse ominously. At that time, Mississippi required people registering to vote to interpret a randomly selected section of the state constitution, a complicated document. Prospective black voters inevitably failed the test, whether they were well-educated or not. Even after several years of effort in Sunflower County, by the spring of 1965 only 155 black people — 1.1 percent of those eligible to vote — were registered, while more than 7,000 whites were registered, or 80 percent of those eligible to vote.

No one was registered that August day. Hamer, who had a booming voice, sang to try to calm people’s fears on the bus taking them home. Years later, Harry Belafonte, who often appeared with Hamer at movement events, said her songs “from the heart would bring another dimension” to the action when people got down to whatever business was at hand. Before or after her speeches, Hamer would inspire her listeners by singing a song that soon became associated with her, “This Little Light of Mine.”

The day of the registration attempt in Indianola, Hamer lost her job on the W. D. Marlow plantation where she had worked as a timekeeper for eighteen years, and where her husband, Perry Hamer, worked as a tractor driver. The owner objected to her attempt to register to vote. Later that fall Hamer attended a SNCC leadership training conference at Fisk University. She then returned to the Indianola courthouse until officials finally allowed her to register to vote that December.

Hamer, born Fannie Lou Townsend on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, was the youngest of twenty children. Her parents, Ella and James Lee Townsend, were sharecroppers, which meant that at harvest time, they turned their crops over to the landowner and were paid a small amount for their share. They moved to Sunflower County to work on the E. W. Brandon plantation when Hamer was two years old. By age six, she was weeding the cotton field, then helping to pick the cotton. Hamer went to school through the eighth grade, which was more schooling than many black children had at the time.

In 1944, Fannie Lou Townsend married Perry Hamer, whom everyone called “Pap,” and they lived on the Marlow plantation outside Ruleville. When Marlow learned that Mrs. Hamer could read and write, he made her the record keeper for the plantation. The Hamers had no children of their own, but they raised two girls from impoverished homes, and later adopted the two daughters of one of them who died. Hamer was respected in both the white and black communities as someone who could help settle disputes and always had a moment to hear a neighbor’s problem. She had deep religious beliefs; she had been brought up in the church and relied on its strength.

In the fall of 1962, Robert Moses of SNCC invited Hamer to a convention at Fisk University, thus launching her career as a leader of the civil rights movement. In 1963, she again tried to register to vote, this time succeeding. In June of the same year, Hamer and several other black women were arrested for sitting in a “whites-only” bus station restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina. That night, the group was brutally beaten at the jailhouse. Hamer suffered a blood clot in her eye, kidney damage, and permanent injury to her leg. After three days in jail she was released, immediately resuming her work as an activist with renewed commitment to the movement.

For the next several years, Fannie Lou Hamer worked to secure the social, economic, and political rights of the African-American community. Hamer became a SNCC field secretary in early 1963. A few months later, she attended a citizenship training school sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Charleston, South Carolina, to learn how to teach her neighbors about the benefits of citizenship. On the bus trip home in June, the bus made a rest stop in Winona, Mississippi. Annelle Ponder of SCLC, who was traveling with the group, said that three or four of the people went in to the café to be served. They sat at the counter but the waitress refused to serve them. A highway patrolman came from the rear of the café and tapped some of the group on the shoulder with his billy club, saying, “Y’all get out — get out.” Ponder reminded him it was against the law to refuse them service but he said, “Ain’t no damn law, you just get out of here!”

On the way back to the bus, Ponder wrote down the license number of the patrol car and at that, the patrolman and police chief came out of the restaurant and put the cafe group under arrest. As that was occurring, Hamer got off the bus to see whether the rest of the group should go on to Greenwood. The police chief arrested her as well. Later the police had two other black prisoners beat Hamer and 15-year-old June Johnson, who would not say “sir” to the men. In a trial later that year, an all-white jury acquitted the law officers. Hamer recalled, “After I got out of jail, half dead, I found that Medgar Evers had been shot down in his own yard.”

In Freedom Summer 1964, more young people, white and black, came to Mississippi to join the voting rights effort. Civil rights workers decided to dramatize the discrimination blacks faced in Mississippi by challenging the all-white delegation that would be selected to represent the state at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Black people from around the state tried to participate in selecting delegates who would nominate the party’s presidential candidate, but were turned away.

In 1964, she co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and spoke at the Democratic National Convention at which she called for mandatory integrated state delegations.They held their own meetings and selected sixty-eight people to represent them at the convention. Aaron Henry, a druggist from Clarksdale and longtime NAACP activist, headed the delegation, and Hamer was the delegation’s vice chair.

At a national convention, the party’s credentials committee considers any challenges and decides who will be seated to vote on the nominees. The MFDP lined up its witnesses, including the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the national Civil Rights Movement leader. Hamer gave the most dramatic presentation. Telling about being jailed and beaten, she concluded, “All of this is on account we want to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America …”

At the zenith of the Civil Rights Movement, Hamer pioneered numerous political and humanitarian efforts. In 1964, she announced her candidacy for the Mississippi House of Representatives but was barred from the ballot. In response, the MFDP introduced Freedom Ballots that included all candidates, black and white. Though it was unofficial, Hamer won the Freedom Ballot.

U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey, who would become the party’s candidate for vice president, sought a compromise at the request of President Lyndon Johnson that would give the MFDP two seats and the promise of reform for the 1968 convention. That made Hamer angry. “We didn’t come here for no seats ‘cause all of us is tired,” she said. The MFDP delegates rejected the compromise, but the convention delegates did not know that when they voted to accept it, and almost all the white Mississippians walked out.

After the fall election, Hamer and two other women, Victoria Gray Adams of Hattiesburg and Annie Devine of Canton, challenged the seating of the five-member Mississippi Congressional delegation, Thomas G. Abernethy, William Colmer, Prentiss Walker, Jamie L. Whitten, and John Bell Williams. They charged that because blacks were kept from registering, the election was unfair. Hundreds of their supporters went to Washington when the Congressional session opened in January 1965, and Hamer, Adams, and Devine were given guest seats in the House chamber that day. Yet later, on September 17, 1965, the House of Representatives rejected their challenge, 228-143.

Hamer did not relent in her activities. In 1966, she walked with Dr. King and Andrew Young as they resumed the march against fear that James Meredith had launched across the state. Meredith, who had been the first black student at the University of Mississippi, had to halt his march when he was shot from ambush. Hamer also raised money to support election activities in two Delta towns. She lost a bid to become a board member for the Sunflower County anti-poverty agency in 1967 because she questioned their authority and the true value of the agency’s programs to poor people. Local whites had united behind her opponent, a black man.

In 1968 the Democratic Party, which by then required its state parties to integrate, seated Hamer as a delegate at its presidential nominating convention in Chicago. Anti-Vietnam War violence in the streets overshadowed the seating of the integrated Mississippi delegation, but Hamer spoke from the podium on behalf of a challenge to the Alabama party. In 1968, Hamer became a member of Mississippi’s first integrated delegation.

That year she started what she called a Pig Bank with the help of the National Council of Negro Women to help people in her community improve their diets. Hamer bought thirty-five gilts (females) and five boars (males), and the pregnant gilts were loaned to local families. They could keep the piglets that were produced and return mama pig to the bank. Some three hundred families benefited from this program. The following year Hamer established Freedom Farm with a similar goal of providing food and some economic independence to local people. She remained active in anti-poverty efforts such as Head Start because she saw the link between education, jobs, and political influence. She also founded “Head Start in the Delta” and acquired federal funding for housing projects.

In 1970 Hamer filed a lawsuit charging that Sunflower County schools were not properly desegregating. The following year, she joined with feminist activists in founding the National Women’s Political Caucus. She helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971, speaking for inclusion of racial issues in the feminist agenda.

She said that women of all different colors should join to form a powerful voting majority in the country. “A white mother is no different from a black mother. The only thing is they haven’t had as many problems. But we cry the same tears.”

Hamer ran for the Mississippi Senate in 1971 against the incumbent, Robert Crook. She campaigned with Carver Randle, an NAACP leader in Indianola who was running for the state House of Representatives. The pair ran on a platform urging that state and local governments hire more minorities for jobs previously held by whites, and to appoint more minorities to government positions. Randle said, “I was impressed with her openness and frankness no matter who was in attendance.” He said Hamer also felt that educated people in the black community “were much better equipped to do what she was doing, yet they didn’t have the fortitude to do it.” Hamer lost the election, 11,770 votes to 7,201.

Ill health filled Hamer’s last years. She had had polio as a child and had been sterilized without her knowledge while hospitalized in 1961. After a lengthy hospitalization for nervous exhaustion in January 1972, she managed to travel that summer to the Democratic National Convention in Miami where she seconded the nomination of Texas Lieutenant Governor Frances “Sissy” Farenthold for vice president. She was hospitalized again in January 1974 for a nervous breakdown, but a few weeks later reported that she felt better than ever. That June a group from Madison, Wisconsin, that had worked with her on Freedom Farm came to Ruleville and found her “in the worst health ever, heavily medicated for pain and dependent on Pap and a neighbor” to keep the household going. In the spring of 1976 she had breast cancer surgery.

These ailments took their toll and she died March 14, 1977, of heart failure brought on by cancer, diabetes, and hypertension. Hundreds of people attended her funeral six days later in Ruleville where Andrew Young, then the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, gave her eulogy, saying, “None of us would be where we are now had she not been there then.”

Hamer felt forgotten near the end of her life, which came during an ebb in national interest in the Civil Rights Movement. Years later, however, at least two universities — Jackson State University in Mississippi and California State University, Northridge — named academic institutes in her honor, and in 1993 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. The Ruleville post office carries her name today, as do a community center, a memorial park, a youth activities center, and the street on which she lived. Fannie Lou Hamer is remembered.

Engraved on her headstone in her hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi, are her famous words: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

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management-in-all-1222-blog · 8 years ago

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“My mark is being made as long as I’m standing six feet above ground”

Monica Roberts, aka the TransGriot, is a native Houstonian and trailblazing trans community leader. She works diligently at educating and encouraging acceptance of trans people inside and outside the larger African-American community and is an award winning blogger, history buff, thinker, lecturer and passionate advocate on trans issues.

Monica seeks to not only end the erasure of African-American trans voices from a movement they played significant roles in starting, but get African-American transpeople and other voices of color more involved in empowering themselves. Her activism focus is educating the TBLG community and allies about our issues and concerns in addition to shedding light about the struggles of GLBT people across the African Diaspora.

Monica was a founding member of the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition and served from 1999-2002 on the inaugural board as NTAC’s Political Director. She was a co-host on the GLBT themed radio show ‘After Hours’ on KPFT-FM from 1999-2001, served on the boards of Louisville’s Fairness Campaign and C-FAIR, and helped organize the 2005 and 2006 Transsistahs-Transbrothas Conferences that took place in that city.

She wrote a newspaper column from 2004-2007 for the Louisville-based GLBT newspaper The Letter that was the precursor to the award winning TransGriot blog she founded in January 2006 and participated in the historic trans themed panel discussion at Netroots Nation 2012.

Her writing about transgender issues from a Black perspective has appeared at Ebony.com, Loop21.com, Transadvocate, Racialicious, Feministe, Global Comment, The Bilerico Project, What Tami Said and Womanist Musings.

She’s advocated for trans human rights protections since 1998 and has lobbied at the federal, state and local levels in Kentucky and Texas. In 2006 she became the third African-American trans person and the first African-American Texan to be given the IFGE Trinity Award, the transgender community’s highest meritorious service award.

Link to interview with Monica

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management-in-all-1222-blog · 8 years ago

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Lucy Hicks Anderson was a pioneer in the fight for marriage equality. She spent nearly sixty years living as a woman, doing domestic work, and working as a madam. During the last decade of her life, she made history by fighting for the legal right to be herself with the man she loved.

After marrying her second husband, soldier Reuben Anderson, in Oxnard, California, in 1944, local authorities discovered that she was assigned male at birth. The couple was charged with perjury for marrying despite their both being legally male, resulting in ten years of probation. Standing up to the charges against her, Anderson said, “I defy any doctor in the world to prove that I am not a woman. I have lived, dressed, acted just what I am, a woman.” Years later, Anderson and her husband were charged again, this time with fraud after she received federal money reserved for military spouses. Both went to prison and were banned from Oxnard upon their release.

Lucy Hicks Anderson spent the remainder of her life in Los Angeles until her death in 1954, at age 68, leaving behind a legacy of authenticity and determination in the face of unjust laws.

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management-in-all-1222-blog · 8 years ago

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Sistren: Black Women Writers at the Inauguration of Sister President Johnnetta B. Cole, Susan J. Ross, 1988

Top Row: Louise Meriwether, Pinkie Gordon Lane, Johnnetta Cole and Paula Giddings.Middle Row: Pearl Cleage, Gwendolyn Brooks and Toni Cade Bambara. Bottom Row: Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni and Mari EvansPhoto sourced from The Feminist Wire’s Toni Cade Bambara Forum

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management-in-all-1222-blog · 8 years ago

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“Give light and people will find the way”

Ella Josephine Baker helped found the U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT and organize three national CIVIL RIGHTS organizations.

Baker was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on December 13, 1903, the second of three children of Georgianna Ross Baker and Blake Baker. Baker’s mother insisted that her children do well in school, because she felt that they needed an education in order to live a full life. Baker was sent to a private boarding school from ninth grade to twelfth grade, after her mother decided that she and her siblings were not receiving high-quality instruction in the public school they had been attending. In 1918, Baker began studying at Shaw University, an all-black school in Raleigh, North Carolina, that offered high school and college-level instruction.

Baker graduated from Shaw University in 1927, ranked first in her class. However, she did not have enough money for further schooling to become either a medical missionary or a social worker, occupations to which she had aspired. Her college degree in hand, she went to New York City.

While living in New York, Baker wrote articles for Harlem newspapers, including the West Indian Review. Living and working in Harlem during the mid-to late 1920s, she became a part of the Harlem Renaissance, a period of high artistic achievement and greater awareness of the possibilities for equality, justice, and true freedom. Baker participated in political discussions with many people, all over New York City. She later recalled, “Wherever there was a discussion, I’d go. It didn’t matter if it was all men, and maybe I was the only woman … it didn’t matter.”

In the early days of the Great Depression, Baker was working for a Harlem newspaper along with George Samuel Schuyler, who was well known in the black community for his writing and who frequently railed against racial prejudice. In one article, Schuyler proposed that African Americans set up cooperatives to purchase goods in larger quantities, at lower prices than they could get otherwise. The response to this article was so positive that Schuyler decided to set up a cooperative on his own with Baker’s help. Baker learned a great deal in this experience, and became an acknowledged expert on consumer affairs, a new idea that she helped introduce to the black community nationwide. In 1935, she was hired by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a group of programs set up by President FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT’s NEW DEAL, to teach people living in Harlem how to purchase the most for the little money they had.

Baker worked for the WPA until 1938, when she left to become an assistant field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the first civil rights organization established in the United States.

At that time the NAACP had fewer members in the South than in any other part of the United States, and most of its members were professionals—doctors, lawyers, and teachers. Baker believed that the organization had to reach the larger population of working people in order to accomplish its tasks. She targeted factory workers, household workers, and construction workers and tried to get them to support the NAACP. By 1941, thanks to Baker and the other NAACP field staffers, the NAACP’s southern membership rolls had increased significantly.

In 1942 Baker was promoted to director of branches for the organization. In that position, she helped branch offices organize fund-raising and membership drives and encouraged them to become involved in local affairs to improve the lot of black people in their communities. Through her contact with the branch offices, the organization became aware of court cases they could bring on behalf of blacks who were denied their civil rights, such as access to public institutions of higher education.

“STRONG PEOPLE DON’T NEED STRONG LEADERS.” —ELLA BAKER

In 1954 Baker was named as president of the New York City branch of the NAACP. In May of that year, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed.873. The Court ruled in Brown that “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites were unconstitutional. As a result, school districts in cities across the nation had to make sure they were not violating the law. Based on her experience raising her niece, Jackie, Baker believed that New York City schools were segregated, and she and other community leaders pressured city hall to examine the school system more closely for evidence of illegal SEGREGATION. The next year, the mayor of New York City asked Baker to join his newly created Commission on School Integration.

To present the commission’s findings to parents of schoolchildren, Baker set up meetings around New York City. When she found that many parents were deeply concerned over the quality of their neighborhood schools, Baker encouraged them to petition the school board to allow their children to attend schools of their own choosing. In response to the petitions, New York developed one of the first open-enrollment plans for public schools. Open enrollment allowed public school students to attend schools outside their own neighborhoods, without requiring them to change their residency or pay extra tuition or transportation costs.

A new chapter in the civil rights movement began when ROSA PARKS refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus on December 1, 1955. In Montgomery, black passengers could sit only in the back of the bus, behind the first ten rows of seats. Whites could sit in the black section of the bus, but when they did, a black person could not sit next to or in front of a white person. And black people could be forced to give up their seats if a white person had no place to sit.

Parks was an officer of the NAACP’s Montgomery branch and had worked with Baker on the NAACP’s Leadership Conference, a program designed to help local members develop their leadership skills. In support of Parks, leaders of Montgomery’s black community, including Dr. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., organized a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. The boycott lasted from December 1, 1955, until December 20, 1956, when blacks in Montgomery heard that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled on December 17 that Montgomery’s bus segregation laws were unconstitutional (Gayle v. Browder, 352 U.S. 903, 77 S. Ct. 145, 1 L. Ed. 2d 114 [Nov. 13, 1956], reh'g denied, 352 U.S. 950, 77 S. Ct. 323, 1 L. Ed. 2d 245).

After the success of the MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT, Baker and others eventually convinced King to call a meeting of southern black leaders to plan to extend the battle. The meeting King called was to take place in Atlanta on January 11, 1957. The evening before, several locations in Montgomery were bombed, including homes of white and black supporters of the civil rights movement. King and the Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, whose home was one of those bombed, left the meeting to investigate the incidents. Baker and an associate stayed in Atlanta to manage the conference with Coretta Scott King and the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth. This meeting was the beginning of the SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE (SCLC), an umbrella organization for groups fighting for civil rights.

One of the SCLC’s first nationwide efforts was the Crusade for Citizenship, a voter registration program. By September 1959, when the organization had not motivated masses of African Americans to register, Baker proposed three changes that she believed would result in a stronger organization. The first suggestion was to create an overarching plan to coordinate the activities of SCLC member groups. The second was to actively develop the leadership skills of people in the member organizations who had demonstrated abilities in that area. The third was to organize black southerners to fight every form of discrimination by using mass action and nonviolent resistance.

One method of nonviolent resistance, the sit-in, was used as early as 1942 by a civil rights organization called the CONGRESS OF RACIAL EQUALITY (CORE) to protest RACIAL DISCRIMINATION. Not until 1960, however, were sit-ins widely used as a form of protest. In February 1960, four black students sat at the lunch counter in a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina. They were refused service, because it was a “whites-only” lunch counter, but remained seated until the store closed for the day. News of the incident spread quickly, and area high school and college students joined them in the following days. By the end of March, students had staged sit-ins in many other southern cities. Baker realized that although the sitins were generating publicity for the civil rights movement, their influence would be greater if they were better coordinated, so in April 1960 Baker organized a conference for student civil rights activists at Shaw University. Over three hundred students attended the meeting, which was the genesis of the STUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE (SNCC). Among those attending were Marion Barry, future mayor and future city council member of Washington, D.C., and JULIAN BOND, future Georgia legislator.

Baker resigned from the SCLC and became SNCC’s adviser and organized its main office. SNCC developed a unique, separate identity within the civil rights movement because of Baker’s style of leadership. Baker believed that everyone in an organization should lead it, so she made sure that everyone in attendance at meetings stated an opinion, and that no other single civil rights leader or organization, including the NAACP and King, directed the activities of the committee. When SNCC nearly split apart over whether to pursue direct action (such as the Montgomery bus boycott and the Greensboro sit-ins) or voter registration, Baker suggested that the organization could do both, setting the stage for the 1961 Freedom Rides.

The Freedom Rides were begun in 1961 as a response to a 1960 ruling, Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 206, 81 S. Ct. 182, 5 L. Ed. 2d 206, in which the Supreme Court decided that interstate buses and trains, and the facilities in the terminals that served them, could not constitutionally remain segregated. The ruling was flagrantly ignored throughout the South. The Freedom Riders, who were both black and white, intended to stop the segregation by traveling together along the routes where segregated facilities were located. The Freedom Rides drew the attention of the Congress, which began debate on a civil rights bill in the summer of 1963. The 1964 CIVIL RIGHTS ACT, as the bill was called, was finally passed on July 2, 1964, guaranteeing African Americans EQUAL PROTECTION in the use of hotels, restaurants, and other public establishments; in job opportunities, raises, and promotions; and in the use of public schools (Pub. L. No. 88-352, 78 Stat. 241).

While the Freedom Riders traveled across the South, SNCC also pursued voter registration. In 1963, Baker went to Mississippi to help with the Freedom Vote, a project of CORE and SNCC. The Freedom Vote was a mock election intended to demonstrate that, contrary to the opinions held by many white southerners, blacks were interested in voting. Baker assisted the project by speaking at rallies, setting up polling places, and collecting and counting the ballots on voting day. The Freedom Vote was a big success: more than 80,000 of the 90,000 people who cast ballots that day were black, even though only around 20,000 blacks were registered for real elections. Two years later, in August 1965, the efforts of Baker and thousands of other activists bore fruit when the VOTING RIGHTS ACT (Pub. L. No. 89-110, 79 Stat. 437) was passed. The Voting Rights Act nearly eliminated one of the last ways that had been used to prevent African Americans from voting—the literacy test—by prohibiting its use in states where fewer than 50 percent of eligible voters were registered.

In 1964 Baker again helped organize a civil rights group. The group was the Mississippi Freedom DEMOCRATIC PARTY (MFDP), begun in response to an established political party, the Mississippi Democratic party. The MFDP attempted to represent the state of Mississippi at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, by claiming that, as an interracial group, it was better able to do so than the all-white Mississippi Democratic party. HUBERT H. HUMPHREY, vice president of the United States, and Walter F. Mondale, Minnesota attorney general, suggested a compromise: two MFDP members could be named as delegates to the convention, but would not be part of Mississippi’s delegation. The MFDP refused this offer, but its request was the catalyst for a new rule passed by the national Democratic party, that all state delegations would have to be racially mixed.

After achieving notable successes in the U.S. civil rights movement, Baker continued to serve as SNCC’s mentor as the organization became involved in protests against the VIETNAM WAR, and as an advocate for the free speech movement and WOMEN’S RIGHTS. She also worked toward increased civil rights for blacks in other countries, including the former Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe; South Africa; and Puerto Rico.

Baker died in New York City on December 13, 1986, her eighty-third birthday. By that time, some of the organizations she had been involved with no longer existed. SNCC fell apart after dissension developed over black power, or black independence from white America. The MFDP lasted through the 1967 elections, winning offices in local races, but was no longer needed after African Americans were allowed to join the state Democratic party. Baker’s work, however, lives on in a generation of black U.S. leaders she nurtured and encouraged, who are able to carry on the struggle for civil and HUMAN RIGHTS worldwide.

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