Article by G. Dixon
Published on March 4, 2019.

Over the month of February, the Black Culture Club worked very hard for Black History Month. Part of this celebration was sharing announcements every morning about lesser-known black history figures. Some of the black history figures mentioned were Jimi Hendrix, Edward Bouchet, Mamie Phipps Clark, and many more. These announcements were a way to shine a little light on some black figures that we may not learn about in school.

Ella Baker was a very interesting black history figure that stayed mostly behind the scenes during segregation but still made a huge impact. Here is an example the announcements normally consisted of. “Today’s Black-Figure in History is Ella Josephine Baker who was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia and raised in North Carolina. She had a passion for social justice at a young age and her grandmother being a slave fueled the passion. In the 1940s she started at the NAACP (The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) as a secretary and shared the group’s message of “ a world without discrimination based on race.” In 1957, Ella Baker moved to Atlanta to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. King, she helped facilitated protests, build campaigns, and ran a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for Citizenship. Baker viewed the young people as a very huge aspect of the civil rights movement. Because of this, she helped lay the framework for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The SNCC contributed to the movement through freedom rides and had a large emphasis on the importance of voting rights for African-Americans. Baker died on Dec. 13, 1986, on her 83rd birthday. She left a very important legacy and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1994. She was also honored on a U.S. postage stamp in 2009.”

The Black Culture Club made this year’s Black History Month one to remember.