Martin Luther King Vs Ella Baker Essay

Ella Baker and Martin Luther King Jr. did have their similarities as leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, but there were vast differences as well. Their differences allowed the Civil Rights Movement to be more encompassing while fighting for the same cause. Baker and King both grew up in the South, had religious upbringings, had at least some level of a higher education, and were public speakers. What set them apart was their differing opinions on who contributed to social change, and how. This is expressed through the varying social classes they depended on, importance placed on reputations developed through public associations, and nonviolence tactics that used to fight for equality. Even though Baker and King had different methods in which

they worked in the civil rights movement, both were able to make progress towards social justice and equality for African Americans by associating with different levels of authorities and social classes, creating different self-portrayals, and having varying levels of dependence on nonviolence.
Baker believed that common, everyday people were the driving force of the civil rights movement, because they were the ones causing chain reactions of social change through impromptu actions.

Often, an unplanned action by a local could manifest as a rallying point for the movement. An example of a semi-spontaneous action done by a local was “Rosa Parks’s reasoned decision to violate a segregation ordinance,” a decision that later “sparked the Montgomery boycott” (Ransby 195). She believed in social change that derived from semi-spontaneous actions by the lower people, which were referred to as people from the pew, or locals. People from the pew had just as much impact on the civil rights movement as well-known leaders. Rosa Parks executed a semi-spontaneous action that resulted with a significant form of progress in the civil rights movement: the Montgomery Bus Boycott. A civil rights leader, like King, could have constructed a bus boycott, but Parks had just as much influence, even though she was not a leader. In addition, the younger generations were also undertaking semi-spontaneous actions, such as sit-ins. The local youth, not civil rights leaders, had enough driving force to influence a mass movement through these acts. Such actions began in a somewhat unplanned manner comparable to

Parks’:
On February 1, 1960, four black college students sat down at the “whites only” lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to move. After several successive days of sit-ins, the store gave in and served the young black patrons without serious incident. The students’ actions ignited a blaze of sit-in demonstrations that spread quickly across the South. (237)
The youth were able to have an effect on civil rights by conducting the sit-ins without any help or careful planning by major recognized leaders. The students were a driving force because they created a trend of sit-ins that spread across many states, showing how they could have just as much influence as people like Martin Luther King Jr. These kinds of semi-spontaneous events and their large-scale results legitimized Baker’s approach to the Civil Rights Movement by showing how the people of the pew had power.