Ella Barker Sociology

America presently still faces many inequalities and lack of justice against oppressed minority groups that aren’t white, cis, hetero, Christian men, even after the decades of activism to combat this. Activist constantly fight for these discriminated, marginalized groups and against the systematic oppression they face. But there are too many fights to be fought all at once. To name a few there is; racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc. Textual evidence given to us over the course of this class shows that tackling all of the social justice movements at once is not possible. Ella Barker immensely helped the NAACP during the grass-roots movement for civil rights by leader cultivation and organization of the youth members but seemed to put women’s rights

Black American activists weren’t focused on the inequality of sexism that plagued America as well as racism, not even incorporating or acknowledging it. Ella Barker was a social worker for the NAACP in organizing the youth for the movement and in cultivating leadership that was required. In her piece, Developing Community Leadership, she talks about her experience with finding a leader for the NAACP to champion their cause and provide a voice to the people, with the prerequisite of being a man. Barker recalls her assignment, recollecting, “And the they were looking for a minister, a man, and I helped to find a minister and a man, and he stayed a whilem and when he came I decided that since I was doing what I was doing, he was the director and I became, I think, co-director,” (Barker, Developing Community Leadership, 365). Barker was assigned to find a man to lead and that’s just what she did. Without any regard or question against their ruling that it had to be a man leading them, she completed the task without fail. She in no means was a feminist, even putting herself at a lower rank to the newcomer man that she found rather than herself who had put in a lot of time and effort into the organization. Don’t get me wrong, she did a lot for the civil rights and the grass-roots movement, such as organizing the youth and cultivating leadership, but she did

In the end they only seem to work against each other. Recently gay rights activists and the “Black Lives Matter” movement have been butting heads over media attention. Just a few months ago, homosexuals were given the right to marry and although this is a joyous moment and a victory for gay men and women (and everyone in-between) some have argued that it has caused a regression in the progress for the “Black Lives Matter” movement throughout the fight and victory for marriage equality. Timothy Stewart-Winter from the New York Times recognizes this regression and lack of attention for the other social movements that came from marriage equality in his op-ed piece, The Price of Gay Marriage. In the op-ed he states that, “Gays must now devote to the fight for protection from discrimination the same resourcefulness and energy with which we fought for the right to marry. We should keep in mind that our struggle began as a fight against police harassment, and ‘Black Lives Matter’ is our cause, too […] America should preach equality abroad humbly, acknowledging that it does so with the zeal of a convert,” (Stewart-Winter, The Price of Gay Marriage, np). In the piece he is saying that now that the homosexuals have gained marriage equality they need to fight against the inequalities against police brutality that African Americans face