Martin Luther King Jr Contradictory To Ella Baker

Contradictory to Ella Baker, Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the church and ministers were fundamental in organizing a movement, due to the importance of church-based guidelines. It was important to King that leaders of the civil rights movement were either educated or a minister, and should be male. For example, Ella Baker had experience and proved herself to be a good leader, “yet King kept [Baker] at arm’s length and never treated her as a political or intellectual peer. As Baker put it: ‘After all, who was I? I was female, I was old. I didn’t have any Ph.D.’” (173). Martin Luther King Jr. refused to work with Baker because she was a female, and was not a minster. Being a minister was very popular among the people who were a part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC),

He believed that women could not do the same work as men, especially when they were not a driving force in the church, and therefore did not allow them to hold certain positions at the SCLC. In addition, Martin Luther King Jr. was interested in working specifically with ministers in order to divert suspicion of communism. King created a network of ministers with the SCLC, which “was planned from the outset to be a loosely structured coalition linking church based leaders in civil rights struggles across the South” (174). The linking of churches was important to the SCLC because getting ministers involved solidified that the group was not connected with communist parties. King and the SCLC were wary when working with ordinary people, because they might not be affiliated with the church, which could lead to political related claims against the organization since their views were so far left on the political spectrum. This expands upon the idea that Martin Luther King Jr. was interested in forming a positive reputation that did not harm his public