Wendell Baker: Fighting for Rights for Sixty Years (Feb 10, 2024)
by Scott Sosebee
Texas lost an icon on November 12, 2012, when civil rights pioneer Wendell Baker passed away one day short of his ninety-first birthday. Although far too few people recognize Mr. Baker’s name, he was representative of those countless individuals who would not let injustice stand, and even though he suffered personal sacrifice continued to fight for what was right his entire life. I am often concerned that we just don’t have the Wendell Bakers of the world around today and that we also do not seem to understand why people like Wendell Baker were—and are—so consequential.
Wendell Harold Baker, Sr. was born in Cotton Creek in Walker County in 1922. Trying to make a living off a small farm in 1920s Texas was a precarious proposition, but it was one made even more perilous if you were subject to the oppression of Jim Crow. The Baker family moved to Pine Hill in 1924 and continued to eke out an existence off the land. Then came the Great Depression, and while all Americans lost economic ground, African Americans lost it at a greater—and faster—rate. As farm income in the state plummeted by over a billion dollars, absentee landowners often moved back onto farms they had personally ceased to cultivate, which meant that sharecroppers, many of those African Americans, were forced off the land. The Bakers were more fortunate than many others in that they owned their farm, so they began to accept sharecroppers onto their holdings, and through windmills and other means the elder Baker provided cheap electricity to neighboring farms to help them make ends meet. Wendell Baker learned the value of helping his fellow man from an early age. From his parents, he also learned the value of education
Wendell had to wait for over a year to attend college because of limited finances. He worked in the cafeteria of Sam Houston State Teachers College to save money, and he began to resent the fact that he could not attend his hometown college simply because he was not white. He eventually enrolled in Samuel Huston College (now Huston-Tillotson) in Austin. He was at the school for less than a year when World War II once again delayed his plans. He first returned to help with the family farm while his brothers went to war, but in 1944 the U.S. Army drafted Wendell Baker, another experience that would change his life. After marrying Augusta Lee, Wendell Baker entered the segregated United States Army.
Baker put on the uniform, but he did so as a conscientious objector. Part of that was due to his conviction that any taking of a life was morally wrong, but another part was his protest against the racism of the military. For Wendell Baker, as it was for some others both white and black, segregating the military due to race while extolling the virtues of fighting for freedom was nothing short of hypocritical. While he excelled in the Army, Baker abhorred many of its institutional practices.
After the war, Baker did not return to Huston College, but because of its proximity in Houston graduated from the new Texas State College for Negroes (now Texas Southern) with a degree in chemistry. He hoped to attend medical school, but family illness forced him to return to Huntsville, where he found work as a chemistry teacher at Sam Houston High School. Almost immediately he became one of the most respected and popular teachers at the school and a mentor and role model to a generation of students at the segregated school. He probably thought he would stay at the school for his entire career, but in 1962 his life changed once again.
Baker and his family, in that year, built a new home near his family’s old farm. But what had once been a rural area was now a growing subdivision in the expanding city of Huntsville—but it was an exclusively white housing development. The white leadership of the Huntsville ISD interpreted Baker’s action as crossing the bi-racial “color line” of the era, so they relieved him of his duties as a teacher. Heartbroken and angered, Wendell Baker took a job as a chemical engineer at the Goodyear plant in Beaumont. As he had always done, he excelled at this new position and worked at the plant for over 20 years, but he never forgot the injustice of his firing in Huntsville. So, he also becomes an activist.
He began by working for voting rights in 1965. Texas had long worked to deprive African Americans of voting rights; the state was the progenitor of the all-white primary and even in the 1960s various practices made the black voting rate well below that of whites. Baker rallied clergymen and African American businessmen to conduct registration drives and get people to the polls. His actions led to change as the African American vote became the primary factor in removing from office a Walker County sheriff who had made denying rights to African Americans his office’s main function. He next took on the monumental task of forcing the Huntsville ISD and Sam Houston State College to comply with federal law and desegregate its schools. Baker worked tirelessly to force the change, and while many initially belittled his efforts, in the end, the work paid off. First Sam Houston and the Huntsville schools allowed African Americans to matriculate.
Despite its victories, Wendell Baker did not stop his activism. He would help to organize workshops, sit-ins, and other means of non-violent protests against the injustices of Jim Crow through the 1960s and 1970s. He and associates formed the SCLC-affiliated Huntsville Action for Youth or Ha-You that would picket and boycott businesses that still refused to serve or sell to African Americans. He endured death threats, social ostracism, and backlash even among some in the African American community, but he continued to directly—and often bluntly—push for civil rights in Walker County until the day he died. Wendell Baker was a hero, a man who sacrificed some personal achievements to effect change in Texas. Fortunately, there have been Wendell Bakers in Texas that helped to move us toward the goal of one day having a truly color-blind society. I just hope we are still producing them.
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.
