Baker entered Texas State University for Negroes (TSUN) in the fall of 1947.  The war hero benefited from the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (GI Bill), which provided veterans with a free college education.  He left off where he started and continued majoring in chemistry.  During his two years in college, he worked part-time to support his new wife and son but found time for extracurricular activities.  He loved singing and joined the glee club.  He also established the campus’s first Alpha Phi Alpha chapter.  The first of nine Black Greek-lettered fraternal societies on college campuses, seven college students established Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity on the campus of Cornell University in 1906.  One of the seven founders, social worker Eugene K. Jones, later served as the first executive secretary of the National Urban League and Federal Council on Negro Affairs (The Black Cabinet). A charter member of TSUN’s Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Wendell H. Baker put forth an agenda that included academic excellence, civic leadership and civil rights.  His hectic schedule did not hurt his grades.  He graduated with honors in 1949.  With his heart set on medical school, he left Houston and returned to Huntsville to help his mother care for the family job while at the same time save money.

Wendell Baker dreamed of entering Meharry Medical School. After securing his undergraduate degree at Texas Southern University in 1949, Baker, who now possessed a chemistry degree, decided a brief career in teaching would provide him with the economic means to both support his fledgling family and save money to cover tuition and fees for his first few years of medical school. By the early 1950s, however, it became clear that medical school would never happen.  His family of seven needed him fulltime; at the same time, his students enjoyed his energy and needed him as well.  The chairperson of the Sam Houston High School science division, Baker taught physical science, biology, chemistry, and physics. His science went on fieldtrips across the state, while his glee clubbers traveled across the country and performed at numerous events.  Often, he negotiated with his white peers who had the best science equipment and books.  While illegal, white peers sometimes gave him unused equipment and textbooks for his classes. Baker’s determination propelled a number of students into math and science as career choices. Only his firing in 1962 for building his ranch-style brick home near several new white subdivisions near his parents’ property ended his passionate career as a devoted HISD educator. In addition, a weekend disc jockey, he lost his second job as well. He took work substitute teaching in nearby communities and did odd jobs to make ends meet. Eventually, however, he found his way back to permanent employment.

Often dubbed “the Jackie Robinson of the Golden Triangle,” Baker began working at the Goodyear Tire Company in Beaumont in 1962. In fact, Baker became the first African American technical professional when Goodyear hired him as a quality-control specialist, ultimately promoting him to chemical engineer. Baker’s responsibilities included the testing of machinery and chemical plants that helped convert raw materials into the processed chemicals the company used in the development of synthetic rubber. Baker worked at the company for twenty-two years, from 1962 to 1984. His transformation from fired schoolteacher to chemical engineer not only tripled his salary, but also prompted his catapult into local activism.

Wendell Baker, a scientist with the Goodyear Tire Co., now found himself in a position to help his community.  In 1965, he began pressing the Black community about civil rights.  His major concern addressed voting rights. On August 6, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.  The act banned discriminatory practices in the area of voting rights.  While the Fifteen Amendment outlawed discrimination that prevented United States citizens from voting in local, statewide, and national elections, southern states formed a number of loopholes that made voting difficult for African Americans.  In Texas, for example, the White Democratic Primary (1923) prohibited African Americans from voting in Texas primary elections. Baker, who carried a little weight in the community as an engineering professional, met with a number of clergy leaders in hopes of convincing individuals to pay their poll taxes and vote.  Not surprisingly, most ministers resisted.  Black ministers, along with other leaders, felt direct confrontation at the polls could precipitate backlashes.  Baker carried his message to ministers in numerous counties surrounding Walker County.  The response was principally the same.  He and his wife Augusta decided on another method.  They decided the family would reach out the community in another way.  They would pay the poll taxes for hundreds of African-American residents.  Appreciative and determined, Walker County Blacks decisively went the polls and voted out of office a racist sheriff who held captive people of color for decades. 

The Walker County Voter’s League also put a plan into motion to force school desegregation. The organization met with numerous groups, from educators to ministers, in hope of strategizing a workable course of action.  As in other instances, middle-class Blacks felt uneasy challenging the status quo.  They actually scoffed at Baker and demanded that he end his actions before risking the jobs of thousands.  In all earnestness, people had good reason to fear reprisals.  Huntsville Blacks felt more vulnerable compared to those living in major U.S. cities. The modern Civil Rights Movement forced the world to observe the contradictions of United States democracy.  Activists risked their jobs, homes, livelihood, and lives in an effort to transform their world. Baker nevertheless considered the accommodating actions of his neighbors and acquaintances ludicrous. He turned to working-class African Americans.  In January 1964, Wendell H. Baker presented his desegregation plan to HISD school superintendent Mance Park.  Park, the same individual responsible for Baker’s firing several years earlier, detested his former employee.  He initially refused Baker’s request.  A recalcitrant Superintendent Park and school board eventually supported a “freedom of choice” plan that favored transferring a select number of high-performing Black elementary students to the White elementary school.  Little Janet Smithers, a second grader whose parents volunteered for the school district’s first “freedom of choice” desegregation plan, became the first African-American student to attend school with white students the following year.  Not surprising, whites made her feel unwelcome.  Her painful and humiliating experience did in fact precipitate the complete desegregation of the district by the late 1960s.  Truthfully, the board had to comply with the Brown ruling or risk losing millions of dollars in federal aid.  By 1965, a growing number of East Texas school districts desegregated their schools.  The defiant school district finally agreed to desegregate its schools in 1968 by way of “freedom of choice,” instead of forced compliance, fourteen years after the Brown ruling and four years following the emotional and tumultuous entry of Miss Janet Smither.
 
In July 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. Hailed as the “legislative” equivalent of the Brown decision, the act transformed the South. City officials in Huntsville had no other choice but to comply or face criminal charges. In 1950, the Supreme Court ordered the University of Texas to enroll Heman Sweatt, a mail carrier from Houston, at its law school. Fifteen years later, however, Sam Houston State Teacher’s College remained off limits to African Americans. Wendell Baker and the Walker County Voter’s League once again instigated compliance. This time the group selected students to enroll in classes at Sam Houston State Teacher’s College (SHSC). The first student, Annie Lee Kizzie, unsuccessfully applied for admissions.  The college registrar informed the student that the school did not admit non-White students. Of course, this was not entirely true.  Historian Amilcar Shabazz, in his award-winning Advancing Democracy (2004), argues that public colleges and university across the state, including Sam Houston State, regularly admitted East Indian, Japanese, Chinese, American Indian, and Latino students. Yes, Jim Crow exclusion occasionally shut varying groups of non-Whites out of the college admissions process; however, for the most part, non-Black students of color had greater accessibility to Texas schools than Blacks. Baker, the Voter’s League, and a new ally, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), brought to SHSC a new Black applicant. This time a Willis schoolteacher, Maxine Haywood, transferred to the teacher’s college.  At first, the admissions office accepted her application.  However, once officials at the registrar’s office recognized Haywood’s Prairie View A. & M. College transcript, the registrar quickly rescinded her transfer. Baker, along with members of the voter’s League and NAACP immediately filed a suit with the federal district court.  The news media made an embarrassing spectacle of the ordeal, especially for the governor, who at the time was out of the state but contacted.  Sources suggest that he ordered the board to overturn the school’s segregation policy and admit Black students.  In 1964, the board of regents at SHSC agreed to comply with the civil rights act and ordered the immediate desegregation of its school.  John Patrick, a young man who graduated with honors at Sam Houston High School, became the first African American student to attend the teacher’s college.  At the time of his graduation in 1969, the university had hundreds more enrolled in its varying degree plans.

Baker, who expressed excitement about the board’s decision, focused on broadening the national Civil Rights Movement in Huntsville.  During the summers of 1964 and 1965, Baker traveled across the South to witness firsthand the strategies, tactics, discussions, and concerns of grassroots and national civil rights leaders.  Baker, without question, understood that young people in particular had a right to charter their own destiny and challenge the status quo for access and equity.  He especially hoped his participation in the various workshops over the past few years would help motivate greater passion and zeal among Huntsville’s future leaders, the young.  Once again, an energized Baker pushed for community involvement.  Although older and middle-class Blacks considered Baker a rabble-rouser and troublemaker, young people answered his call.  Anxious Sam Houston High School students in 1964 and 1965 pushed for the desegregation of their city’s schools, restaurants, theater, public swimming pool, library, courthouse, shopping centers, and drugstores.  They also demanded equal access to good-paying jobs.  Motivated by an AFL-CIO meeting in Austin that addressed Freedom Summer in Mississippi, the Huntsville students decided to formulate their own direct protest tactics and forcibly desegregate their city.  The students returned to Huntsville, requested the aid of Rev. Oliver and Wendell Baker, and set out to make history.
 
The students and their adult supporters—including Baker—in July 1965 formed the SCLC-affiliated Huntsville Action for Youth (Ha-You, pronounced Hey-You).   Beginning on Saturday, July 18, Ha-You activists—Baker, members of the Negro Chamber of Commerce, students, White students and activists from other communities, and ministers—picketed outside business establishments that refused to cater to Blacks, including the Life Theater, boutiques, restaurants, and drug stores.  Tempers flared whites threw the activists when the activists out of the Texan Café.  The protests spread to the Walker County Courthouse on the second and third days.  When police made arrests, many local Blacks blamed Baker.  They understandably feared for the safety of their children.  Even Augusta Baker, Wendell’s wife, worried about their children’s safety in the wake of potential interracial violence and police brutality, and in the end, forbade their involvement in the local demonstrations.  Baker believed, nevertheless, that direct protest in Huntsville could and would lead to fundamental and quick changes.  Within two weeks, the controversial protests led to the desegregation of the entire City of Huntsville.

The success of both the Walker County Voter’s League and Ha-You Movement led to a number of far-reaching changes for Blacks.  SHSC enrolled its first African-American students by 1965. The police department in the mid-1960s hired its first Black officers since Reconstruction. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) also began hiring Black correctional officers and secretarial staffers. The school system finally equalized teacher’s salaries. African-American clerical staff also worked in city and county offices. Whites served Black customers in business establishments throughout the city. In the 1970s, SHSU students involved in the antiwar movement sought Baker’s advice. Baker also worked with students to lift the alcoholic ban in the county limits.  From voting apathy to charges of discrimination in local government offices, Baker continues to challenge his community on matters pertaining to fairness and equity.