To Become a Part of a Society That Is Meaningful: The Ella Jo Baker Intentional Community Cooperative and the DC Housing Cooperative Movement

The Ella Jo Baker Intentional Community Cooperative (EJBICC) is a five-building scattered-site limited equity housing cooperative, and intentional community, located less than five blocks east of Malcolm X/Meridian Hill Park in Columbia Heights Washington, DC. Incorporated as affordable housing for activists and organizers in the District of Columbia, in the early 2000s during a period of rapid gentrification in the nation’s capital, EJBICC is the only limited equity housing cooperative and intentional community created by activists and organizers for activists and organizers. Inspired by the legendary and skilled grassroots organizer, national director of the Young Negroes Cooperative League, Ella Jo Baker, the Black women co-founders of EJBICC wanted to ensure that the people fighting to protect the gains made during the Black Freedom Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, had access to safe, decent, and stable affordable housing for themselves and their families. As such, this paper gestures toward a history of EJBICC grounded in the intellectual and political labor of two Black feminist activists who are oriented toward socialism and grassroots organizing.