Civil Rights activist and human rights activist, Ella Baker was Born in Norfolk, Virginia on Dec. 13, 1903, but grew up in rural North Carolina, where she developed a deep sense of self-respect. As a girl growing up in North Carolina, Baker listened to her grandmother tell stories about slave revolts. An enslaved woman, her grandmother had been whipped for refusing to marry a man chosen for her by the slave “owner.” Baker studied at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. As a student she challenged school policies that she thought were unfair. After graduating in 1927 as class valedictorian, Baker moved to New York City and began joining social activist organizations.
In 1930, she joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League, whose purpose was to develop Black economic power through collective planning within Black communities. Baker also involved herself with several women’s organizations. She was committed to economic justice for all people and once said, “People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job.” She also was adept at recognizing talent and helped coax capable rank and file members into taking leadership roles. Baker married T.J. Roberts in the late 1930s and then joined the staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1940.
She worked as a field secretary and then served as director of branches from 1943 until 1946. Among the participants at one of her workshops was an NAACP member from Montgomery, Alabama, named Rosa Parks. After resigning from the national organization in 1946 (she had returned to Harlem to raise a niece), Baker stayed involved with its New York chapter. In 1952 she was elected president of the NAACP New York chapter, the first-ever woman in that role. There, she built coalitions with other groups, worked on a campaign to end school segregation, and even publicly confronted the mayor.
But after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, Baker co-founded the organization "In Friendship" to raise money to fight against Jim Crow Laws in the deep South. Many Black leaders, decided they wanted to establish a formal organization to build similar boycotts throughout the south. In 1957 she moved to Atlanta and met with a group of Southern Black ministers and helped form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to coordinate reform efforts throughout the South. She also ran a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for Citizenship. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., served as the SCLC’s first president and Baker as its director.
For two and a half years Baker utilized her skills, experience and contacts to plan events, identify and establish protests and campaigns, and select and trained various individuals to lead them. Her relationship with Dr. King, however, was tense: Despite her level of experience and proven track record, he had difficulty allowing a woman’s decisions to trump his own. Her idea was that the organization should devote its resources more to promoting and enabling its overall mission rather than celebrating a charismatic leader. Baker felt that no lasting change would be achieved through demonstrations alone. While demonstrations did lead to important legislative changes the sustained commitment of citizens was required to ensure that what the law provided for actually happened.
Frustrated, Baker was on the brink of resigning in 1960. On February 1, 1960, a group of Black college students from North Carolina A&T University refused to leave a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they had been denied service. Her work behind the scenes allowed Dr. King to move from one place to the net mobilizing people through mass meetings. For two and a half years Baker utilized her skills, experience and contacts to plan events, identify and establish protests and campaigns, and select and trained various individuals to lead them. Her relationship with Dr. King, however, was tense: Despite her level of experience and proven track record, he had difficulty allowing a woman’s decisions to trump his own.
Her idea was that the organization should devote its resources more to promoting and enabling its overall mission rather than celebrating a charismatic leader. She felt that no lasting change would be achieved through demonstrations alone. While demonstrations did lead to important legislative changes the sustained commitment of citizens was required to ensure that what the law provided for actually happened. Frustrated, Baker was on the brink of resigning in 1960. On February 1, 1960, a group of Black college students from North Carolina A&T University refused to leave a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they had been denied service. Baker always believed that meaningful change happens on the streets and not just from court rulings.
She wrote a letter calling student leaders all over the South to join and begin working together. The days-long conference, held over Easter weekend at Shaw University, yielded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Baker left the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She wanted to assist the new student activists because she viewed young, emerging activists as a resource and an asset to the movement. Adopting the Gandhian theory of nonviolent direct action, SNCC members joined with activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to organize in the 1961 Freedom Rides.
In 1964 SNCC helped create Freedom Summer, an effort to focus national attention on Mississippi’s racism and to register Black voters. Baker, and many of her contemporaries, believed that voting was one key to freedom. With Ella Baker’s guidance and encouragement, SNCC became one of the foremost advocates for human rights in the country. Ella Baker mentored many emerging activists, such as Diane Nash, John Lewis, and Bob Moses, as leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Her influence was reflected in the nickname she acquired: “Fundi,” a Swahili word meaning a person who teaches a craft to the next generation.
Baker has been called "The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement". She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. Ella Baker never tried to be the focal point of any of the organizations. Ella Baker believed that civil rights would be achieved only if people were committed to fighting for their rights and making decision within their communities. While largely unknown to the public, she was regarded as the backbone of the Civil Rights Movement. Julian Bond, SNCC Chairman and founder of the Southern Poverty Law Firm, once said, "I think it's fair to say that without her leadership and her style of leadership we would not have been the organization that we turned out to be." Ella Baker was the unsung heroine of the civil rights movement.