“The major job was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use, and it could only be used if they understood what was happening and how group action could counter violence…” – Ella Jo Baker
Barbara Ransby, historian and biographer for Ella Baker calls her, "One of the most important American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement". It is not an exaggeration to say that Ella Baker was the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.”
If you have not heard of her, it is because the role that Black women played in the Civil Rights Movement is often ignored or silenced by historians and a public that only gives relentless attention to people like Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Like many women in the Movement, her activism and efforts began long before King and Malcolm X ever entered the scene.
Ella Josephine Baker was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia, to Georgiana (called Anna) and Blake Baker. Her father worked in the shipyards of Norfolk and was often gone on voyages so she was raised mostly by her mother. They soon moved to her mother’s hometown of Littleton, North Carolina. There Ella spent a lot of time with her grandmother, Josephine Elizabeth "Bet" Ross.
From her grandmother, she heard stories about slavery and leaving the South to escape its oppressive society. At an early age, Baker gained a sense of social injustice, as she listened to her grandmother's horror stories of life as an enslaved person. Her grandmother was beaten and whipped for refusing to marry an enslaved man her owner chose, and she told Ella other stories of life as an African American woman during this period. Giving her granddaughter context to the African American experience helped Baker understand the injustices black people still faced in Jim Crow America.
Ella attended school in North Carolina and eventually became a student at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and graduated with valedictorian honors. Decades later, she returned to Shaw to help found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This was only one of her many contributions to the Civil Rights Movement.
Baker worked as an editorial assistant at the Negro National News, which sought to develop black economic power through collective networks. In the 1930s Baker worked for the Worker's Education Project of the Works Progress Administration, established under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Baker taught courses in consumer education, labor history, and African history. The Harlem Renaissance influenced her thoughts and teachings. She advocated widespread, local action as a means of social change. Her emphasis on a grassroots approach to the struggle for equal rights influenced the growth and success of the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century.
In 1938 Baker began her long association with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), then based in New York City. In December 1940 she started work there as a secretary. She traveled widely for the organization, especially in the South, recruiting members, raising money, and organizing local chapters.
Baker despised elitism and placed her confidence in grassroots membership. She believed that the bedrock of any social change organization is not its leaders' eloquence or credentials, but the commitment and hard work of the rank-and-file membership and their willingness and ability to engage in discussion, debate, and decision-making. She especially stressed the importance of young people and women in the organization.
Baker’s philosophy and grass-roots approach allowed her to develop networks of friends and activists throughout the South in the 1930s and 40s. She was building a network that would prove vital for the activities of the Civil Rights Movement. It was her efforts that laid the groundwork.
In the early 1950s, Ella Baker lived in New York and became president of the local NAACP chapter in that city. She worked to develop local leadership and control of the organization, fighting against bureaucratic and charismatic leaders within the organization. But by 1957, her attention turned once again to the South and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
In 1957, Baker, along with two other organizers, joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) that had formed in the aftermath of the bus boycott. She and her fellow organizers orchestrated the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, which was a march in Washington D.C. advocating for voting rights. Then The SCLC’s first project was the 1958 Crusade for Citizenship, a voter registration campaign to increase the number of registered African American voters for the 1958 and 1960 elections. Baker was hired as Associate Director, the first staff person for the SCLC. While the project did not achieve its immediate goals, it laid the groundwork for strengthening local activist centers to build a mass movement for the vote across the South.
But Baker's job with the SCLC was more frustrating than fruitful. She was unsettled politically, physically, and emotionally. She had no solid allies in the Atlanta office where she had been named interim director. Historian Thomas F. Jackson notes that Baker criticized the organization for "programmatic sluggishness and King's distance from the people. King was a better orator than a democratic crusader Baker concluded."
In 1960, on the heels of regional desegregation sit-ins led by black college students, Baker persuaded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to invite southern university students to the Southwide Youth Leadership Conference at Shaw University on Easter weekend. At this meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed.
In her address at Shaw, Baker warned the activists to be wary of "leader-centered orientation". She wanted to bring the sit-in participants together in a way that would sustain the momentum of their actions, teach them the skills necessary, and turn them into a more militant and democratic force. Julian Bond later described the speech as "an eye opener" and probably the best of the conference. "She didn't say, 'Don't let Martin Luther King tell you what to do,'" Bond remembers, "but you got the real feeling that that's what she meant."
In 1961 Baker persuaded the SNCC to form two wings: one wing for direct action and the second wing for voter registration. With Baker's help SNCC, along with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), coordinated the region-wide Freedom Rides of 1961. They also expanded their grassroots movement among black sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and others throughout the South. She argued that "people under the heel", the most oppressed members of any community, "had to be the ones to decide what action they were going to take to get (out) from under their oppression".
Ella Baker was a teacher and mentor to the young people of SNCC, influencing such important future leaders as Julian Bond, Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Curtis Muhammad, Bob Moses, and Bernice Johnson Reagon.
In 1964 Baker helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as an alternative to the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party. She worked as the coordinator of the Washington office of the MFDP and accompanied a delegation of the MFDP to the 1964 National Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The group wanted to challenge the national party to affirm the rights of African Americans to participate in party elections in the South. The MFDP delegation was not seated, but their influence on the Democratic Party later helped to elect many black leaders in Mississippi. They forced a rule change to allow women and minorities to sit as delegates at the Democratic National Convention.
Throughout the late 1960s and into the 1970s, Ella Baker worked tirelessly to advance the cause of Black equality and social justice. Ella Baker’s influence was reflected in the nickname she acquired: “Fundi,” a Swahili word meaning a person who teaches a craft to the next generation. Baker continued to be a respected and influential leader in the fight for human and civil rights until her death on December 13, 1986, her 83rd birthday.
Ella Baker once said, “This may only be a dream of mine, but I think it can be made real.”
This dream of Baker’s can continue to be made real. You can join her legacy and be a part of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights today. You are the key to making Baker’s dream a reality.
In 2015, two High School students from St. Paul, MN, wrote and produced a 10-minute film about the life of Ella Baker. They submitted it to the 2015 National History Day (NHD) competition and won first place. This illustrates the legacy and impact of Baker on students of today. You can watch the video here: