Ella Baker

Ella Baker was born on December 13, 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia. She began her career as an activist early. As a student at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, she challenged school policies that she found demeaning. After graduating from Shaw as class valedictorian in 1927, she moved to New York City.

Baker responded to the suffering she saw in Harlem during the Great Depression by joining a variety of political causes. In 1930 she joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League and was elected to be its first national director a year later. The league, which was founded by writer George Schuyler, aimed to develop blacks' economic power through collective planning. She also became involved with several women's organizations and, as an employee of the Works Progress Administration, offered literacy and consumer education to workers while educating herself about radical politics.

Baker began her affiliation with the National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1940. After working as a field secretary, she served as director of branches from 1943 to 1946. Her efforts to expand the reach of the NAACP throughout the South helped create the grassroots network that provided a base for the Civil Rights Movement in the following decades. At the same time, she fought to make the NAACP itself more democratic by shifting the organization's emphasis away from legal battles and toward community-based activism. Although she resigned from the NAACP staff in 1946, she stayed as a volunteer and, as the first woman to head the New York branch, led its fight to desegregate New York City public schools.

In 1956 Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Stanley Levison established In Friendship, an organization dedicated to raising money to support the struggle in the South. She moved to Atlanta, Georgia, the following year to organize Martin Luther King Jr.'s newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and to run the Crusade for Citizenship, a voter registration campaign. She stayed at SCLC for two years, but she never accepted its policy of favoring strong central leadership over local, grassroots politics.

Determined to assist the fledgling student movement, she left SCLC and she took a job at the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA). She invited sit-in leaders to attend a conference in April 1960 at Shaw University. From that conference, the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) was born. Among SNCC's achievements was its role in founding the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Baker was a key player in the party's attempt to replace the all-white delegation from Mississippi at the 1964 Democratic Party convention.

Baker returned to New York in 1964 and fought for human rights until her death. An unsung hero of the Civil Rights Movement, Baker made a significant impact in paving the way for a more just and humane social order. She was a truly inspirational person who promoted respect, understanding and tolerance among all people.

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