Ella Baker

Civil rights organizer and activist

• Born: December 13, 1903
• Birthplace: Norfolk, Virginia
• Died: December 13, 1986
• Place of death: New York, New York

Working behind the scenes of the Civil Rights movement, Baker was a grassroots community organizer whose primary aim was to teach uneducated working-class African Americans the skills necessary to achieve social and economic empowerment. Baker worked especially hard to train African American youths as social activists.

Early Life

Ella Josephine Baker was born in Norfolk, Virginia, to Georgianna (Anna) Ross Baker and Blake Baker. Her father worked for the railroad, and her mother was active in community service through the Baptist church. In 1910, Baker’s father moved the family to Littleton, North Carolina, to escape growing racial violence in Norfolk, but he continued to work there and rarely saw his children. Consequently, Baker’s mother was her greatest influence during her childhood. Family and community were important to Baker’s mother, who believed that it was an obligation to help those less fortunate. This lesson made a deep and lasting impression on Baker.

In 1918, Baker enrolled in Shaw University, a Baptist preparatory school and university for African American students. After graduating from high school, Baker remained at Shaw and earned her bachelor’s degree. There she developed her social activist skills as a member of the debate team and school newspaper editor. Baker often found herself challenging established school policies. In 1927, she graduated from Shaw as class valedictorian.

After graduation, Baker moved to New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, where she met many socialist radicals who shaped her political thought. Throughout the 1930’s, Baker honed her skills as a community organizer and youth programs developer for a host of grassroots and government organizations in New York City. In the late 1930’s, Baker married T. J. Roberts. Indicative of her fierce independence, however, she did not take her husband’s surname. The couple divorced in 1958.

Life’s Work

In 1940, Baker was hired by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as an assistant field secretary to organize and conduct fund-raising and membership drives. She resigned from the NAACP for personal reasons in 1946 but continued to work with the organization unofficially. Into the early 1950’s, Baker worked with several smaller, local civil rights groups. In 1952, she became the first woman president of New York City’s NAACP branch and concentrated on eliminating racism and segregation in the city’s schools by organizing and leading several protests.

Baker shifted her attention to civil rights struggles in her native South after the Montgomery bus boycott began in 1955. In 1956, Baker organized direct action campaigns in the South through the civil rights group In Friendship. One year later, she helped organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Baker moved to Atlanta in 1958 to become the SCLC’s first full-time staff member and organized the Crusade for Citizenship. She left the SCLC the next year to once again focus on grassroots movements in smaller communities that were overlooked by the SCLC and the NAACP.

In 1960, Baker helped form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Comprising mostly African American college students, this organization concentrated on involving poor and undereducated African Americans in the Civil Rights movement. During 1963 and 1964, Baker, through SNCC, organized the Freedom Vote, Freedom Summer, and Freedom School campaigns in Mississippi. She also orchestrated the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s participation in the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

In the late 1960’s, SNCC became increasingly militant and violent in its attitude and actions. Although SNCC moved away from Baker’s original vision for the group, her support never wavered in spite of her reservations about the group’s philosophy and tactics. Despite her continued support, Baker’s role in SNCC diminished with time.

By the early 1970’s, failing health had limited Baker’s physical participation as an organizer, but she remained a respected activist who spoke out against a variety of social ills, including war and political persecution. She also supported the women’s rights and Puerto Rican political independence movements, and she spoke out against apartheid in South Africa. Baker died in her Harlem apartment on her birthday in 1986, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.

Significance

Although Baker worked with the NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and many other civil rights organizations, she remained loyal only to her core beliefs and values, which respected the young, the impoverished, and the undereducated. When an organization began to exhibit qualities that were contrary to her ideals, Baker moved on to groups more closely aligned with her values. Beyond fighting racism, she sought to eliminate the sexist attitudes that permeated African American culture at the time. Refusing to join any particular political party or subscribe to a specific political ideology, Baker was an intensely independent community organizer and activist who cherished social justice over political affiliations.

Bibliography

Bohanon, Lisa Frederikson. Freedom Cannot Rest: Ella Baker and the Civil Rights Movement. Greensboro, N.C.: Morgan Reynolds, 2005. Provides a general overview of Baker’s work during the 1950’s and 1960’s.

DeLaure, Marilyn Bordwell. “Planting Seeds of Change: Ella Baker’s Radical Rhetoric.” Women’s Studies in Communication 31, no. 1 (Spring, 2008): 1-28. Scholarly analysis of some of Baker’s most famous and influential speeches as an organizer and activist.

Grant, Joanne. Ella Baker: Freedom Bound. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998. This biography focuses on Baker’s work within the Civil Rights movement from the 1940’s through the 1960’s.

Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. A comprehensive biography of Baker’s life from early childhood on. Focuses on both her personal life and professional work.