Ella Baker

Ella Josephine Baker (December 13, 1903 – December 13, 1986) was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist.

She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades.

In New York City and the South, she worked alongside some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists, such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, and Bob Moses, as leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Baker criticized professionalized, charismatic leadership; she promoted grassroots organizing, radical democracy, and the ability of the oppressed to understand their worlds and advocate for themselves.

Ella Josephine Baker was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia, to Georgiana (called Anna) and Blake Baker, and first raised there.

She was the second of three surviving children, bracketed by her older brother Blake Curtis and younger sister Maggie.

Her father worked on a steamship line that sailed out of Norfolk, and so was often away.

Her mother took in boarders to earn extra money.

In 1910, Norfolk had a race riot in which whites attacked black workers from the shipyard.

Her mother decided to take the family back to North Carolina while their father continued to work for the steamship company.

Ella was seven when they returned to her mother's rural hometown near Littleton, North Carolina.

As a child, Baker grew up with little influence.

Her grandfather Mitchell had died, and her father's parents lived a day's ride away.

She often listened to her grandmother, Josephine Elizabeth "Bet" Ross, tell 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 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.

Ella attended Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and graduated with valedictorian honors.

Decades later, she returned to Shaw to help found SNCC.

Baker worked as editorial assistant at the Negro National News.

In 1930, George Schuyler, a black journalist and anarchist (and later an arch-conservative), founded the Young Negroes Cooperative League (YNCL).

It sought to develop black economic power through collective networks.

They conducted "conferences and trainings in the 1930s in their attempt to create a small, interlocking system of cooperative economic societies throughout the US" for black economic development.

She immersed herself in the cultural and political milieu of Harlem in the 1930s, protesting Italy's invasion of Ethiopia and supporting the campaign to free the Scottsboro defendants in Alabama.

She also founded the Negro History Club at the Harlem Library and regularly attended lectures and meetings at the YWCA.

During this time, Baker lived with and married her college sweetheart, T. J. (Bob) Roberts.

Having befriended Schuyler, Baker joined his group in 1931 and soon became its national director.

Baker also 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.

In 1938 Baker began her long association with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), then based in New York City.

They divorced in 1958.

Baker rarely discussed her private life or marital status.

According to fellow activist Bernice Johnson Reagon, many women in the Civil Rights Movement followed Baker's example, adopting a practice of dissemblance about their private lives that allowed them to be accepted as individuals in the movement.

Baker befriended John Henrik Clarke, a future scholar and activist; Pauli Murray, a future writer and civil rights lawyer; and others who became lifelong friends.

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.

She realized this vision most fully in the 1960s as the primary advisor and strategist of the SNCC.

Biographer Barbara Ransby calls Baker "one of the most important American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement".

She is known for her critiques of both racism in American culture and sexism in the civil rights movement.