Ella Baker

Early life

Ella Josephine Baker was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia, and grew up in Littleton, North Carolina, on land her grandparents had worked while enslaved. Her maternal grandmother, Bet Ross, was punished by her enslaver for refusing a marriage he had chosen for her. Baker often told that story, and the SNCC Digital Gateway links her own persistence to it. Her mother, active in a church missionary group, encouraged women to see themselves as agents of social change.

Baker graduated from Shaw University in Raleigh in 1927 and moved to New York. There she became national director of the Young Negroes Cooperative League, an early sign of her interest in collective, community-based economic action.

The NAACP years

Baker joined the NAACP in 1938 as an assistant field secretary and became director of branches in the 1940s, travelling widely through the South and building a network of local contacts. She resigned in 1946 after failing to steer the organization toward grassroots organizing. In 1952 she returned as president of the New York City branch. In 1956 she co-founded In Friendship with Stanley Levison and Bayard Rustin to support local movements in the South.

SCLC and the birth of SNCC

Baker helped launch the Southern Christian Leadership Conference around Martin Luther King Jr. In January 1958 she moved to Atlanta to organize its Crusade for Citizenship voting-rights campaign and ran the organization's headquarters, serving as acting director from April 1959 until a permanent director arrived.

After the Greensboro sit-ins of February 1960, Baker organized a conference of student activists at Shaw University over Easter weekend in April 1960, persuading King and SCLC to put up the $800 it cost. Instead of steering the students into an SCLC youth wing, she urged them to form their own organization, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was born. She told them their struggle was "bigger than a hamburger," and she left SCLC that August. Through her old NAACP contacts she helped SNCC begin voter registration work in Mississippi, and she later helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Philosophy and legacy

Baker was openly critical of leader-centered movements, including the style that formed around King. She pressed for "group-centered" leadership, in which ordinary people developed the capacity to lead themselves. The King Institute records her view that the movement made King rather than King making the movement, and the SNCC Digital Gateway quotes her saying "strong people don't need strong leaders."

She returned to New York in the late 1960s and stayed active in the freedom struggle until she died on her 83rd birthday, December 13, 1986. Her insistence on developing local leaders, rather than waiting on a single charismatic figure, is her lasting contribution to the theory and practice of organizing.