69 Facts About Ella Baker

Ella Josephine Baker was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist.

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

Ella Baker mentored many emerging activists, such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, and Bob Moses, as leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

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

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

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

Ella Baker's father worked on a steamship line that sailed out of Norfolk, and so was often away.

Ella Baker's mother took in boarders to earn extra money.

Ella Baker's mother decided to take the family back to North Carolina while their father continued to work for the steamship company.

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

Ella Baker 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, Ella Baker gained a sense of social injustice, as she listened to her grandmother's horror stories of life as an enslaved person.

Ella Baker's 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.

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

Ella Baker worked as editorial assistant at the Negro National News.

Ella Baker taught courses in consumer education, labor history, and African history.

Ella Baker 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.

Ella Baker founded the Negro History Club at the Harlem Library and regularly attended lectures and meetings at the YWCA.

Ella 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.

Ella Baker advocated widespread, local action as a means of social change.

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

Ella Baker traveled widely for the organization, especially in the South, recruiting members, raising money, and organizing local chapters.

Ella Baker was named director of branches in 1943, and became the NAACP's highest-ranking woman.

Ella Baker pushed the NAACP to decentralize its leadership structure and to aid its membership in more activist campaigns at the local level.

Ella Baker believed that the strength of an organization grew from the bottom up, not the top down.

Ella Baker believed that the branches' work was the NAACP's lifeblood.

Ella Baker 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.

Ella Baker especially stressed the importance of young people and women in the organization.

Ella Baker slept in their homes, ate at their tables, spoke in their churches, and earned their trust.

Ella Baker wrote thank-you notes and expressed her gratitude to the people she met.

Ella Baker formed a network of people in the South who would be important in the continued fight for civil rights.

Ella Baker tried to find a balance between voicing her concerns and maintaining a unified front.

Between 1944 and 1946, Ella Baker directed leadership conferences in several major cities, such as Chicago and Atlanta.

Ella Baker got top officials to deliver lectures, offer welcoming remarks, and conduct workshops.

In 1946, Ella Baker took in her niece Jackie, whose mother was unable to care for her.

Ella Baker soon joined the NAACP's New York branch to work on local school desegregation and police brutality issues.

Ella Baker believed the program should be primarily channeled not through White and the national office, but through the people in the field.

Ella Baker lobbied to reduce the rigid hierarchy, place more power in the hands of capable local leaders, and give local branches greater responsibility and autonomy.

In January 1957, Ella Baker went to Atlanta to attend a conference aimed at developing a new regional organization to build on the success of the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama.

Ella Baker was one of three major organizers of this large-scale event.

Ella Baker demonstrated her ability to straddle organizational lines, ignoring and minimizing rivalries and battles.

Ella Baker was hired as Associate Director, the first staff person for the SCLC.

Ella Baker worked closely with southern civil rights activists in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and gained respect for her organizing abilities.

Ella Baker helped initiate voter registration campaigns and identify other local grievances.

That same year, 1960, on the heels of regional desegregation sit-ins led by black college students, Ella Baker persuaded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to invite southern university students to the Southwide Youth Leadership Conference at Shaw University on Easter weekend.

Ella Baker saw the potential for a special type of leadership by the young sit-in leaders, who were not yet prominent in the movement.

Ella Baker believed they could revitalize the Black Freedom Movement and take it in a new direction.

Ella Baker wanted to bring the sit-in participants together in a way that would sustain the momentum of their actions, teach them the skills necessary, provide the resources that were needed, and help them to coalesce into a more militant and democratic force.

In 1961 Ella Baker persuaded the SNCC to form two wings: one wing for direct action and the second wing for voter registration.

Ella Baker insisted that "strong people don't need strong leaders", and criticized the notion of a single charismatic leader of movements for social change.

In keeping the idea of "participatory democracy", Ella Baker wanted each person to get involved.

Ella Baker 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 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 Ella Baker helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as an alternative to the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party.

Ella Baker 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.

Ella Baker was less involved with SNCC during this period, but her withdrawal was due more to her declining health than to ideological differences.

From 1962 to 1967, Ella Baker worked as the staff of the Southern Conference Education Fund.

In SCEF, Ella Baker worked closely with her friend Anne Braden, a white longtime anti-racist activist.

Ella Baker believed that socialism, the transitory phase toward communism, was a humane alternative to capitalism.

Ella Baker became a staunch defender of Braden and her husband Carl; she encouraged SNCC to reject red-baiting as divisive and unfair.

In 1967 Ella Baker returned to New York City, where she continued her activism.

Ella Baker later collaborated with Arthur Kinoy and others to form the Mass Party Organizing Committee, a socialist organization.

Ella Baker supported the Puerto Rican independence movement and spoke out against apartheid in South Africa.

Ella Baker allied with a number of women's groups, including the Third World Women's Alliance and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Ella Baker remained an activist until her death on December 13,1986, her 83rd birthday.

Ella Baker was largely arguing against the structuring of the civil rights movement by the organization model of the black church.

Ella Baker questioned not only the gendered hierarchy of the civil rights movement but that of the Black church.

Ella Baker was older than many of the young ministers she worked with, which added to their tensions.

Ella Baker once said the "movement made Martin, and not Martin the movement".