Reference
- Ella Baker (1903–1986)One of the most important leaders of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Ella Baker help to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She spent her lifetime battling racial injustice. An influential member of multiple civil rights organizations, she was also an organizer of many small, grassroots community groups.
Born in Norfolk, Virginia, Baker grew up in North Carolina on land her grandparents had worked as slaves. After graduating as class valedictorian from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1927, Baker moved to New York City to look for work. She took jobs as a waitress and a factory worker before she began writing for black publications. In 1932, she co-organized the Young Negro Cooperative League, a consumer group dedicated to helping the disadvantaged during the Depression. In the 1940s, Baker traveled throughout the segregated South to organize branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She became known for her determination and fearlessness in an atmosphere of racial threat and violence, in which African Americans could be killed for simply trying to register to vote.
During the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955–1957, which began after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white passenger, Baker organized assistance for the boycotters and other African Americans who had suffered reprisals for their civil rights activities. In 1957, she was among the founders of Dr. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference to widen the opposition to racial injustice in the South. While Reverend King was the group's inspirational leader, it was Baker who managed the SCLC, which grew into sixty-five affiliates in various states.
During a wave of sit-ins by black college students in the winter of 1960, Baker saw an opportunity to harness the students’ dedication and enthusiasm for social activism. She helped launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and taught members how to organize protests and coordinate voter registration drives. Eventually, Baker's efforts on behalf of the SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which she formed to challenge the power of the all-white state Democratic Party, contributed to the landmark passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which guaranteed the protection of voting rights for all U.S. citizens, one of the major achievements of the civil rights movement.
In 1967, Baker resided in New York City and remained active in multiple causes, including the campaign to release activist and writer Angela Davis and the Puerto Rican independence movement. She died on her eighty-third birthday. Those who knew Ella Baker affectionately called her the “Fundi,” a Swahili word for a learned person who passes skills and knowledge from one generation to another. In light of Ella Baker's lifetime contribution to the cause of civil rights, it is a fitting description of this remarkable woman.
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Perspectives
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned fifty years and touched thousands of lives. A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the black freedom struggle. She was a national officer and key figure in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime mover in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Baker made a place for herself in predominantly male political circles that included W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King Jr., all the while maintaining relationships with a vibrant group of women, students, and activists both black and white. In this deeply researched biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker's long and rich political career as an organizer, an intellectual, and a teacher, from her early experiences in depression-era Harlem to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Ransby shows Baker to be a complex figure whose radical, democratic worldview, commitment to empowering the black poor, and emphasis on group-centered, grassroots leadership set her apart from most of her political contemporaries. Beyond documenting an extraordinary life, the book paints a vivid picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with other progressive struggles worldwide across the twentieth century.
On the Freedom Side
As Wesley C. Hogan sees it, the future of democracy belongs to young people. While today's generation of leaders confronts a daunting array of existential challenges, increasingly it is young people in the United States and around the world who are finding new ways of belonging, collaboration, and survival. That reality forms the backbone of this book, as Hogan documents and assesses young people's interventions in the American fight for democracy and its ideals. Beginning with reflections on the inspiring example of Ella Baker and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, Hogan profiles youth-led organizations and their recent work. Examples include Southerners on New Ground (SONG) in the NAFTA era; Oakland's Ella Baker Center and its fight against the school-to-prison pipeline; the Dreamers who are fighting for immigration reform; the Movement for Black Lives that is demanding a reinvestment in youth of color and an end to police violence against people of color; and the International Indigenous Youth Council, water protectors at Standing Rock who fought to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline and protect sovereign control of Indigenous lands. As Hogan reveals, the legacy of Ella Baker and the civil rights movement has often been carried forward by young people at the margins of power and wealth in U.S. society. This book foregrounds their voices and gathers their inventions--not in a comprehensive survey, but as an activist mix tape--with lively, fresh perspectives on the promise of twenty-first-century U.S. democracy.
Ella Baker's Catalytic Leadership
Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an influential African American civil rights and human rights activist. For five decades, she worked behind the scenes with people in vulnerable communities to catalyze social justice leadership. Her steadfast belief in the power of ordinary people to create change continues to inspire social justice activists around the world. This book describes a case study that translates Ella Baker's community engagement philosophy into a catalytic leadership praxis, which others can adapt for their work. Catalytic leadership is a concrete set of communication practices for social justice leadership produced in equitable partnership with, instead of on, communities. The case centers the voices of African American teenage girls who were living in a segregated neighborhood of an affluent college town and became part of a small collective of college students, parents, university faculty, and community activists learning leadership in the spirit of Ella Baker.
Ella Baker – #WomenYouShouldKnow
- Ella BakerElla Baker was known as the Backbone of the Civil Rights Movement. She led by listening. A master at group dynamics and responding to human emotions, she had a special gift of inspiring people to believing they could make a change.
Forming SNCC
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In spring 1960, sit-in students attended an organizing conference in Raleigh under SCLC. Ella Baker urged them to remain independent.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new windowThough effective, student sit-ins weren't supported by Civil Rights leaders. Learn how Ella Baker's grassroots activism challenged hierarchy and helped the movement gain momentum.
Online Resources
- Ella Baker and the challenge of black ruleWhat is African American Politics? What form should it take? How does it conceptualize white supremacy? In In the Shadow of Du Bois, Robert Gooding-Williams uses the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Fredrick Douglass to provide answers to these questions. While the choices of Douglass and Du Bois make a great deal of sense, they reproduce the tendency of confining political theory to literature – a move that bounds the genre in problematic ways. In this article, I in effect attempt to “unbound” the genre by considering Ella Baker, a civil rights era political organizer.
- Empowering Communities: Ella Baker's Decentralized Leadership Style and Conversational EloquenceThis article examines Ella Baker's distinctive contributions to what she called the fight for full freedom. In particular, this article analyzes Baker's 1969 speech, "The Black Woman in the Civil Rights Struggle." This article contends that Baker's rhetorical efforts allowed her to revitalize and rethink the Civil Rights Movement by positioning her audience as its leaders. By empowering her audience to be leaders and to take a personal stake in the fight for freedom, Baker promoted the continuation of the Civil Rights Movement by emphasizing the importance of individual action and the commitment to a larger communal struggle. This article enriches scholarship about the Civil Rights Movement, by highlighting how Civil Rights Movement rhetors used a wide array of appeals.
- The Parallel Rhetorics of Ella BakerScholars have done much to uncover the contributions of civil rights organizer Ella Baker. Her invitational rhetoric has been their primary focus. The titles of honor bestowed upon Baker say very little about her rhetorical discourse beyond this focus. In this essay, I analyze Baker's parallel employment of liberal, socialist, and radical feminist styles of rhetoric, alongside her invitational style. By examining a body of work that includes two Baker primary sources, pertinent quotes from several of her speeches, and several other sources, I substantiate my argument that Baker did not employ invitational rhetoric exclusively but often projected it along parallel paths with other types of rhetoric as she fought against patriarchy and sexism as a civil rights activist.
Diane Nash on Ella Baker, a Black History Legend | Biography
- Diane Nash on Ella Baker, a Black History Legend | BiographyDiane Nash discusses how her mentor Ella Baker inspired her own work as a civil rights activist in honor of Black History Month.