Baker, Ella

BAKER, ELLA (1903–1986). The “godmother” of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Ella Baker was a major influence on political activists from the 1930s to the 1980s. She encouraged hundreds of students and community people to organize and take what was legally theirs, particularly in the area of civil rights. In addition to her work with SNCC, Ella Baker was national director of the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League, director of branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a coordinator of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), and a staff member of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF).

Granddaughter of slaves who had acquired the land in North Carolina on which they had slaved, Ella Josephine Baker grew up with a strong sense of a Black community who shared what they had. After graduating as valedictorian from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, she moved to New York City, where she worked for the American West Indian News and the Negro National News. Because few jobs were open to Black women, she did factory work and waitressing to survive. In 1932, she helped organize the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League, a consumer cooperative, and did consumer education for the Works Progress Administration.

From 1940 to 1946, Ella Baker traveled in the South for the NAACP as field secretary and then director of branches to recruit members and stimulate local campaigns. She was involved in the anti-lynching campaign and the equal-pay-for-black-teachers movement. Her strength was to evoke in people a feeling of common need and the belief that people together can change the conditions under which they live. During these years, she formed a network of politically active people throughout the South who proved invaluable during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1946, Baker resigned from her leadership role in the national NAACP because she felt it was too bureaucratic. She also took on the responsibility of raising her niece. She did, however, work with the NAACP in New York City on school desegregation and served as president of the city’s branch.

In 1958, Ella Baker became executive director of SCLC, founded by Martin Luther King, Jr., and other ministers in 1957 immediately after the Montgomery bus boycott. Although SCLC believed voter registration to be primary, this priority did not become a reality until SNCC was formed in 1960. Baker was instrumental in inviting to a conference the hundreds of Black students and some white students who had participated in the sit-ins at lunch counters throughout the South, and out of which came SNCC and its philosophy of nonviolent direct action. Although Baker did not personally believe in nonviolence, she saw it as a tactic that could accomplish voter registration and one in which many of the students believed. During this first SNCC conference, Baker broke with SCLC and Martin Luther King, who wished her to influence the SNCC students to become a youth wing of SCLC. In the following years, Baker was the older person behind SNCC who listened, counseled, advised, and nurtured the civil rights workers who organized the freedom rides, worked in voter registration, and broke segregation in the South. Baker saw securing the vote as a necessary step for black people to take but did not idealistically believe it would cure their problems.

The MFDP was organized by SNCC as an alternative to the regular Democratic Party in Mississippi. Ella Baker set up the Washington office of the MFDP and keynoted its Jackson, Mississippi, convention. Although the MFDP delegates were not seated at the Democratic National Convention, the influence of the MFDP was felt in the election of many local Black leaders to office in Mississippi. But the Democrat’s rejection of the MFDP also disillusioned many young activists about the possibilities of working within the system.

Ella Baker continued her political work with SCEF, an organization dedicated to helping Black and white people work together. She also was a supporter of freedom struggles in Africa, a national board member of the Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee and vice-chairperson of the Mass Party Organizing Committee. In her last years she continued to nurture, inspire, scold, and advise the numerous young people who worked with her during her long career of political activism.

Cantarow, Ellen, and Susan Gushee O’Malley. “Ella Baker Organizing for Civil Rights.” In Moving the Mountain. New York: Feminist Press, 1980.

Grant, Joanne. Ella Baker: Freedom Bound. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 1998

Moye, J.Todd. Ella Baker: Community Organizer of the Civil Rights Movement. Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2013.

Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker. Directed and produced by Joanne Grant. 1980. Sixty minutes. Distributed by Icarus/First Run Features. http://icarusfilms.com/if-ell2

Ella Baker Papers, 1903-1986. Overview. Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture. New York Public Library. Archives & Manuscripts. http://archives.nypl.org/scm/20899