Ella Baker

"In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning- getting down and understanding the root cause.
It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system."
- Ella Baker 1964
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Ella Baker, born Dec. 13, 1903 and died Dec. 13, 1986, was a civil rights and human rights activist beginning in the 1930s whose career spanned more than five decades. She was instrumental in the launch of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
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.

She is the granddaughter of a slave who was beaten for refusing to marry a man her master chose for her, Ella Baker spent her life working behind the scenes to organize the Civil Rights Movement. If she could have changed anything about the movement, it might have been to persuade the men leading it that they, too, should do more work behind the scenes. Baker was a staunch believer in helping ordinary people to work together and lead themselves, and she objected to centralized authority. In her worldview, "strong people don't need strong leaders."

In 1927, after graduating from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, Baker moved to Harlem and began her long career of organizing, helping to establish consumer cooperatives during the Depression. She joined the NAACP's staff in 1938 and spent half of each year traveling in the South to build support for local branches, which would become the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1946, she reduced her NAACP responsibilities to work on integrating New York City public schools.

Baker was one of the visionaries who created the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, and she recruited the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. into it. She served two terms as the SCLC's acting executive director but clashed with King, feeling that he controlled too much and empowered others too little.

In 1960, when four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, were refused service in a university cafeteria, setting off sympathetic sit-ins across the country, Baker seized the day. Starting with student activists at her alma mater, she founded the nationwide Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which gave young blacks, including women and the poor, a major role in the Civil Rights Movement.

Baker returned to New York City in 1964 and worked for human rights until her death.
Her words live on in "Ella's Song," sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock: "We who believe in freedom cannot rest."