Ella Baker

Ella Jo Baker was born in 1903 into a relatively well off African American family. Her grandfather, Mitchell Ross, had been able to purchase 50 acres near Littleton, North Carolina, using this land in a cooperative manner to help his neighbors. Ella’s mother was a stern, assertive religious leader, commanding respect in her efforts to “lift as we climb.”

Ella herself became an excellent student, completing high school and college at Shaw Boarding School and becoming valedictorian of her class. She was an excellent debater, but she thought educated people should make space for the working poor and tenant farmers who were often illiterate. She refused to become a teacher, partly because it was expected, and also because education was funded and controlled by whites.

Instead, a cousin helped Ella move to Harlem, where she became seduced by its vibrant political life. She lived near the 135th Street library and went to lectures at the YWCA. She became national director of the short-lived Young Negroes Cooperative League, but it lacked capital. Ella took writing and organizing jobs but never had much money. In 1936 she worked on the Workers Education Project, part of the WPA. Every spectrum of radical thinking could be found in the WPA, as people learned, studied and argued about the problems of the day.

Ella married her college sweetheart T. J. Roberts and lived with him in New York for 20 years before their divorce. But Ella was reticent about her private life and continued to go under the name of “Miss Baker.” She adopted her niece when Jackie was nine, educating her in New York. 

In 1940, Ella Baker joined the fast-growing NAACP as an assistant field secretary and later was the national director of field services. Baker traveled all over the South, believing relationships were the building blocks of activism. She especially enjoyed people in such difficult places as Birmingham, Alabama, and Shreveport, Louisiana. She stressed patience and process. People could grow into confidence. But Baker said what she thought, making the NAACP leadership uncomfortable. She left in 1946, but she did not cut her ties completely.

In the late 1940’s and 50’s, Baker continued to work in New York on various jobs, especially in education, demanding integrated schools and parental participation. She was never a communist, but she wasn’t anti-communist either. She never took static positions. Nevertheless, she was monitored by the FBI.

Dramatic events in the South led to the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and suggested the potential for wide-spread action. With Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison, Ella Baker formed In Friendship to help with funding for these actions. This group met with Martin Luther King to find ways the movement might expand, leading to the organization of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957 in Atlanta. Baker moved to Atlanta and set up the office. Her contacts all over the South helped make it successful.

But Ella Baker was never comfortable in the SCLC. Dr. King’s larger than life persona took over, which kept others from leading. Baker felt people’s reliance on a messianic leader made them more dependent. She wanted to help people vote and document harassment, to work from the bottom up. But in the SCLC a patriarchal ethos took over and women’s work was constantly undervalued. Baker believed she worked for a movement, not an organization. She was a radical humanist, unfalteringly confident in common people. She left the SCLC in 1960.

Beginning in Greensboro, North Carolina, students ignited a blaze of sit-ins all over the country. Ella Baker nurtured this movement. In April, 1960, 200 student leaders collected to form the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. Baker insisted the group be independent of existing groups. She found office space for them and did much of the writing during the first hopeful summer. She was able to fund herself with a job at the YWCA. 

After their involvement in the bloody interstate Freedom Rides begun the next year, SNCC activists were seen as the shock troops of the movement. There was constant disagreement and discussion, in all of which Ella Baker participated. She insisted on a politics of action, which empowered local people, but she also felt thinking and analysis must be part of the work. By 1964 the group was planning Freedom Summer, when hundreds of volunteers from the north converged on Mississippi to teach and help voter registration.

For the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegate challenge, Ella Baker staffed the Washington office and traveled with Fannie Lou Hamer to tell her story. The group’s rejection of the Democrats’ lame compromise on the convention floor was a turning point for the movement, leading to black separatism.

In the 1970’s asthma and arthritis slowed Ella Baker down, but she never stopped, opposing political repression and persecution, and war and colonialism abroad. She also spoke to women’s groups. Her radical democratic humanism gave meaning to her every action. She died in New York in 1986.

Since her death, countless movement activists have testified to Ella Baker’s mentoring. Her quiet presence was always felt. She raised questions, taught by inquiry and example, by teasing out what was always available in people. According to her biographer Barbara Ransby, “Baker’s leadership helped create a space where the traditional hierarchies of race, class and gender could be turned on their heads,” particularly in SNCC in the 1960’s.

When I studied the civil rights movement recently, I was thrilled by stories of this humble woman who was unintimidated by anyone, who operated with confidence and authority and ignored convention. It seemed to me she was fighting my battles as well as those of the movement, against those who try to keep us small and unimportant; fighting for reality and humanity. Ransby’s book, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision [published 2003], tells the story of the movement from Ella’s point of view.