Ella Baker
Ella Baker was born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1903, and later she moved with her family to Littleton, North Carolina on land that once belonged to her grandparents’ slave masters. In 1927, Ms. Baker graduated from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. When she moved to the Harlem area in New York City, Ms. Baker discovered that, despite her education, the only jobs open to her as an African-American woman involved factory work or waiting tables.
Discouraged by the lack of opportunities, Ms. Baker began writing articles for the American West Indian News and the Negro National News. In the late 1930s, she became active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and eventually began traveling extensively as a field secretary recruiting members throughout the South. In 1952, Baker became president of the New York City branch of the NAACP. She resigned from the NAACP the following year to run unsuccessfully for the New York City Council, but continued to work towards equal rights for African Americans.
Baker was present at the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957. She served as interim director of the SCLC for more than two years, although as neither minister nor a man, it was clear that she would never be named the executive director.
Baker soon recognized the need for a youth-centered organization that could fight on its own terms. Therefore, she organized a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1960, out of which emerged the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC was one of the nation’s leading civil rights organizations in the 1960s.
In conjunction with SNCC, Baker helped coordinate the “freedom riders,” groups of young African Americans and whites who rode interstate buses into the segregated South to test the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia (364 U.S. 454 (1960). In this case, the court held that segregation in public transportation was illegal because it violated the federal Interstate Commerce Act which broadly forbade discrimination in public transportation. The riders faced mob violence and mass arrest by authorities determined to halt integration. The worst violence occurred in Alabama where one bus was firebombed and the riders were viciously beaten as they fled the burning bus.
During her life, Ella Baker helped create a diverse civil rights movement which embraced the values and viewpoints of all involved. She died in 1986.
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