Perhaps best known for her work with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition (SCLC) and her involvement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Ella Baker was an outspoken advocate of grassroots leadership. Throughout her life-long career as an activist, Baker participated in more than fifty different organizations and campaigns, ranging from the Negro Cooperative Movement in the 1940s to the Free Angela Davis campaign in the 1970s.
Born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1903, Baker was raised by her parents, Georgianna and Blake Baker, on the same land her grandparents had worked as slaves. Baker's childhood was marked early on by an activist spirit. Her mother, a member of the Missionary Association, called on women to act as agents of social change in their communities, while her aunts and uncles were active in local issues.
After graduating from Shaw University in 1927, Baker moved to Harlem, where as national director of the Young Negroes Cooperative League (YNCL), she helped organize African-American consumer cooperatives during the Depression. During this time, Baker was also employed by the Worker's Education Project, a program of the Works Progress Administration, and was involved with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and other trade unions.
In 1941, Baker joined the staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as an assistant field secretary and later served as director of branches. Unable to redirect the organization's focus towards grassroots organizing, Baker resigned from her position in 1946 but remained as New York City branch president from 1954 until 1958. During this time, Baker, along with Stanley Levison and Bayard Rustin, co-founded In-Friendship, a group to aid victims of racial terrorism in the South.
In January 1958, at Martin Luther King, Jr.'s request, Baker moved to Atlanta to organize SCLC's Crusade for Citizenship, an educational and action campaign for the enforcement of voting rights for black citizens. She ran SCLC's Atlanta headquarters; and after executive director John Tilley resigned in April 1959, she filled in until a permanent director was hired in March 1960.
While serving on the SCLC staff, Baker experienced personality conflicts with colleagues and disagreed with the leadership’s organizing phi losophy. Andrew Young, an SCLC staff member with Baker, characterized Baker as a "determined woman" who reminded the young Baptist ministers of the "strong Mommas they were all trying to break free of." Further,” Young said, "The Baptist church has no tradition of women in independent leadership roles, and the result was dissatisfaction all around."
Rather than a "leader-centered" movement, Baker pushed for "group-centered leadership" which she later described in a 1968 interview: "[T]he first consideration is to try and deve lop leadership out of the group and to spread the leadership roles so that you deve lop—in other words, you're organizing people to be self-sufficient rather than to be dependent upon the charismatic leader, or the Moses type leader."
Fol lowing the February 1960 sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, Baker and King called a conference of student activists at Shaw University. The result of the April meeting was a student-led organization known as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Already serving in an advisory capacity to the growing student movement, Baker left SCLC in August 1960.
In addition to continuing her involvement as an advisor to SNCC, Baker served as a consultant to the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) throughout the early 1960s and helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). She returned to New York in 1964 and remained active in the civil rights struggle until her death in 1986.