Ella Baker
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Ella Baker (December 13, 1903 - December 13, 1986) was an African-American Civil Rights activist. She organized the 1960 meeting out of which the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee arose. Coordinator of the Freedom Riders.
Baker was born in as born in Norfolk, Virginia, and grew up in rural North Carolina, She attended Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, graduating in 1927 and moving to New York City. She has wanted to undertake graduate studies in sociology, but as it was the Great Depression she had to find work to support herself. She refused to teach, which at the time was one of the few professions open to black women. She instead took waitressing and factory jobs. During 1929 - 1930 she was an editorial staff member of the American West Indian News, going on to take the position of editorial assistant at the Negro National News. In 1930 she became involed in consumer advocacy, forming the Young Negroes' Cooperative League consumer cooperative.
In 1938 she began her long association with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She travelled widely, especially in the South, as the NAACP field secretary and then as director of branches to recruit members, raise money, and organize local campaigns. Baker formed a network of people in the south who would go on to be important for the fight for civil rights. She resigned from her leadership role in the NAACP in 1946. Returning to New York, she worked with the NAACP on school desegregation, becoming president of the New York chapter of the NAACP in 1952. She resigned in 1953 to run unsuccessfully for the New York City Council on the Liberal party ticket.
In 1958 Baker went to Atlanta to set up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) office, and to organise a voter registration program. She remained in Atlanta for two and a half years as executive director of the SCLC until the post was take up by Wyatt Tee Walker in April 1960. That same year, Baker persuaded the SCLC to invite southern university students to the Southwide Youth Leadership Conference at Shaw University on Easter weekend, at this meeting the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed. She spoke after Martin Luther King and James Lawson, her speech More Than a hamburger, urged the audience to think widely about the issue of racial discrimination. Following the conference Baker resigned from the SCLC and went to work with the SNCC.
From 1962 to 1967 Baker worked on the staff of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), which aimed to help black and white people work together.
In 1964 she helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as an alternative to the regular Democratic Party in Mississippi. The influence of the MFDP on the Democratic Party helped to elect many black leaders in Mississippi, and forced a rule change to allow women and minorities to sit as delegates at the Democratic National Convention.
Reference
- O’Malley, S. G. Baker, Ella Josephine. American National Biography Online, Feb. 2000.
External link
- Biographical piece as part of SNCC-People (http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/baker.html)
- The Ella Baker Centre for Human Rights (http://www.ellabakercenter.org/index.html)