Ella Josephine Baker was an African American civil rights and human rights activist. Born in 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia, Ella Baker became one of the leading figures in the civil rights movement from the 1950s to the 1960s.
Growing up in North Carolina, she developed a sense for social justice early on, due in part to her grandmother's stories about life under slavery.
Her grandmother's pride and resilience in the face of racism and injustice continued to inspire Ms. Baker throughout her life.
As a student she challenged school policies that she thought were unfair. After graduating in 1927 as class valedictorian, she moved to New York City and began joining social activist organizations.
She worked alongside the movement’s greatest figures, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Thur good Marshall, Marvel Cooke, Asa Philip Randolph or Martin Luther King. She also mentored many emerging activists like Rosa Parks, and Bob Moses.
Baker criticized professionalized, charismatic leadership; she promoted grassroots organizing, radical democracy, and the ability of the oppressed to understand their worlds and advocate for themselves
." She is known for her critiques not only of racism within American culture, but also of sexism within the civil rights movement.
She was the director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference before creating the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
One of goal of her life, is to assist the new student activists because she viewed young, emerging activists as a resource and an asset to the movement. So she created the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Adopting the Gandhian theory of nonviolent direct action, SNCC members joined with activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to organize the 1961 Freedom Rides.
In 1964 SNCC helped create Freedom Summer, an effort to focus national attention on Mississippi's racism and to register black voters.
Miss Baker, and many of her contemporaries, believed that voting was one key to freedom.
