Ella Baker's legacy lives on in the fight for justice and equality

The civil rights organizer believed in the power of grass-roots activism

Ella Baker was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s-1960s.

As we celebrate Women’s History Month, let’s remember a woman who made major contributions to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s-1960s, but is not as well-known as the male leaders who received significantly more attention.

Although several books have been written about her and a center for human rights in Oakland, California, is named in her honor many Americans still don’t know that Baker was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement.

Many Americans don’t know that Baker was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and the South, she worked alongside some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Ella Josephine Baker was born on Dec. 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia. 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.

She studied at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. After graduating in 1927 as class valedictorian, Baker moved to New York City and began joining social activist organizations.

In 1930, she joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League, whose purpose was to develop Black economic power through collective planning. Before long, she was serving as its national director. She was committed to economic justice for all people and once said, “People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job.”

Baker later worked in the South as a field organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and served as the organization’s national director of branches in the mid-1950s.  In her role, she raised funds and recruited new members to the organization.

After the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other clergymen founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, King asked Baker to establish its national office and serve as its executive director.

Baker left the SCLC after the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, where a group of Black college students from North Carolina A&T University refused to leave a Woolworth’s lunch counter where they had been denied service on Feb. 1, 1960. Inspired by the sit-ins, in April of that year Baker organized the conference for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Shaw University, which became one the major Civil Rights Movement organizations of the 1960s.

During the campaign to register Blacks as voters in Mississippi, Baker was a founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The party was formed before the 1964 Democratic National Convention by Black Democrats who were barred from the Mississippi delegation.

Baker fought for the right to be heard in a male-dominated movement with strong egos and she strongly believed in the power of grassroots action.

‘’You didn’t see me on television, you didn’t see news stories about me,’’ reported the New York Times in her obituary. ‘’The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is strong people don’t need strong leaders.’’

Those words sum up Baker’s view on how to create change. She believed that it is important to develop the people to advocate for themselves to achieve change and not depend on one powerful leader. She was distrustful of charismatic messianic leadership.

This view is still essential to the challenges faced today by those who seek equality and justice.

To be clear, this is not a call for anarchy, but a movement that is not dependent on one great leader and top-down leadership.

When Joe Biden accepted the nomination to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, he began his acceptance speech by quoting Baker:

“Ella Baker, a giant of the civil rights movement, left us with this wisdom: Give people light and they will find a way,” he said. “Give people light. Those are words for our time. The current president has cloaked America in darkness for much too long. Too much anger. Too much fear. Too much division.”

Throughout his acceptance speech, the contrast between and shadow was a guiding metaphor.

In his conclusion, Biden echoed Baker’s words again, saying that “love is more powerful than hate. Hope is more powerful than fear. Light is more powerful than dark,” before calling for love and hope and light to join in the battle for the soul of the nation.”

Baker’s influence and respected organizational skills was reflected in the nickname she acquired: “Fundi,” a Swahili word meaning a person who teaches a craft to the next generation.

Irv Randolph is an award-winning journalist and political commentator. The Randolph Report is a weekly newsletter on politics, culture, current events and professional development relevant to Black Americans, curated by Irv Randolph, an award-winning journalist and political commentator. Sign up below and we’ll deliver new articles to your inbox every Tuesday morning.