Baker, Ella (1903–1986)

Ella Josephine Baker, an African American civil rights and political activist, was influential in a broad range of 20th-century social justice movements for almost half a century. Baker is one of a group of significant, but not widely known, African American women who made crucial contributions to the civil rights movement. Her radical vision of social change emphasized grassroots organizing, commitment to listening to people, and then working together to address their problems and needs.

Baker, born in Norfolk, Virginia, was influenced by growing up in Norfolk and rural North Carolina as the granddaughter of former slaves. Family members, such as her grandfather, Mitchell Ross, a farmer and Baptist minister, and her mother, Georgianna Ross Baker, whose religious beliefs and sense of moral obligation spurred her to help the sick and others in need in the community, set examples that would influence Baker's activism for the eradication of poverty, racism, and other inequities. Baker was sent to the Shaw Academy and University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and graduated as class valedictorian in 1927.

Within a year, she moved to Harlem, where she encountered what she described as radical thinking and saw firsthand the terrible impact of the Great Depression on ordinary people's lives. She held jobs ranging from waitressing and factory labor to editorial and management work for the American West Indian News and the Negro National News. Through working at the Harlem Branch Library, helping organize speakers for the Adult Education committee, attending Brookwood Labor College (established to train labor organizers) in Katonah, New York, for a semester in 1931, Ella Baker became immersed in the radical political debates of the time.

Ella Baker worked on tenant and consumer rights with the Dunbar Housewives' League, as well as on a variety of community cooperative projects. Along with George Schuyler, in 1930 she helped organize and became executive director of the Young Negroes' Cooperative League, a black consumer cooperative formed to combat the economic effects of the Depression and to promote mutual aid, communalism, and community-based action. In the 1930s, Ella also taught consumer education through the Works Progress Administration. She was married to Thomas J. Roberts for several decades but kept her maiden name, and she raised her niece Jacqueline Brockington.

Ella Baker's organizing abilities and capacity to be an effective grassroots trainer were central to her work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In the 1940s, she traveled in the South and throughout the country as a field secretary and helped recruit members, organized campaigns locally, and raised money as director of branches. She worked closely with people on everything from job training for African Americans to antilynching campaigns and thus created a network of individuals committed to social and economic change. This network would become an important source for the civil rights activities of the 1950s and 1960s. By 1952, Baker resigned from the NAACP in part to raise her niece but also because of her disaffection with the bureaucracy and the lack of a group-centered leadership. Baker returned to Harlem and was elected president of the New York City NAACP branch. By building coalitions, she organized campaigns on issues such as desegregation, school reform, and police brutality. Her involvement in coalition politics resulted in her unsuccessful run for elective office for the New York City Council on the Liberal Party ticket.

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