Day 13 - Ella Jo Baker

"People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job." 

Uninterested in the spotlight, Ella Jo Baker devoted none of her efforts in seeking recognition. “I found a greater sense of importance by being a part of those who were growing,” a Baker biographer wrote. Instead, like all the world’s greatest teachers and editors, she enjoyed the pleasure of watching others reach their own potential. Ella Josephine Baker, the master organizer, was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia. Growing up in North Carolina, she developed a sense for social justice early on. Ms. Baker graduated valedictorian from Shaw University (Raleigh, NC) in 1927, and as a student, she challenged school policies that she considered unfair. After graduating in 1927, she relocated to New York City and began joining social activist organizations. 

Baker was a strategist, organizer and mother to the movement whose political acumen, humble leadership style and razor-sharp political insights were legendary. Many say that it is really a reflection of our selective amnesia that few people know her name. The S.N.C.C. leader James Forman once remarked that “many people helped to ignite or were touched by the creative fire of S.N.C.C., without appreciating the generating force of Ella Baker.” Inspired by the historic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, Baker co-founded the organization In Friendship to raise money to fight against Jim Crow Laws in the deep South. 

In 1957, Baker moved to Atlanta to help organize Martin Luther King's new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She also ran a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for Citizenship.  

After a group of black college students from North Carolina A&T University refused to leave a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina where they had been denied service, Ms. Baker organized a meeting at Shaw University for the student leaders of the sit-ins in April 1960. From that meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee -- SNCC -- was born. 

Ms. Baker understood group dynamics and how to empower people to join forces, a delicate task that involved responding to a wide array of human feelings. Unfortunately, despite Ms. Baker’s gifts for leadership and oratory, it is believed that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) pastors were intent on preserving their patriarchal hierarchy and refused to allow her to share in their prestige. When we celebrate the men of the Movement, we must never fail to know the names and celebrate those women of the Movement such as Ella Josephine Baker. 

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