BAKER, ELLA JOSEPHINE
Ella Josephine Baker helped found the U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT and organize three national CIVIL RIGHTS organizations.
Baker was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on
December 13, 1903, the second of three children
of Georgianna Ross Baker and Blake Baker.
Baker’s mother insisted that her children do well
in school, because she felt that they needed an
education in order to live a full life. Baker was
sent to a private boarding school from ninth
grade to twelfth grade, after her mother decided
that she and her siblings were not receiving
high-quality instruction in the public school they had been attending. In 1918, Baker began
studying at Shaw University, an all-black school
in Raleigh, North Carolina, that offered high
school and college-level instruction.
Baker graduated from Shaw University in
1927, ranked first in her class. However, she did
not have enough money for further schooling to
become either a medical missionary or a social
worker, occupations to which she had aspired.
Her college degree in hand, she went to New York Ci t y.
While living in New York, Baker wrote arti-
cles for Harlem newspapers, including the West
Indian Review. Living and working in Harlem
during the mid- to late 1920s, she became a part
of the Harlem Renaissance, a period of high
artistic achievement and greater awareness of
the possibilities for equality, justice, and true
freedom. Baker participated in political discus-
sions with many people, all over New York City.
She later recalled, “Wherever there was a discus-
sion, I’d go. It didn’t matter if it was all men, and
maybe I was the only woman . . . it didn’t matter.”
In the early days of the Great Depression,
Baker was working for a Harlem newspaper
along with George Samuel Schuyler, who was
well known in the black community for his writ-
ing and who frequently railed against racial
prejudice. In one article, Schuyler proposed that
African Americans set up cooperatives to pur-
chase goods in larger quantities, at lower prices
than they could get otherwise. The response to
this article was so positive that Schuyler decided
to set up a cooperative on his own with Baker’s
help. Baker learned a great deal in this experi-
ence, and became an acknowledged expert on
consumer affairs, a new idea that she helped
introduce to the black community nationwide.
In 1935, she was hired by the Works Progress
Administration (WPA), a group of programs set
up by President FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT‘s NEW
DEAL, to teach people living in Harlem how to
purchase the most for the little money they had.
Baker worked for the WPA until 1938, when
she left to become an assistant field secretary for
the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP), the first civil rights
organization established in the United States.
At that time the NAACP had fewer mem-
bers in the South than in any other part of the
United States, and most of its members were
professionals—doctors, lawyers, and teachers.
Baker believed that the organization had to
reach the larger population of working people in
order to accomplish its tasks. She targeted fac-
tory workers, household workers, and construc-
tion workers and tried to get them to support
the NAACP. By 1941, thanks to Baker and the
other NAACP field staffers, the NAACP’s south-
ern membership rolls had increased significantly.
In 1942 Baker was promoted to director of
branches for the organization. In that position,
she helped branch offices organize fund-raising
and membership drives and encouraged them to
become involved in local affairs to improve the
lot of black people in their communities.
Through her contact with the branch offices, the
organization became aware of court cases they
could bring on behalf of blacks who were denied
their civil rights, such as access to public institu-
tions of higher education.
In 1954 Baker was named as president of the
New York City branch of the NAACP. In May of
that year, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its
landmark decision in BROWN V. BOARD OF EDU-
CATION, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed.
873. The Court ruled in Brown that “separate
but equal” schools for blacks and whites were
unconstitutional. As a result, school districts in
cities across the nation had to make sure they
were not violating the law. Based on her experi-
ence raising her niece, Jackie, Baker believed that
New York City schools were segregated, and she
and other community leaders pressured city hall to examine the school system more closely for evidence of illegal SEGREGATION. The next year,
the mayor of New York City asked Baker to join
his newly created Commission on School Integration.
To present the commission’s findings to parents
of schoolchildren, Baker set up meetings
around New York City. When she found that
many parents were deeply concerned over the
quality of their neighborhood schools, Baker
encouraged them to petition the school board to
allow their children to attend schools of their
own choosing. In response to the petitions, New
York developed one of the first open-enrollment
plans for public schools. Open enrollment
allowed public school students to attend schools
outside their own neighborhoods, without
requiring them to change their residency or pay
extra tuition or transportation costs.
A new chapter in the civil rights movement
began when ROSA PARKS refused to give up her
seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus on December
1, 1955. In Montgomery, black passengers
could sit only in the back of the bus, behind the
first ten rows of seats. Whites could sit in the
black section of the bus, but when they did, a
black person could not sit next to or in front of
a white person. And black people could be
forced to give up their seats if a white person had
no place to sit.
Parks was an officer of the NAACP’s Montgomery
branch and had worked with Baker on
the NAACP’s Leadership Conference, a program
designed to help local members develop their
leadership skills. In support of Parks, leaders of
Montgomery’s black community, including Dr.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., organized a boycott
of the Montgomery bus system. The boycott
lasted from December 1, 1955, until December
20, 1956, when blacks in Montgomery heard
that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled on
December 17 that Montgomery’s bus segregation
laws were unconstitutional (Gayle v. Browder,
352 U.S. 903, 77 S. Ct. 145, 1 L. Ed. 2d 114
[Nov. 13, 1956], reh’g denied, 352 U.S. 950, 77 S.
Ct. 323, 1 L. Ed. 2d 245).
After the success of the MONTGOMERY BUS
BOYCOTT, Baker and others eventually convinced
King to call a meeting of southern black
leaders to plan to extend the battle. The meeting
King called was to take place in Atlanta on January
11, 1957. The evening before, several locations
in Montgomery were bombed, including
homes of white and black supporters of the civil
rights movement. King and the Rev. Ralph D.
Abernathy, whose home was one of those
bombed, left the meeting to investigate the incidents.
Baker and an associate stayed in Atlanta to
manage the conference with Coretta Scott King
and the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth. This meeting
was the beginning of the SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN
LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE (SCLC), an umbrella
organization for groups fighting for civil rights.
One of the SCLC’s first nationwide efforts
was the Crusade for Citizenship, a voter registration
program. By September 1959, when the
organization had not motivated masses of
African Americans to register, Baker proposed
three changes that she believed would result in a
stronger organization. The first suggestion was
to create an overarching plan to coordinate the
activities of SCLC member groups. The second
was to actively develop the leadership skills of
people in the member organizations who had
demonstrated abilities in that area. The third
was to organize black southerners to fight every
form of discrimination by using mass action
and nonviolent resistance.
One method of nonviolent resistance, the
sit-in, was used as early as 1942 by a civil rights
organization called the CONGRESS OF RACIAL
EQUALITY (CORE) to protest RACIAL DISCRIMINATION.
Not until 1960, however, were sit-ins
widely used as a form of protest. In February
1960, four black students sat at the lunch
counter in a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro,
North Carolina. They were refused service,
because it was a “whites-only” lunch counter,
but remained seated until the store closed for
the day.News of the incident spread quickly, and
area high school and college students joined
them in the following days. By the end of March,
students had staged sit-ins in many other southern
cities. Baker realized that although the sitins
were generating publicity for the civil rights
movement, their influence would be greater if
they were better coordinated, so in April 1960
Baker organized a conference for student civil
rights activists at Shaw University. Over three
hundred students attended the meeting, which
was the genesis of the STUDENT NONVIOLENT
COORDINATING COMMITTEE (SNCC). Among
those attending were Marion Barry, future
mayor and future city council member ofWashington,
D.C., and JULIAN BOND, future Georgia
legislator.
Baker resigned from the SCLC and became
SNCC’s adviser and organized its main office.
SNCC developed a unique, separate identity within the civil rights movement because of
Baker’s style of leadership. Baker believed that
everyone in an organization should lead it, so
she made sure that everyone in attendance at
meetings stated an opinion, and that no other
single civil rights leader or organization, including
the NAACP and King, directed the activities
of the committee.When SNCC nearly split apart
over whether to pursue direct action (such as the
Montgomery bus boycott and the Greensboro
sit-ins) or voter registration, Baker suggested
that the organization could do both, setting the
stage for the 1961 Freedom Rides.
The Freedom Rides were begun in 1961 as a
response to a 1960 ruling, Boynton v. Virginia,
364 U.S. 206, 81 S. Ct. 182, 5 L. Ed. 2d 206, in
which the Supreme Court decided that interstate
buses and trains, and the facilities in the
terminals that served them, could not constitutionally
remain segregated. The ruling was flagrantly
ignored throughout the South. The
Freedom Riders, who were both black and
white, intended to stop the segregation by traveling
together along the routes where segregated
facilities were located. The Freedom Rides drew
the attention of the Congress, which began
debate on a civil rights bill in the summer of
1963. The 1964 CIVIL RIGHTS ACT, as the bill was
called, was finally passed on July 2, 1964, guaranteeing
African Americans EQUAL PROTECTION
in the use of hotels, restaurants, and other public
establishments; in job opportunities, raises,
and promotions; and in the use of public
schools (Pub. L. No. 88-352, 78 Stat. 241).
While the Freedom Riders traveled across
the South, SNCC also pursued voter registration.
In 1963, Baker went to Mississippi to help
with the Freedom Vote, a project of CORE and
SNCC. The Freedom Vote was a mock election
intended to demonstrate that, contrary to the
opinions held by many white southerners,
blacks were interested in voting. Baker assisted
the project by speaking at rallies, setting up
polling places, and collecting and counting the
ballots on voting day. The Freedom Vote was a
big success: more than 80,000 of the 90,000 people
who cast ballots that day were black, even
though only around 20,000 blacks were registered
for real elections. Two years later, in August
1965, the efforts of Baker and thousands of
other activists bore fruit when the VOTING
RIGHTS ACT (Pub. L. No. 89-110, 79 Stat. 437)
was passed. The Voting Rights Act nearly eliminated
one of the last ways that had been used to
prevent African Americans from voting—the literacy
test—by prohibiting its use in states where
fewer than 50 percent of eligible voters were registered.
In 1964 Baker again helped organize a civil
rights group. The group was the Mississippi
Freedom DEMOCRATIC PARTY (MFDP), begun
in response to an established political party, the
Mississippi Democratic party. The MFDP
attempted to represent the state of Mississippi at
the 1964 Democratic National Convention in
Atlantic City, New Jersey, by claiming that, as an
interracial group, it was better able to do so than
the all-white Mississippi Democratic party.
HUBERT H. HUMPHREY, vice president of the
United States, and Walter F. Mondale, Minnesota
attorney general, suggested a compromise:
two MFDP members could be named as delegates to the convention, but would not be
part of Mississippi’s delegation. The MFDP
refused this offer, but its request was the catalyst
for a new rule passed by the national Democratic
party, that all state delegations would have to
be racially mixed.
After achieving notable successes in the U.S.
civil rights movement, Baker continued to serve
as SNCC’s mentor as the organization became
involved in protests against the VIETNAM WAR,
and as an advocate for the free speech movement
and WOMEN’S RIGHTS. She also worked
toward increased civil rights for blacks in other
countries, including the former Southern
Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe; South Africa; and
Puerto Rico.
Baker died in New York City on December
13, 1986, her eighty-third birthday. By that time,
some of the organizations she had been involved
with no longer existed. SNCC fell apart after dissension
developed over black power, or black
independence from white America. The MFDP
lasted through the 1967 elections, winning
offices in local races, but was no longer needed
after African Americans were allowed to join the
state Democratic party. Baker’s work, however,
lives on in a generation of black U.S. leaders she
nurtured and encouraged, who are able to carry
on the struggle for civil and HUMAN RIGHTS
worldwide.
FURTHER READINGS
Dallard, Shyrlee. 1990. Ella Baker: A Leader behind the Scenes.
Parsippany, N.J.: Silver Burdett Press.
CROSS-REFERENCES
School Desegregation; Voting.
