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Ella Baker, born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1903, was an enigmatic figure. She spent most of her career working behind the scenes, helping to organize the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and other civil rights groups, yet she was a charismatic public speaker. She had an ordinary childhood in a middleclass family, but when she went to live in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, she was exposed to much of the leftist thought that was then popular among many African American intellectuals. She studied the works of Karl Marx, the nineteenth-century Socialist and economic theorist, and adapted the rhetoric of Marxism to her speeches. It is likely that her numerous conversations with other leftists helped her form the notion that society should be changed to suit people, instead of insisting that people adapt to society. As her career in the civil rights movement developed, she dropped much of her commitment to Socialism, even though she continued occasionally to use Marxist terminology in her speeches. Indeed, her belief that power should build from the bottom up instead of the top down put her in a long tradition of American political thought dating back to before the Revolutionary War. Much of her work helped bring closer to realization the ideals held by many of those who fought that war and who eventually wrote the Constitution.

When Baker graduated from college in April 1927, she wanted to become a missionary or social worker, but she could not afford the additional education she needed to get a job as one or the other, so she moved to New York City to look for opportunities. By 1930 she was involved in the management of the Young Negroes' Cooperative League and served as its national director for about four years. The league was part of an international movement in which people pooled their resources to provide food and other necessities for themselves; with mostly poor African Americans in the league, Baker developed her skills in the grassroots organizing of people who had little money and often had never voted.

The Great Depression of the 1930s was difficult for Baker, and during that decade she learned how to work with little money as well as how to motivate people with her speeches. During these years she worked as a publicist for the National Negro Congress and as a teacher and project supervisor for the federal government's Works Progress Administration. Her work from 1938 to 1946 for the NAACP--and with the New York Urban League beginning in 1946--had much to do with the NAACP's growth and success, and during that period she honed her motivational speaking skills into the style found in "The Black Woman in the Civil Rights Struggle." During the 1950s and 1960s, Baker tried to work quietly behind the scenes to organize civil rights workers; she did so because she wanted people themselves, and not outsiders, to make important choices about their lives. By the 1970s she was a respected figure among civil rights leaders but not well known outside the civil rights movement. This changed when historians began recognizing her achievements, and Baker was sought out by interviewers who wished to record her views of the civil rights movement.

References:

1. Cantarow, Ellen, et al. Moving the Mountain: Women Working for Social Change. New York: Feminist Press, 1980.

2. Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981.

3. Carson, Clayborne. The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle, 1954-1990. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.

4. Dallard, Shyrlee. Ella Baker: A Leader behind the Scenes. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Silver Burdett Press, 1990.

5. Grant, Joanne. Ella Baker: Freedom Bound. New York: John Wiley, 1998.

6. Lerner, Gerda. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

7. Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

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