On this day in 1903

Dec. 13, 1903

Ella Baker protests the all-white Mississippi delegation outside the Democratic National Convention in 1964. Credit: Photo by George Ballis, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

Ella Baker, who played an integral role in the civil rights movement, was born in Norfolk, Virginia. 

Baker began her activism after graduating from Shaw University as class valedictorian in 1927. She dedicated herself to economic justice, saying, “People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job.” 

In 1940, she became a field secretary for the NAACP, and three years later served as director of branches. Inspired by the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, she co-founded the organization, Friendship, to fight Jim Crow laws in the Deep South. Two years later, she moved to Atlanta to work with Martin Luther King Jr. and help him organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. 

After the 1960 sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina, she organized a youth leadership conference at Shaw University, where more than 300 gathered. She supported the students’ decision to leave SCLC and form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She became “the godmother of SNCC,” teaching students that “strong people don’t need strong leaders” and that they should take control of the movement, rather than relying on a leader with “heavy feet of clay,” a not-so-subtle jab at King. 

She continued her grassroots work in 1964 with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and when the three civil rights workers were killed, she declared, “Until the killing of a Black mother’s son becomes as important as the killing of a white mother’s son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest.” 

She remained active in the movement until her death on her 83rd birthday in 1986. In 2009, the U.S. Post Office honored her with a postage stamp.

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