.jpg)
.jpg)
Ke'Shunta Drake is an Assistant Editor at Historianspeaks.org. She is a graduate student at Michigan State University where she is completing studies in English literature.
Black women were significant figures in the Civil Rights Movement. The patriarchal structure of the movement, however, overshadowed many of these women's contributions to the struggle. Ella Baker belongs to a long line of Black women activists whose life and work contributions to the Civil Rights Movement demolished patriarchal assumptions and limitations. Ella Baker was born in the early twentieth century in Norfolk, Virginia. She attended Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and graduated with honors. After graduation, Baker moved to New York City and worked as an editorial assistant for the New Negro National News in Harlem. While in Harlem, Baker protested Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia during the Italian and Ethiopian War (1936-1941) and supported the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama, nine young Black men falsely accused of raping two white women in a boxcar in Alabama. Baker later founded the Negro History Club at the Harlem Library. She also befriended John Henrik Clarke, a noted activist historian and Pauli Murray, an attorney and civil rights activist.
Baker’s writing and advocacy work and belief in social change was the major impetus for her work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Baker held many positions during her time with the organization. Her experience with the NAACP eventually led to her work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957. At SCLC, Baker served as Associate Director. In this capacity, she was active in the founding conference for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Shaw University in 1960. Baker along with Howard Zinn became known as one of SNCC' highly revered advisors. Baker became known as the “Godmother of SNCC.” In 1961, Baker persuaded SNCC to form two wings: direct action and voter registration. With Baker’s assistance, SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) coordinated the Freedom Rides in 1961. The grassroots movement expanded its movement to include black sharecroppers and tenant farmers throughout the South. Through SNCC, Baker was a teacher and mentor to many historical figures including Stokely Carmichael, Curtis Muhammad, and Diane Nash.
Baker was a tireless fighter for social justice. A fight that continued for the duration of her life and assumed many forms. A fierce critic of capitalism, she supported socialist methods of societal organization. Baker believed that the strength of an organization emanated from the bottom up not the top down. During her later years, she traveled widely and supported the Free Angela Campaign, which advocated for the release of Angela Davis, a Black feminist activist who was charged with murder after a failed armed escape attempt during the Soledad brother’s trials in California in August 1970. Davis was cleared of all charges in 1972. Baker’s activism was both transnational and international. She supported the Puerto Rican independence movement in the 1960s and 1970s and raised her voice against Apartheid in South Africa, a legalized form of segregation similar to Jim Crow formally instituted in 1948. Baker remained an activist until her death in 1986 on her 83rd birthday. Baker was a woman who dedicated her life to the struggle for social change, and she will always be remembered as the “Godmother of SNCC, and perhaps more importantly the Godmother of Black Struggle.