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An Activist is born
Ella Baker was born on 1903 in rural North Carolina and took pride in being from a family with a tradition of social consciousness. -
The Start of the Ella Baker
Between 1929 and 1932, she was on the editorial staffs of at least two newspapers, the American West Indian News and Negro National News -
Ella Baker's Progression
Between 1932 and 1939, she became a national director of the Young Negroes' Cooperative League, which established stores, buying clubs that encouraged poor people to pool their purchasing power, and other cooperative economic ventures in Black neighborhoods. -
Starting the upbringing of the organization
Later into the same period of time, she worked with a variety of labor organizations in Harlem, including the Women's Day Workers and Industrial League, which focused on the problems of domestic workers. -
Apart of the NAACP
In 1943 she became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) National Director of Branches but left its office in 1946 for raising a niece and a result of her conflicts with the organization's viewpoint and returned as a president of the New York City branch to develop a program in which Black and Hispanic parents actively worked on issues involving school desegregation and the quality of education. -
The Evolution to an SCLC
In the mid-1950s, with Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison, she helped organize In Friendship, an organization that offered economic support for Blacks suffering reprisals for political activism in the South and developed the idea of a mass-based organization to continue the momentum that came out of the Montgomery bus boycott which transform into Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organization. -
The Link to the dream organization of the SNCC
In 1961, she also joined the SNCC which became the kind of organization that Ella Baker had been trying to create for some years. It went into the rural areas that other groups were reluctant to enter, it was far more open to the participation of women and young people than the established civil rights groups. -
A Bond Created To The SCEF
Baker also worked with Anne Braden in the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) where the two became close friends; and Fannie Lou Hamer and Bayard Rustin found themselves on opposing sides in the battle over a proposed compromise at the 1964 Democratic National convention. -
The Women as the Symbol of the Movement Leaders
Ella Baker along with Daisy Bates have both held key positions in established civil rights organizations, each received little recognition as the "movement leaders" within the Black community, and both paid an economic price for their leadership roles. -
The Partnership with Martin Luther King
Baker later works with Martin Luther King to inspire and build even more movements or to people organizing one-by-one, as she argued, fostering commitment and changing consciousness so that people recognize their own power to achieve social change and act on it.
