Ella baker accomplishments
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Ella Baker
(1903-1986)
Who Was Ella Baker?
Ella Baker became one of the leading figures of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. Following her early work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she was among the founders of Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. Three years later, she helped launch the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
Early Life and Education
Born in Norfolk, Virginia, on December 13, 1903, Baker grew up in rural North Carolina. She was close to her grandmother, a former slave, who told Baker many stories about her life, including a whipping she had received at the hands of her owner. A bright student, Baker attended Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, graduating class valedictorian in 1927.
YNCL and NAACP
After moving to New York City in the late 1920s, Baker joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League (YNCL), which allowed its members to pool their funds to get better deals on goods and services. Before long, she was serving as its national director.
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Ella Baker
African-American civil rights activist (1903–1986)
Ella Josephine Baker (December 13, 1903 – December 13, 1986) was an African-Americancivil rights and human rights activist. She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and the South, she worked alongside some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists, such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, and Bob Moses, as leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).[1][2]
Baker criticized professionalized, charismatic leadership; she promoted grassroots organizing, radical democracy, and the ability of the oppressed to understand their worlds and advocate for themselves.[3] She realized this vision most fully in the 1960s as the primary advisor and strategist of the SNCC.[1][4] Biographer Barbara Ransby calls Baker "one of the most importa
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Baker, Ella Josephine
December 13, 1903 to December 13, 1986
Rejecting Martin Luther King’s charismatic leadership, Ella Baker advised student activists organizing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to promote “group-centered leaders” rather than the “leader-centered” style she associated with King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) (Baker, 19 June 1968). It was this grassroots leadership that Baker credited for the success and longevity of the movement: “You see, I think that, to be very honest, the movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement. This is not a discredit to him. This is, to me, as it should be” (Baker, 19 June 1968).
Born in Norfolk, Virginia, on 13 December 1903, Baker was raised on the same land her grandparents had worked as slaves. Baker’s childhood was marked early on by the activist spirit of her mother, a member of the local missionary association, who called on women to act as agents of social change in their communities.
After graduating from Shaw University in 1927, Baker
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