Location: US 1589/NC 903 (Main Street) at East End Avenue in Littleton
County: Halifax
Original Date Cast: 2011
William Chafe of Duke University has called Ella Baker “the mother of the civil rights movement.” Baker culminated a life dedicated to civil rights work by organizing the meeting to establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at her alma mater, Shaw University.
Born in Norfolk, she moved with her family in 1910 to Elam in Warren County and moved soon after to Littleton. She attended St. Anna’s, a local Episcopal school. Initially the family rented but in time built a house which still stands and to which Baker returned as an adult on visits home.
Baker graduated from Shaw in 1927, moved to New York, and in 1930 joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League, with an aim to develop black economic power through collective planning. In 1940 she began work for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as field secretary, and rose to director of branches, 1943-1946. She wished to build as large a base for the NAACP as possible. Her ventures into traditional male domains, according to Barbara Ransby, “exemplify Baker’s habit of pushing the boundaries of acceptable behavior for a respectable, middle-class, married woman during the 1940s.”
In 1957 Baker joined with Martin Luther King Jr. and others—she was the only woman present—to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). After the sit-ins in Greensboro, beginning February 1, 1960, and the regionwide movement that followed, she organized the meeting at Shaw in April 1960 that gave rise to SNCC. She advocated that the nascent organization be student-directed and not under the umbrella of the SCLC. The members of SNCC were the “shock troops” of the civil rights movement, called by John Hope Franklin “probably the most courageous and the most selfless” of the activists of the 1960s.
Baker mentored the leaders of SNCC, among them Marion Barry, Julian Bond, and John Lewis, as they separated from the SCLC. Among her words of counsel: “Give light and people will find the way... The struggle is eternal. The tribe increase. Somebody else carries on.” Ella Baker died in Queens, where she is buried, on December 13, 1986. The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California, honors her memory and legacy.
References:
Lea Williams, We Who Belive in Freedom: The Life and Times of Ella Baker (2017)
Ellen Cantarow, Moving the Mountain: Women Working for Social Change (1980)
Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2003)
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (1988)
Joanne Grant, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (1998)
Southern Oral History Program interview with Baker (1977): http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/G-0008/menu.html