CNN – She played an important role in three of the largest groups in the civil rights movement, but Ella Baker is still largely unknown outside of the activist community.
Baker grew up in North Carolina, where her grandmother’s stories of life under slavery inspired her passion for social justice.
As an adult, she became an organizer within the NAACP and co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led. She also helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
For her efforts, Baker has been called the “mother of the civil rights movement”.
Baker was best known not as a frontline leader but as a mentor to some of the movement’s greatest leaders. She taught volunteers that the movement couldn’t depend solely on charismatic leaders, and empowered them to become activists in their own community.
This is the approach that led the SNCC when it launched its Freedom Mississippi voter registration campaign in Mississippi in 1964. Baker often risked her life organizing in small towns in the south.
“The main task,” she once said, “was to make people understand that they had something in their power that they could use.”
Baker had reason to distrust charismatic leaders. Many of the greatest leaders in the civil rights movement came from a black church tradition in which women were expected to be submissive.
Nobody has ever accused the strong-willed baker of turning their back on someone.
Her relationship with King is still controversial. King struggled with confident women like Baker, historians say, and she eventually left the SCLC.
She still made a name for herself. Many of the greatest civil rights activists credit Baker, not King, as an inspiration. SNCC activists called her “Fundi,” a Swahili word for a person teaching a skill to the next generation.
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