Her contacts within the NAACP proved to be a valuable resource as the freedom movement garnered momentum.Baker eventually rejoined the NAACP’s local chapter in New York in 1952.
Ella Baker Elementary School. In 1940, she joined the NAACP.From 1940 to 1946, Baker worked up the totem pole in the NAACP. Ella Baker Days have been popping up all over the country as a way to honor and celebrate Ms. Baker’s lifetime of community organizing and civil rights activism on behalf of communities (and especially women) of color. Hardly anyone mentions Ella Baker, but she had accepted her anonymity:“I found a greater sense of importance by being a part of those who were growing,” Baker told filmmaker Joanne Grant in her 1981 documentary John Hope Franklin, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, called Baker, “probably the most courageous and the most selfless” of the activists in the 1960s.Baker certainly lived up to that nickname. She became a mentor to me.”It was here that Baker’s connections with the NAACP bore fruit. For two years, Baker trained leaders of local chapters in resistance, planned protests and held events to further the SCLC’s aims.Baker often clashed with King, though.
There, she worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. At various workshops, Baker would train people on how to organize and lead grassroots groups of the NAACP.Baker resigned her post at the NAACP in 1946, but she still maintained her passion for advancing the Civil Rights Movement. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. Baker died on Dec. 13, 1986.
She slept in their homes, ate at their tables, spoke in their churches, and earned their trust.
King balked at the notion that a woman may have ideas beyond his own.
Ella Baker, an official for the Southern Conference Educational Fund, speaks at the Jeannette Rankin news conference on January 3, 1968. Events Events.
Ella Baker had an enormous influence on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Ella Josephine Baker (December 13, 1903 – December 13, 1986) was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. This was a gathering of sit-in leaders to meet, assess their struggles, and explore the possibilities for future actions.Baker saw the potential for a special type of leadership by the young sit-in leaders, who were not yet prominent in the movement. She … According to fellow activist Baker believed that the strength of an organization grew from the bottom up, not the top down. Without her deft touch, several African-American organizations at the time might not have been so successful.