Ella Baker

Ella Josephine Baker was the most important civil rights leader most people have never heard of. She worked behind the scenes for over five decades, organizing with the NAACP, co-founding the Southern Christian Leadership Conference alongside Martin Luther King Jr., and mentoring the young activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. While others stood at podiums, Baker built the infrastructure that made movements possible.

Born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1903 and raised in North Carolina, Baker graduated as valedictorian of Shaw University. She moved to Harlem during the Great Depression and immediately began organizing — consumer cooperatives, literacy programs, political education. In 1940, the NAACP hired her as a field secretary, and she spent years traveling the South, building local chapters and developing grassroots leaders.

Baker's philosophy was simple and revolutionary: strong people don't need strong leaders. She distrusted charismatic, top-down leadership and championed participatory democracy — the idea that ordinary people could and should make the decisions that shaped their lives. SNCC, the organization she helped birth after the 1960 sit-ins, embodied this vision and produced a generation of leaders including Diane Nash, John Lewis, and Stokely Carmichael.