Ella Baker

It was Easter weekend, April 1960, at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Young activists were arriving from all over the South for a conference.

The woman who had brought them together was fifty-six. Her name was Ella Baker.

It was her old university. Thirty-three years earlier, she had graduated here, first in her class.

Ella was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia. In 1910, after a race riot, her family moved near Littleton, North Carolina. Ella was seven.

There, her grandmother told her about slavery. She had been enslaved. She had been beaten for refusing to marry the man her owner had chosen.

Those stories stayed with Ella. They taught her what injustice is.

After her studies, she went to New York. In the Harlem of the 1930s, she worked for a league of Black cooperatives. She became its national director.

She taught working people. She founded a Black history club at the Harlem library.

In 1938, she began working for the NAACP, the association for Black civil rights. Around 1940, she travelled for it. She recruited members and raised funds.

In 1943, she became the association's director of branches. About three years later, she left the post to care for her niece. In 1952, she became head of the association's New York branch.

In 1957, she helped Martin Luther King Jr. launch a new organization, the SCLC. She ran its Atlanta office, then served as its interim executive director until April 1960.

But she clashed there with the leaders, all of them men. She believed the movement should not revolve around a single chief. One day, she said the movement had made Martin, and not the other way around.

In that spring of 1960, she brought the students together at Shaw.

She warned them against a movement centred on one leader.

That weekend, SNCC was born: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

People called her the "Godmother of SNCC." She helped the young people turn toward direct action and registering Black voters.

In 1964, she helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She went with its delegates all the way to Atlantic City, to the Democratic convention.

She once put it simply:

Her nickname was Fundi. In 1981, a film told her life under that name.

Her way of working, together, has its own history. It echoes Ubuntu without merging with it: we become strong through one another.

Ella Baker died in New York on December 13, 1986. It was her eighty-third birthday.

Today, a human rights centre and a Manhattan school bear her name.

She left behind an idea born in a university hall. A movement does not need a saviour. It needs everyone.