Ella Baker and Models of Social Change

Ella Jo Baker died in 1986. Her entire adult life was devoted to building organizations that worked for social change by encouraging individual growth and individual empowerment. Nonetheless, even among those generally knowledgeable about the modern history of the Afro-American struggle, neither her name nor her sense of how we make change are widely known. She worked during a time when few Americans were capable of taking a Black woman seriously as a political figure. Yet, Ella Baker was a central figure in Afro-American activism as an organizer and as an advocate of developing the extraordinary potential of ordinary people. Few activists can claim a depth and breadth of political experience comparable to Ella Baker's half-century of struggle. She was associated with whatever organization in the Black community was on the cutting edge of the era-the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in the forties, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the fifties, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the sixties. Miss Baker's activism-and she was always pointedly Miss Baker to the people she worked with, a mark of respect'-was