Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement

Author Barbara Ransby is a historian from Detroit, MI, who completed her bachelor’s degree at Columbia University in Manhattan and her master’s and doctorate at the University of Michigan. She founded the Ella Baker-Nelson Mandela Center for Anti-Racist Education in 1988 and has dedicated her life to highlighting to work of women who were central to the civil rights moment. She currently teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Ella Baker is the focus of Ransby’s biography. She was born in 1903 to Anna Ross and Blake Baker, two middle-class black parents. She was raised partially in Norfolk, VA, and in Littleton, NC, and became involved in the black freedom movement after moving to Harlem at the end of the 1920s. From there she worked for the NAACP, helped found SCLC, and was a major influence at SNCC. She was an activist, an organizer, and an educator until her death in 1986.

Baker’s mother was active in her local church and raised her children to be respectable “race-ambassadors” for the black community.