Ella Baker Becomes The Mother of Civil Rights

Born in Virginia in 1903 Ella Baker became known as the mother of Civil Rights and for good reason. She graduated Shaw Univeristy and moved to New York City where she began organizing around 1930. In 1940 she joined the NAACP. 

She’s good at it and Martin Luther King recruits her to join his Souther Christian Leadership Conference. In 1960 she learns of Black students being denied service at Woolworth’s lunch counter so she quits the SCLC to help start the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. 

She moved on to organizing and fund raising to push for the Civil Rights act to be passed. Even on her death bed in 1986 she was still working as an activist and calling for an end to Apartheid in South Africa.