Ella Baker
Ella Josephine Baker was an AfricanAmerican civil rights and human rights activist. She was a largely behindthescenes organizer whose career spanned over five decades. She worked alongside some of the most famous civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King, Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks, and Bob Moses. She was a critic of professionalized, charismatic leadership and a promoter of grassroots organizing and radical democracy. She has been called One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the Civil Rights Movement.
Ella Jo Baker was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and raised by Georgiana and Blake Baker, her parents. When she was seven, her family moved to her mothers hometown of Littleton in rural North Carolina. As a girl, Baker listened to her grandmother tell stories about slave revolts. Bakers maternal grandmother Josephine Elizabeth Bet Ross,1907 had been enslaved and was whipped for refusing to marry a man chosen for her by the slave master.1906
Source: Wikipedia