Ella Baker

Ella Baker grew up in Littleton, North Carolina, listening to her grandmother, who had been enslaved, describe being whipped for refusing to marry the man her owner chose. She graduated top of her class from Shaw University in Raleigh in 1927 and moved to New York, where she worked in cooperatives and adult education during the Depression.

In 1940 she became a field secretary for the NAACP and spent six years travelling the segregated South by bus and train, recruiting members and setting up branches in small towns where being seen with her could cost a person their job. She became director of branches, and resigned in 1946, frustrated by a national office that wanted members to pay dues and lawyers to do the work.

In 1957 she went to Atlanta to set up the office of the new Southern Christian Leadership Conference for Martin Luther King, and ran it for over two years while the ministers who led it looked for a man to take the job. She thought the organisation depended too much on King's presence and too little on the people it was meant to serve. When students began the sit-ins in 1960, she called a conference at Shaw that April and argued, against King's own advisers, that they should form an independent group. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the result, and its style of patient, local, leaderless organising in Mississippi and Alabama was hers.

She helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964 and kept working, largely unknown to the public, until her death on her 83rd birthday.