Timothy B. Tyson is senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, where he also has appointments in the Divinity School and the History Department. He is also in the American Studies Department at UNC-Chapel Hill. Tyson wrote a special report for The N&O, "The Ghosts of 1898," published in November.

Ella Baker was the single most important organizer and intellectual behind the African-American freedom movements that transformed American history in the last half of the 20th century. Though Baker herself would resist the assessment -- "strong people don't need strong leaders," she liked to say -- her grassroots vision reshaped our world.

Her radicalism blended African-American self-reliance and Southern populism. Born in 1903, Baker was raised on her grandparents' farm in Warren County, among former slaves and Reconstruction radicals. Her grandfather, Mitchell Ross, a dark-skinned rebel, preached the gospel of freedom after Emancipation

After graduating from Shaw University, she took a Works Progress Administration post in New York City and became a democratic socialist, confronting Stalinists and Republicans with equal fervor. The affable organizer rejected all dogma. "She would argue her point one day," an acquaintance recalled, "and see you on the street and hug you the next."

In 1940, Baker joined the staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Battling sexism at every turn, she became national director of branches in 1943. One of her workshops, "Give People Light and They Will Find a Way," inspired an unknown seamstress named Rosa Parks. Under Baker's leadership, the NAACP grew to almost 450,000 members, becoming a truly national organization that linked small Southern towns with big Northern cities. In 1946, Baker resigned, disappointed that the NAACP was determined to remain a top-down bureaucracy.

Baker's NAACP work came in handy after the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, when she insisted that Martin Luther King Jr. not allow the momentum to fade. Over King's initial resistance, Baker launched the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, whose campaigns would topple old Jim Crow.

Like the NAACP, the SCLC did not live up to Baker's vision of grassroots mobilization, operating instead as a vehicle for King's ascendant celebrity. Its hidebound preachers resisted Baker and accomplished almost nothing until impatient black college students in Greensboro sat down at Woolworth's lunch counter in 1960. When the sit-ins spread, Baker knew that this fresh energy had to be harnessed -- and protected from the civil rights establishment. "This may be only a dream of mine," she confided to a friend, "but I think it can be made real."

Organizing a conference at Shaw University, Baker helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. These young shock troops took the South by storm. Baker knew that their fearless spirit should lead, not follow, the "adult" organizations. Forty years older than many SNCC members, Baker kept minutes, wrote press releases, raised funds and served as a one-woman think tank. SNCC became the most interracial, democratic and vibrant civil rights organization of the postwar era.

Baker's philosophy of cultivating local leadership and her faith in the wisdom of the black poor set her apart from the conventional wisdom of her day. The mass base she built for the NAACP made possible courtroom victories such as Brown vs. Board of Education. SCLC's campaigns in Birmingham and Selma won the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And the young insurgents of SNCC overran the armies of segregation and remade American democracy. Without her efforts, these battles might have ended differently.

Baker died in 1986, but her work lives on at the grassroots of American life. Her life reminds us that "we who believe in freedom cannot rest," as Baker told the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964 -- and that we can sometimes prevail, too, if we don't forget our way home.

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