Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists, such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, and Bob Moses, as leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

[1][2] Baker criticized professionalized, charismatic leadership; she promoted grassroots organizing, radical democracy, and the ability of the oppressed to understand their worlds and advocate for themselves.

[1][4] Biographer Barbara Ransby calls Baker "one of the most important American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement".

[11] She often listened to her grandmother, Josephine Elizabeth "Bet" Ross, tell stories about slavery and leaving the South to escape its oppressive society.

[13] At an early age, Baker gained a sense of social injustice, as she listened to her grandmother's horror stories of life as an enslaved person.

Her grandmother was beaten and whipped for refusing to marry an enslaved man her owner chose,[14] and told Ella other stories of life as an African-American woman during this period.

Giving her granddaughter context to the African-American experience helped Baker understand the injustices black people still faced.

In 1930, George Schuyler, a black journalist and anarchist (and later an arch-conservative), founded the Young Negroes Cooperative League (YNCL).

She immersed herself in the cultural and political milieu of Harlem in the 1930s, protesting Italy's invasion of Ethiopia and supporting the campaign to free the Scottsboro defendants in Alabama.

She believed that the bedrock of any social change organization is not its leaders' eloquence or credentials, but the commitment and hard work of the rank and file membership and their willingness and ability to engage in discussion, debate, and decision-making.

[24] While traveling throughout the South on the NAACP's behalf, Baker met hundreds of black people, establishing lasting relationships with them.

Whereas some northern organizers tended to talk down to rural southerners, Baker's ability to treat everyone with respect helped her in recruiting.

[citation needed] Baker believed the program should be primarily channeled not through White and the national office, but through the people in the field.

[30] In January 1957, Baker went to Atlanta to attend a conference aimed at developing a new regional organization to build on the success of the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama.

This was planned as a loosely structured coalition of church-based leaders who were engaged in civil rights struggles across the South.

[31] The group wanted to emphasize the use of nonviolent actions to bring about social progress and racial justice for southern blacks.

Baker worked closely with southern civil rights activists in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and gained respect for her organizing abilities.

Their strategy included education, sermons in churches, and efforts to establish grassroots centers to stress the importance of the vote.

[34] While the project did not achieve its immediate goals, it laid the groundwork for strengthening local activist centers to build a mass movement for the vote across the South.

[22] Historian Thomas F. Jackson notes that Baker criticized the organization for "programmatic sluggishness and King's distance from the people.

"[36] That same year, 1960, on the heels of regional desegregation sit-ins led by black college students, Baker persuaded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to invite southern university students to the Southwide Youth Leadership Conference at Shaw University on Easter weekend.

Baker wanted to bring the sit-in participants together in a way that would sustain the momentum of their actions, teach them the skills necessary, provide the resources that were needed, and also help them to coalesce into a more militant and democratic force.

With Baker's help SNCC, along with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), coordinated the region-wide Freedom Rides of 1961.

[45] She was a teacher and mentor to the young people of SNCC, influencing such important future leaders as Julian Bond, Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Curtis Muhammad, Bob Moses, and Bernice Johnson Reagon.

Through SNCC, Baker's ideas of group-centered leadership and the need for radical democratic social change spread throughout the student movements of the 1960s.

According to her biographer Barbara Ransby, Baker believed that black power was a relief from the "stale and unmoving demands and language of the more mainstream civil rights groups at the time.

Its goal was to help black and white people work together for social justice; the interracial desegregation and human rights group was based in the South.

[22] SCEF raised funds for black activists, lobbied for implementation of President John F. Kennedy's civil rights proposals, and tried to educate southern whites about the evils of racism.

[50] Federal civil rights legislation was passed by Congress and signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and 1965, but implementation took years.

When she gave a speech urging activists to take control of the movement themselves, rather than rely on a leader with "heavy feet of clay", it was widely interpreted as a denunciation of King.