Ella Josephine Baker
and 
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

SNCC was born during a period of extensive student protest activity. Yet its creation indicated the culmination of the lunch counter sit-in movement rather than the beginning of a new upsurge of student activism. SNCC exerted little control over the ad hoc protest groups throughout the South whose activities it was supposed to coordinate. Only as the spontaneous enthusiasm of the early protests waned did the new organization begin to attract support.

SNCC's founding conference, held on April 16-18, 1960, in Raleigh, North Carolina, was called by Ella Baker, executive director of SCLC [The Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. The initiating role of SCLC might have signaled the reassertion of control over the southern black struggle by Martin Luther King and the black ministers associated with him, but Baker, who understood the psychological need of student activists to remain independent of adult control, resisted efforts to subvert their autonomy. Students at the conference affirmed their commitment to the nonviolent doctrines popularized by King, yet they were drawn to these ideas not because of King's advocacy but because they provided an appropriate rationale for student protest.

SNCC's founding was an important step in the transformation of a limited student movement to desegregate lunch counters into a broad and sustained movement to achieve major social reforms. Although many of the students at the founding conference initially were reluctant to broaden the focus of their activities, the existence of a South-wide coordinating committee provided the opportunity for increasing numbers of young people to participate in a regional movement that would attack racism in all its dimensions.

Baker initiated the plan to bring sit-in protesters together at Raleigh because she recognized that many black students had little preparation for the leadership roles suddenly thrust upon them. As a product of a southern black college, Shaw University in Raleigh, she was herself aware of the limitations of southern black education and of the significance of the sit-ins as a departure from the pattern of political apathy among black students. She hoped that a meeting of student leaders would enable protesters to communicate with each other and to acquire the knowledge necessary to sustain their movement. After borrowing $800 from SCLC and contacting an acquaintance at Shaw to secure facilities there, she sent a note, signed by herself and King, to all major protest groups, asking them to send representatives.

Baker carefully avoided any implication that the meeting would subvert the independence of local student protest groups. Rather, student leaders were offered the opportunity "TO SHARE experience gained in recent protest demonstrations and TO HELP chart future goals for effective action." The notice lauded the leadership already shown by black students and called for "evaluation in terms of where do we go from here." The purpose of the meeting was to achieve "a more unified sense of direction for training and action in Nonviolent Resistance." The letter assured students that, although "Adult Freedom Fighters" would be present "for counsel and guidance," the conference would be "youth centered."

. . . Born in Virginia in 1905 and raised in North Carolina, Baker had hoped to become a medical missionary, but upon finding that the cost of medical training exceeded her family's means, she turned to sociology. After graduating as valedictorian of her college class, Baker went to New York and during the Depression worked as a community organizer while taking graduate courses at the New School for Social Research. During the 1940s she became a field secretary for the NAACP in New York. In January 1958 she made what was meant to be a short trip to Atlanta to help organize a series of mass meetings for the newly established SCLC; instead, she remained to organize SCLC's headquarters. Soon, however, she became restive under the cautious leadership of King and was planning to resign her post when the lunch counter sit-ins began.

Ella Josephine Baker died in 1986.