Ella Baker

As Women’s History Month continues, I wanted to highlight, again another transforming woman whose name I hope young people will learn: Ella Josephine Baker.

- Marian Wright Edelman

Ella Baker said this 60 years ago as she was speaking about the murders of Freedom Summer workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who disappeared together in Mississippi in June 1964. During the nationally publicized weeks-long search for Chaney, who was Black, and Goodman and Schwerner, who were white, FBI investigators also found the bodies of several other murdered Black men whose disappearances had not received the same attention. Ella Baker’s statement was a rallying cry that has never stopped resonating. She was a lifelong warrior against injustice and inequality, a mentor for my generation of civil rights activists, a powerful advisor to colleagues like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and always, always, unwilling to rest.

Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Bernice Johnson Reagon featured those words in the stirring “Ella’s Song”—we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes—and she and I were both among the hundreds of young people Ella Baker mentored. Ella Baker believed in servant leadership and shared leadership rather than charismatic leadership and always encouraged young people to find and lift their own voices and join them with others.