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Forgotten Foremothers

Profiles of lesser-known heroines in the fight for women’s right

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Louisiana v. Callais et al. This case, filed by a group describing themselves as “non-African American” voters, examined whether or not the new congressional districting map of Louisiana constituted a racial gerrymander, the sort that would be unconstitutional according to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

 

This was just the latest, some say final, chipping away at the Voting Rights Act. An earlier ruling, Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, essentially ruled that while racial gerrymandering was unconstitutional, partisan gerrymandering was not. This put potential plaintiffs in the nearly impossible position of arguing that a gerrymander was motivated primarily by racism and not partisan politics.

 

The Rucho case followed the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling in which the Supreme Court decided that certain checks on discrimination in voting were no longer needed because the county in question had stopped discriminating. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg famously likened this to “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

 

In outlining the foundation for the Callais ruling, Justice Samuel Alito argued that racial parity had been reached among voters, so the Voting Rights Act protections were no longer needed. “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana,” he said.

 

“Alito’s claim represents egregious cherry-picking, as he was not referring to recent elections, but to those in 2008 and 2012—the years that Barack Obama ran for president,” noted Kevin Morris for the Brennan Center for Justice. “In the three most recent presidential elections, the trend shows exactly the opposite. The indisputable fact is the racial turnout gap is widening.”

 

This claim also misses—perhaps willfully—the actual issues presented by critics of gerrymandering. The Shelby County, Rucho, and Callais decisions suggest a perspective that gerrymandering itself is not a meaningful obstacle to voting. Literacy tests, poll taxes, violent intimidation at the polls to discourage Black voters—those would be a violation of the right to vote promised by the Fifteenth Amendment. But so long as a Black citizen can get to the ballot box, they argue, no political voice has been denied. 

 

In the dissent, Justice Elena Kagan outlined the profound error of that interpretation. “A minority community that is cohesive in its geography and politics alike, and that faces continued adversity from racial division, is split—'cracked’ is the usual term—so that it loses all its electoral influence. Members of the racial minority can still go to the polls and cast a ballot. But given the State’s racially polarized voting, they cannot hope—in the way the State’s White citizens can—to elect a person whom they think will well represent their interests. Their votes matter less than others’ do; they translate into less political voice. ... Election after election, Black citizens’ votes are, by every practical measure, wasted.”

 

Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett called the Callais ruling a “cause for celebration.” In his additional concurrence, joined by Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas wrote, “Today’s decision should largely put an end to this ‘disastrous misadventure’ in voting-rights jurisprudence.”

 

In the dissent, Justice Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson and quoting Ruth Bader Ginsberg, did not share this victorious spirit. “The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—‘one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history.’”

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Ella Josephine Baker was born in Norfolk, Va., on Dec. 13, 1903, to Georgianna (Anna) and Blake Baker. She had an older brother, Curtis, and the family would welcome younger sister Margaret a few years later. 

Georgianna and Blake were both free people, but Ella’s grandmother Josephine Elizabeth—usually called Betsy—had been enslaved. Ella grew up hearing the stories of her life as a “house slave” at a plantation. In this position, as Shyrlee pointed out, Betsy was considered to be “better off” than those forced to work in the fields. Yet, the house work was still exhausting and the conditions dehumanizing. “House slaves cooked, cleaned, did the laundry, made clothes, and took care of the plantation owner’s children. They did whatever was needed to keep the house running smoothly. As a result, house slaves had little privacy and could be awakened at any time of the night to take care of the owner’s needs or wants.”

 

Betsy married Matthew Ross, who was also enslaved on the plantation. After the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Matthew managed to buy a few acres of plantation land to farm for himself and raise a family with Betsy. He built a church and became a minister. “Today no one in Ella Baker’s family knows how he was able to buy land because slaves had no money,” Shyrlee said. “Neither do they know how he became a minister.” This employment, however, certainly meant he could read, despite the laws against it. He then taught Ella’s mother who taught Ella in a long line of defiance.

 

Grandfather Matthew and Grandmother Betsy were far from unique in their background; most of the African American farmers around Ella in North Carolina had been enslaved. They’d been unable to earn money from their work, and then were freed by a government that provided no support or resources after. Many became tenant farmers or sharecroppers, another form of exploited labor. “It became a sad joke across the South that no matter how hard farmers had worked, at the end of the year the money they earned always seemed to equal what they owed the landowner,” Shyrlee wrote. 

 

In 1918, 15-year-old Ella began attending Shaw University in Raleigh, NC. Shaw is the oldest historically Black learning institution in the southern United States, founded on Dec. 1, 1865. Ella worked throughout her boarding-school and college years to help pay for her education. “In school, I waited tables,” she said, “and that provided a certain amount of money to help pay tuition, because my parents had three children in boarding school at the same time and no real money.”

 

She graduated from Shaw in 1927. At age 24, she moved to New York City to live with family in Harlem—and dropped right into the vibrant intellectual and artistic energy of the Harlem Renaissance, powered by the brilliance of writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston and the talented performers of the Cotton Club. Ella began writing for newspapers, including The Crisis, headed by editor W.E.B DuBois. “Wherever there was a discussion, I’d go,” Ella said. “It didn’t matter if it was all men and maybe I was the only woman...it didn’t matter...New York was the hotbed of radical thinking.”

 

She was also in New York for the stock market crash of 1929. Her job as a newspaper reporter, much like photographer Dorthea Lange, took her into the lives of the most desperate and downtrodden during the Great Depression. Ella pulled upon her experience with North Carolina sharecroppers to support the creation of neighborhood food cooperatives. She and George Schuyler, newspaper reporter and anarchist (he would later become a staunch conservative), “didn’t form or operate these cooperatives themselves,” Shyrlee pointed out. “Instead, they gave people advice on how to start them and run them.” She and George founded the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League in 1932. “Within three years, Ella Baker had become an expert on consumer affairs. This meant that she could teach people how to buy quality food and other items for less money.”

 

While the YNCL would not endure, Ella would take what she learned to help build or support numerous cooperatives in the Harlem area in the following years. 

 

In 1935, Ella teamed up with fellow journalist Marvel Cooke for an investigative exposé for The Crisis. The piece, titled “Bronx Slave Market,” painted the picture of “an urban slave market where Black women sold their labor to the highest bidder,” according to the writeup by The New York Historical. 

 

Ella and Marvel reported with persuasive compassion. “As early as 8 a.m. they come; as late as 1 p.m. they remain. Rain or shine, cold or hot, you will find them there—Negro women, old and young—sometimes bedraggled, sometimes neatly dressed...waiting expectantly for Bronx housewives to buy their strength and energy for an hour, two hours, or even for a day at the munificent rate of fifteen, twenty, twenty-five or, if luck be with them, thirty cents an hour [roughly $7.30 in 2026]. If not the wives themselves, maybe their husbands, their sons, or their brothers, under the subterfuge of work, offer worldly-wise girls higher bids for their time.”

 

Ella and Marvel went undercover and “invaded the ‘market’ early on the morning of September 14. ... Taking up our stand outside the corner flower shop whose show window offered gardenias, roses and the season’s first chrysanthemums at moderate prices, we waited patiently to be ‘bought.’” They set a high price for themselves and “refused to wash windows or scrub floors,” so they remained as observers on the street for the whole day. 

 

“The ‘mart’ is but a miniature mirror of our economic battle front,” Ella and Marvel wrote, outlining all the complex entanglements in action. “To many, the women who sell their labor thus cheaply have themselves to blame.” Employment agencies, none of which were available nearby the Bronx, would “bemoan” that these women haven’t “chosen the decent course.” Meanwhile, these domestic laborers were often hired by “the wives and mothers of artisans and tradesmen who militantly battle against being exploited themselves, but who apparently have no scruples against exploiting others.” And to all of this, the general public “dismisses them with a sigh and a shrug of the shoulders.”

As an assistant field secretary, Ella “worked her way across the South, persuading ordinary folks that they could make extraordinary changes in their lives. It must be noted that, at the time, the act of joining the NAACP was a punishable act in many areas. Many were fearful, and rightfully so,” wrote Aprele Elliot in The Journal of Black Studies, observing that “psychological barriers to protest” form when generations are brutalized on the whims of white people, including very active branches of the Ku Klux Klan in many states. “So, sometimes [in] as little as 3 minutes after a church service, [Ella] would make her appeal to the congregation.”

 

“The major job,” Ella said, “was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use, and it could only be used if they understood what was happening and how group action could counter violence...”

 

Throughout her life, Ella’s primary guiding principle was “power to the people.” You’ll notice that all her efforts have included educating others and giving them the knowledge to advocate and make choices for themselves. This continued to be her approach when, in 1942, she became the director of branches for the NAACP, a position in which she managed and supported all the various NAACP branches across the nation. In her style, she never swooped in to fix a branch’s problems, but instead, as Shyrlee put it, “[T]here might be a need for a traffic light in an area where blacks lived. Ella Baker would advise the branch on how to present the case to city officials.”

 

Ella “insisted that people help themselves and discover solutions to problems,” Aprele stated. “She abandoned the traditional NAACP strategy of appealing to the professional ranks and the notion that the ‘talented tenth’ would lead the masses. She wanted regular folks to become involved and wanted programs created to challenge people to begin helping themselves.”

 

In 1946, Ella resigned from her travel-intensive role at the NAACP to return to Harlem where she helped raise her niece Jackie. Jackie would describe her aunt as strict, but “she always thought you should have an explanation” for her rules. “You knew that the love was there and that there wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for you.”

 

“Within a year after leaving the NAACP, [Ella] set up Harlem’s first office of the American Cancer Society,” Shyrlee wrote. “It provided information on how to reduce the possibility of getting cancer and how to recognize signs of the disease.” Newspaper The New York Age reported on March 20, 1948, that Ella, “well-known civic worker,” estimated that “recruitment of 500 volunteer campaign workers would be required.” Organizing and educating—always the backbone of Ella’s work. 

 

In 1954, Ella returned to the NAACP, now as president of the New York City branch. Her years caring for Jackie, now 16 years old, gave her insight into the city’s educational landscape. That same year, the consequential Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka had been decided, effectively overturning the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case that had supported “separate but equal” segregation. The Brown verdict established a law against school segregation, on the grounds that separating students by race violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

 

The value of such Supreme Court decisions is not that they have the power to immediately solve the crisis of segregation—indeed, multiple southern states challenged the ruling and even more simply refused to comply. Much has been written about the famously violent response in Little Rock, Ark. States complied with malicious slowness to desegregate, founded all-white private schools, or demolished public spaces rather than share them with Black people.

 

Legal cases build upon one another with precedent. What was ruled once can then be used to support and strengthen a similar ruling now. The Brown decision didn’t solve the problem, but it gave people like Ella a powerful tool in their kits to start addressing the inadequate schooling for Black children across the nation.

 

In 1955, Ella’s NAACP work crossed her path with that of Rosa Parks, who would board a bus on Dec. 1 and refuse to move for a white person, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott challenging segregation on public transport. This was a fight in the South, but Ella was determined to support it. She joined with New York attorney Stanley Levison and Bayard Rustin, one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s closest advisors, and “representatives from more than 25 religious, political and labor groups,” to form In Friendship, according to The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. In Friendship provided financial support for the boycott, which lasted over a year. 

 

When the bus boycott concluded successfully, Ella and others from In Friendship wanted to use the momentum to keep pushing forward. Martin “thought that it was normal to have a lull after a major success,” Aprele reported, but Ella “believed that critical moments were evaporating and that King had failed to seize the opportunities.” It was not the last time Ella would butt heads with Martin. 

 

In 1957, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference formed with 28-year-old Martin as its president. Northern organizations like the NAACP were considered outside troublemakers. The SCLC was a coalition of Southern organizations coming together to fight segregation on their own turf and give voice to the Black population. It was 54-year-old Ella that put out the call to gather and she was there on day one with the rest of the founders, yet she would never hold a leadership position. “I knew from the beginning that as a woman, an older woman, in a group of ministers...there was no place for me to come into a leadership role,” she said later. “The competition wasn’t worth it.”

 

Ella “soon grew weary of King's organization and began criticizing SCLC for its male-dominated, hierarchical structure,” reported Dennis J. Urban, Jr. in International Social Science Review. Her dissatisfaction with the SCLC led her to the younger generation’s acts of resistance and organization, specifically the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. As the SNCC (pronounced “snick”) formalized its strategies, “it was agreed that although SNCC would remain on friendly terms with SCLC, the two groups would have no formal connection.” Ella fully supported these college students in their rejection of elder leadership. They wanted guidance, not authority figures, and that fit perfectly with Ella’s aims.

 

Ella mistrusted most leadership structures built around a single leader, especially one that became famous. “I have always felt it was a handicap for oppressed people to depend so largely on a leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a spot in the public limelight,” she said. “It usually means the media made him, and the media may undo him. There is also the danger in our culture that, because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement.”

 

Ella’s age and experience proved to be an asset to the college-age activists. “It was Ella more than anyone else who gave us the space to operate in,” said Bob Moses, 25 to Ella’s 57 in 1960. “As long as she was sitting there in the meetings, no one else could dare come in and say, ‘I think you should do this or that,’ because no one could pull rank on her. Her stature was that there wasn’t anyone from the NAACP or to Dr. King who could get by her. I think the actual course of the SNCC movement is a testimony to the fact that students were left free to develop on their own. That was her real contribution.”

 

“Most of the youngsters had been trained to believe in or follow adults,” Ella said. “I felt they ought to have a chance to learn to think things through and to make the decisions.”

 

Ella was “fond of using the Socratic method. She asked questions and the students discovered answers,” Aprele wrote. Quiet members would be engaged in conversation, then coaxed to share their thoughts with the group. “The students trusted her because, rather than dictate policy, [Ella] guided them to solutions. She spoke their language.”

 

An anecdote, outlined by Dennis, revealed how crucial Ella’s behind-the-scenes work was to the cause in those rare moments she did choose to step in.

The work was what mattered to Ella. “You don’t see me on television, you don’t see news stories about me,” she said. “The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders.”

 

The country’s first Civil Rights Act passed in 1875 during the Reconstruction after the Civil War, an attempt by Senator Charles Sumner to ensure the laws of the land would “protect all citizens in their civil and legal rights.” It would largely go ignored by future administrations until efforts toward legal equality began again, nearly 100 years later, with the Civil Rights Act of 1957. This, too, was defanged by Senators opposed to Black equality, who successfully removed protections for voting enfranchisement. Importantly, however, this act did launch the Civil Rights Commission designated to investigate, among other things, barriers to voting.

 

Throughout the 1960s, SCLC and SNCC worked toward common cause, but separately and with their own leadership. Ella coordinated frequently with both. Indeed, where there was organizing for Black equity happening throughout the 1960s, Ella was not far away.

 

In 1963, when literacy tests, harassment, threats, and violence prevented African Americans in Mississippi from voting, Ella traveled to assist SNCC and the Council of Federated Organizations, a coalition of civil rights groups, in holding a Freedom Vote. The event was, as Shyrlee explained, “a mock election that was set up to protest the official elections in which most blacks were not allowed to vote.” Such a large public protest earned press coverage. It was also an opportunity for people like Ella—who “had a hand in setting up voting places in black barbershops, beauty parlors, stores, and funeral homes”—to register Black voters and show them how to cast their ballots. Because someday, that vote would be real.

 

During the two-day voting window, the hand-counted ballots numbered 78,869. The actual number of registered Black voters, those who’d braved the death threats and passed the arbitrary tests, was only 12,000. Ella said, “What was this doing? This was giving the lie to the old idea that...the reason why Negroes weren’t voting was because they weren’t interested in voting.” 

 

In 1964,  she returned to assist brilliant speakers and activists such as Fannie Lou Hamer in the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a short-lived yet important political party formed to provide an alternative to the state’s all-white Democratic delegation. This proved to be a complex time in United States politics as the “Dixiecrats,” that is the Democrats of the south, resisted social progress, voting enfranchisement, and ultimately rewrote the profiles of the country’s political parties themselves.

 

True to her nature, Ella was working behind-the-scenes in Atlanta when the country’s eyes were on the march happening in Selma, Ala. with Martin at its head. She never liked being on camera much. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 went into effect on July 2, followed the next year by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on Aug. 7. Sixty-one-year-old Ella returned home to Harlem.

 

After this, SNCC fractured. Some wanted to continue with the non-violent approach of Martin and the SCLC. Others adopted self-determination and “Black Power” as their new rallying cries. Health issues, rather than disagreement, slowed Ella’s involvement. She herself had never fully subscribed to nonviolence (after all, it’s unlikely she ever regretted punching that boy when she was just 6 years old) and she certainly understood the emotion behind the shift toward more revolutionary actions. Black Power, she said, “sprang from the frustrations of having given so much and...having had faith that the democratic process would provide certain types of things and it didn’t… This is what people have been driven to, even an older person like me who has been around all these years.” 

 

Ella never retired. When writer and activist Angela Davis was wrongfully arrested, 69-year-old Ella traveled the country with the “Free Angela” campaign. She lent her voice to oppressed people outside the United States, speaking out against South African apartheid, and allying with the Puerto Rican independence movement. She even hosted rallies in her Harlem home.

 

Ella Baker died on her 83rd birthday, Dec. 13, 1986. 

 

Later historians and activists would see wisdom in how rarely Ella stood in the spotlight. “Ella Baker’s influence on a large number of people extends to generations who, knowing very little about or having never heard of Miss Baker, were shaped by her political legacy,” wrote Joy James for The Black Scholar. “Miss Baker’s obscurity is as instructive as her political thought and action.”

 

While there was still so much left to accomplish, Ella died with some comfort that the organizations to which she gave her time and energy had made a difference in the country. “People are more easily alerted to whether they are getting oppression, and they’ll do something. They’re quicker to respond now,” she said. “They would be much less willing to settle for what they had endured before.” 

 

It's not difficult to imagine what her advice would be for those fighting the new (and old) battles today: Band together. Unite. Organize. Power to the people. 

 

 

Sources:

Ella Baker: A Leader Behind the Scenes by Shyrlee Dallard

Brennan Center for Justice: Finishing Off Voting Rights Act, Supreme Court Declares Racism Over – Again

SCOTUSblog: In major Voting Rights Act case, Supreme Court strikes down redistricting map challenged as racially discriminatory

SupremeCourt.gov: Louisiana v. Callais et al

Journal of Black Studies: Ella Baker: Free Agent in the Civil Rights Movement by Aprele Elliott

Signs: Ella Baker and the Models of Social Change by Charles Payne

The Black Scholar: Ella Baker, ‘Black Women’s Work’ and Activist Intellectuals by Joy James

International Social Science Review: The Women of SNCC: Struggle, Sexism, and the Emergence of Feminist Consciousness by Dennis J. Urban, Jr.

The New York Historical: How Journalists Ella Baker and Marvel Jackson Cooke Exposed Domestic Work’s ‘Slave Market’

Grassroots Economic Organizing: The Genius of Ella Jo Baker

The Crisis: November 1935 issue

Stanford – Martin Luther King, Jr, Research and Education Institute: In Friendship; Baker, Ella Josephine, Albany Jail Diary from 27 July-31 July 1962

The New York Age: March 20, 1948

Text: First Civil Rights Act of 1866

SNCC Digital Gateway: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)

Ella Baker Center for Human Rights: Who was Ella Baker?

Wikipedia: Ella Baker, Shaw University, Black Power, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, NAACP, Marvel Cooke, Plessy v Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Civil Rights Act of 1957, Civil Rights Act of 1875, Freedom Vote