Ella Baker 1903–1986
Littleton, Halifax County, North Carolina
Marker Inscription
Ella Baker 1903 1986. Civil rights leader. She organized the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, April 1960, at Shaw University. Her childhood home ¼ mi. E.
Erected by North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources
The Story
Ella Baker spent decades as a strategist behind the civil rights movement, and in April 1960 she helped young activists found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Shaw University in Raleigh. Preferring grassroots, participatory leadership to charismatic figureheads, she mentored a generation of organizers. Her childhood home stands a quarter mile east of this marker.
Why it matters
She shaped the democratic, youth-driven wing of the civil rights movement, and SNCC became one of its most influential organizations.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Ella Baker
Related events
- · Founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Pauli Murray
Durham, NC
Pauli Murray grew up in Durham, in a childhood home a quarter mile south of here, and went on to break barrier after barrier. A lawyer, activist, poet, and writer of the memoir Proud Shoes (1956), Murray helped shape the legal arguments behind the civil rights and women's movements, and in later life became the first African American woman ordained an Episcopal priest. Few Americans left a mark across so many fields.
John A. Hyman
Warrenton, NC
John A. Hyman (1840–1891) became the first African American to represent North Carolina in the United States Congress, serving from 1875 to 1877, after earlier terms as a state senator during Reconstruction. Born into slavery, he rose to political leadership in the brief window when Black men held office across the postwar South. His home stood a block to the west.
James E. O'Hara
Halifax County, NC
James E. O'Hara (1844–1905) was an African American political leader who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1883 to 1887 and practiced law in nearby Enfield. He was among the last generation of Black congressmen from the South before disenfranchisement closed that door for decades. He lived a short distance to the south.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Edgecombe County, NC
Long before his 1963 address at the Lincoln Memorial made the phrase immortal, Martin Luther King Jr. tried out the refrain "I have a dream" in a November 1962 speech delivered in a gymnasium just southeast of this marker. The moment captures the civil rights movement in its building years, when King crisscrossed the South refining the words that would define a generation. This eastern North Carolina stop is one of the places where that message took shape.