Ella Baker - Final Years

Final Years

That same year, Ella Baker returned to New York, where she continued her activism. She later collaborated with Arthur Kinoy and others to form the Mass Party Organizing Committee, a socialist organization. In 1972, she traveled the country in support of the "Free Angela" campaign demanding the release of Angela Davis. She lent her voice to the Puerto Rican independence movement, spoke out against apartheid in South Africa and allied herself with a number of women's groups, including the Third World Women's Alliance and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She remained an activist until her death in 1986.

It is widely written that Ella Baker and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as other SCLC members, differed in opinion and philosophy. She once claimed that the "movement made Martin, and not Martin the movement." Another speech she made, in which she urged activists to take control of the movement themselves, rather than rely on a leader with "heavy feet of clay," was widely interpreted as a denunciation of King.

Ella Baker was a notoriously private person. People close to her did not know that she was married for twenty years to T. J. "Bob" Roberts. She left no diaries. The 1981 documentary Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker, directed by Joanne Grant, revealed her important role in the Civil Rights Movement.

In 2009, Ella Baker was honored on a U.S. postage stamp.