On Monday, Feb. 18, Civil Rights Movement veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) will visit campus to engage in dialogue with students, faculty, staff, and the community.
The Ella Baker Tour, named after the initiator and mentor to SNCC, hopes to enlighten and energize student and community activists with the grassroots, intergenerational community organizing principles that guided the work of Ella Baker and SNCC.
Though Baker’s name may not be as familiar as those of other movement leaders, she is widely regarded among Civil Rights Movement veterans and contemporary activists as one of the most influential leaders of the movement.
When four black college students in Greensboro, N.C., challenged segregation by sitting-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter on Feb. 1, 1960, news quickly spread and similar protests swept across the South.
Baker, as executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), saw the potential for a coordinated effort of student activism challenging segregation.
Baker called a conference for Easter Weekend of 1960 at her alma mater, Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C., and out of that conference came the beginnings of the vanguard of the movement.
Informed by her participation in the intellectual ferment of the Harlem Renaissance, her past experiences in youth-centered community organizing, and a disillusionment with the charismatic and male-dominated leadership within the Civil Rights Movement, Baker heavily influenced SNCC’s development.
Foremost to SNCC’s development as an anti-hierarchical organization that valued community-based leadership was Baker’s insistence that the founding students resist the wishes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the other ministers of SCLC for the student organization to be a youth wing of SCLC.
Many active SNCC veterans and contemporary organizations, addressing a wide range of social justice issues, point to Baker and her philosophy as foundations for their work.
Veterans of SNCC – Theresa El-Amin, Guy and Candie Carawan, and Ruby Nell Sales-will facilitate a student dialogue at 2 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 18 in the Forum Room of the Culp University Center. At 6 p.m. students, faculty, staff, and the public are invited to participate in a dialogue with SNCC Veterans in the Culp Center Ballroom. The 6 p.m. event will be followed by a candlelight vigil at the Carillon in honor of Civil Rights Movement activists who have passed away.
The Ella Baker Tour is co-sponsored by the Black Affairs Association, Women’s Resource Center, and the Women’s Studies Department.
We leave you with a quote from Ella’s Song, written by SNCC veteran and composer Bernice Johnson Reagon. The song eloquently interprets the philosophy of Ella Baker – “the older I get the better I know that the secret to my going on/ Is when the reins are in the hands of the young, who dare to run against the storm . . .

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