Who is Ella Baker?

Ella Baker was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement — the most important American social movement of the 20th century — yet has often gone unrecognized. Although as influential as Martin Luther King Jr., Baker’s work as a black woman has been comparatively invisible. Scholars attribute this not just to her gender and the dominance of a simplistic, King-centered narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, but to the decentralized leadership style she modeled. She focused not on imparting wisdom but on empowering individuals and local groups to recognize their own potential and find their own solutions.

Baker’s radical vision of participatory democracy recognized the knowledge of members of marginalized and oppressed groups. In the 1960s, she guided the next generation toward the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It was her support and mentorship that empowered students, invigorated with new ideas of leadership, to found SNCC and a new youth-led phase of the Civil Rights Movement. For these reasons, Baker is the ideal choice to be recognized on a college campus.

About the artist

Dana King is a classical figurative sculptor who creates public monuments of Black bodies in Bronze. A research and history enthusiast, she believes sculpture provides an opportunity to shape culturally significant memories that determine how African descendants are publicly held and remembered. 

In addition to her bust of Dr. Huey Newton in West Oakland, California, her life-size bronze artwork is in Berkeley, California (“A Man for the People”); New Haven, Connecticut (“King William Lanson”); and at the Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama (“Guided by Justice”). In 2021, she installed and dedicated “Monumental Reckoning” in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. She was the first African American woman to create a sculptural installation in the park representing the history of African descendants. Examples of her work may be found at danakingart.com.