Throughout her life, Baker insisted on the importance of grass-roots leadership. “Strong people don’t need a strong leader,” she declared, warning activists to eschew messiahs and saviors and build local leaders by the thousands. “Martin didn’t make the movement,” she said. Rather, “the movement made Martin.” She did not mean this to be a disparaging assessment but a hopeful one. The strength and determination of ordinary people and the power of the organizations they build together are the locus of the power that fuels change, power that is bigger than any one individual, no matter how charismatic or committed.

And she knew that individuals were vulnerable. Two of her friends, the N.A.A.C.P. organizers Harriette and Harry Moore, were blown up in their home on Christmas Day 1951 by the Ku Klux Klan. And King would later be tragically assassinated.

Ella Baker was not interested in elite strategy sessions or flowery oratory. She was about the hard, unglamorous work of building relationships, mobilizing communities, developing campaigns and creating new organizers. She was a mentor to Representative John Lewis of Georgia; Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture); Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton of Washington, D.C.; Marian Wright Edelman, the president emeritus of the Children’s Defense Fund; Joyce Ladner, the former president of Howard University; and the social activist Julian Bond. One of her closest political protégés was Bob Moses, the Algebra Project founder and a MacArthur Genius Award recipient. Her legacy runs deep.

I hesitate to speculate what activists from earlier eras, like Ella Baker, who died in 1986, might do or say today. Still, I am pretty confident that if she were with us in 2020, Baker would be on the side of the growing racial and social justice movements that are decentralized and engaged in mass direct action tactics: the climate justice movement, the immigration rights and antiwar movements, the Poor Peoples’ Campaign, and the groups that comprise The Rising Majority coalition; all of them doing work that foregrounds the interests and voices of members of the most long-suffering and marginalized sectors of our society.

Ella Baker has many political heirs today, people who carry on in the defiant spirit of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. They are the young people who make up the grass-roots of the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren presidential campaigns, full of zeal, passion and determination to forge a new kind of national politics; the freshmen congresswomen known as “the squad,” who are working within the Democratic Party but not on the condition of silence or unprincipled compliance; and the activists in groups like the Working Families Party and the Justice Democrats supporting “outsider” progressive candidates in local elections from Philadelphia to Chicago.

When, in 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the Democratic Party leadership to act on the values they professed, the elites in the party turned a deaf ear. The party’s base of black working class people and their fellow white and Latino supporters who attended the Atlantic City convention were manipulated, spied upon and lied to in order to undermine their power. Many of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s original inside supporters caved under pressure from the top.

In July, the Democratic Party will host its 2020 convention in Milwaukee, and Ella Baker’s “fighting spirit” will be very present. Hopefully, this time it will be the forward looking progressives rather than the “play it safe” centrists who win the day and make Ella Baker proud.