Ella Baker, born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1903, was an enigmatic figure. She spent most of her career working behind the scenes, helping to organize the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and other civil rights groups, yet she was a charismatic public speaker. She had an ordinary childhood in a middleclass family, but when she went to live in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, she was exposed to much of the leftist thought that was then popular among many African American intellectuals. She studied the works of Karl Marx, the nineteenth-century Socialist and economic theorist, and adapted the rhetoric of Marxism to her speeches. It is likely that her numerous conversations with other leftists helped her form the notion that society should be changed to suit people, instead of insisting that people adapt to society. As her career in the civil rights movement developed, she dropped much of her commitment to Socialism, even though she continued occasionally to use Marxist terminology in her speeches. Indeed, her belief that power should build from the bottom up instead of the top down put her in a long tradition of American political thought dating back to before the Revolutionary War. Much of her work helped bring closer to realization the ideals held by many of those who fought that war and who eventually wrote the Constitution.