“Strong people don’t need strong leaders”— Ella Baker

Editing by Carolyn Bennett

People must “understand that in the long run they themselves are the only protection they have against violence and injustice,” said a leading figure of the U.S. civil rights movement.

“[People] cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves.”

Ella Baker “and many of her idealistic young comrades [in the 1931 Young Negroes Cooperative League, the first political organization she joined) felt the cooperative movement was much more than a survival strategy to ameliorate the suffering of a handful of Black participants. It was also a proving ground for the principles of communalism and cooperation, an alternative to the cutthroat mode of competition that many felt had led to the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing social disaster. …

“Ella Baker was, above all, a bridge connecting young people to their elders, northerners to southerners, Black people to White people, intellectuals to common folk in a web of organizational and personal relationships.

“She was a historical bridge connecting the social movements of the 1950s and 1960s to the legacy of Black resistance and social protest in the decades that followed.”

Ella Baker was an untelevised legend. You did not see news stories about her. The kind of role she tried to play, she said, was “to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which … organization might come.”

She was the most important nonstudent involved in the phase of student activism that began with the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee following the dramatic sit-ins of the winter and spring of 1960. She gave 50 years to political activism.

Ella Josephine Baker (1903-1986) “was a pivotal behind-the-scenes figure in progressive African-American political movements from the 1930s [forward].”

Her theory — “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.”




Sources
Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers 1941-1965 (“Ella Baker and the Origins of ‘Participatory Democracy’” by Carol Mueller), edited by Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Ann Rouse, and Barbara Woods (Indiana University Press, 1993)

Black women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (Volume I), edited by Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (Indiana University Press, 1993)



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