Ella Baker Quotes

Until the killing of black men, black mothers' sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother's son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.

Give light and people will find the way

You didn't see me on television, you didn't see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don't need strong leaders.

One of the things that has to be faced is the process of waiting to change the system, how much we have got to do to find out who we are, where we have come from and where we are going.

Give light and people will find the way.

Strong people don't need strong leaders.

Give light, and people will find the way.

There are heroes and, emphatically, heroines enough in this history. Yielding to the temptation to focus on their courage, however, may miss the point. Part of the legacy of people like Ella Baker and Septima Clark is a faith that ordinary people who learn to believe in themselves are capable of extraordinary acts, or better, of acts that seem extraordinary to us precisely because we have such an impoverished sense of the capabilities of ordinary people.

[Ella Baker]'s second defining characteristic was her dislike of top-down leadership... 'She felt leaders were not appointed but the rose up. Someone will rise. Someone will emerge'. It was an attitude Baker shared with some of the older women in the movement.

Those who romanticize the concept of leaderless movements often misleadingly deploy Ella Baker's words, "Strong people don't need [a] strong leader." Baker delivered this message in various iterations over her fifty-year career working in the trenches of racial-justice struggles, but what she meant was specific and contextual. She was calling for people to disinvest from the notion of the messianic, charismatic leader who promises political salvation in exchange for deference. Baker also did not mean that movements would naturally emerge without collective analysis, serious strategizing, organizing, mobilizing and consensus building.

From her perspective, reading, discussions, forums, and lectures were as important to a movement for social change as mass protests, boycotts, and strikes.

How did I make a living? I haven't. I have eked out an existence." - Ella Baker

There is also the danger in our culture that because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement.

To young women, black and white, Baker embodied the possibility of escaping the restrictions that defined conventional femininity. Authoritative yet unassuming, self-confident and assertive, forcing others to take her seriously simply by presuming that they would, Baker was a revelation.

According to the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, the average debt for court-related fines and fees in 2018 was $13,607. The median income of African American households was only $41,361 that year and $36,959 for households headed by African American females. While one in four women in the United States has a loved one behind bars, according to Essie Justice Group, one in two Black women has a loved one who is incarcerated. Many Black American women find themselves paying much of their income to the state as a result of the incarceration of their partners, children, and other family members.

Even when looking at the struggles of ordinary people, there has been a tendency to reduce those struggles to the heroism or particular genius of a “charismatic leader.” This has certainly been the case with the civil rights movement, which is continuously reduced to the actions or speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. while the broader context within which he operated or the thousands of others who made “the movement” an actual movement is ignored. Zinn, who was one of two “adult advisers” for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (along with Ella Baker), provides a different perspective.

I think, in the end, we have to say that there should be no discussion of Martin Luther King Jr. without Ella Baker, which is to say they are complementary. These two figures, voices, tendencies in the Black freedom movement, and particularly in the human freedom movement in general, they say something to young people these days in the age of Obama. See, Obama ends up being the worst example of messianic leadership, captured by a vicious system that is oligarchic domestically and imperialistic globally and uses the resonances of this precious freedom struggle as a way of legitimating himself in the eyes of both the Black people and the mainstream Americans, and acting as if as community organizer he has some connection to Ella Baker, which is absurd and ludicrous in light of him running the oligarchic system and being so proud of heading the killing machine of US imperial powers. So that when young people - who now find themselves in an even more desperate situation given the present crisis - think about the legacy of Martin King and legacy of Ella Baker in the age of Obama, it compounds the misunderstandings and misconstructions, and sabotages the intellectual clarity and political will necessary to create the kind of change we need. To use jazz metaphors, what we need would be the expression and articulation of different tempos and different vibrations and different actions and different witnesses, so it's antiphonal; it's call-and-response, and in the call-and-response, there are Ella Baker-like voices tied to various kinds of deep democratic witnesses that have to do with everyday people organizing themselves. And then you've got the Martin-like voices that are charismatic, which are very much tied to a certain kind of messianic leadership, which must be called into question, which must be democratized, which must be de-patriarchalized. And yet they are part of this jazz combo.

La Lista” es una novela de espías que cuenta lo que ocurre cuando Graciela firma un contrato en San Petersburgo, donde le proporcionan como tapadera una promoción de cosméticos para infiltrarse entre las familias de clase alta en Túnez. Espías de España, Francia, Gran Bretaña, Rusia y Estados Unidos emplean The Onion Router, la red de los hackers, para seguirla, mientras ella rastrea a los familiares de los científicos en Facebook. Una soplona británica-india intenta avisarla del peligro, pero yerra. Dos víctimas mueren: una francotiradora y un espía británico. En el desenlace, la apertura anual de Naciones Unidas se anuncia caliente con acusaciones cruzadas entre americanos, rusos y europeos, peticiones de asilo internacional y manifestaciones en las universidades estadounidenses a favor de los asilados.

La pobreza de mi autosuficiencia queda expuesta, y en lugar de ella se revela la suficiencia de Cristo.   La

Part of the legacy of people like Ella Baker and Septima Clark is a faith that ordinary people who learn to believe in themselves are capable of extraordinary acts, or, better, of acts that seem extraordinary to us precisely because we have such an impoverished sense of the capabilities of ordinary people.

This may only be a dream of mine, but I think it can be made real.

This may only be a dream of mine, but I think it can be made real.

Cavilo sobre el papel, tratando de derramar mi corazón en la página. Pero solo se me ocurren las mismas palabras, y espero que la profundidad del sentimiento que hay tras ellas les dé peso y sustancia. «Te amo. Te echo de menos. Ten cuidado.»

Gloria Dickerson Fannie Lou Hamer Unita Blackwell Ella Baker Who are you reading about ?

Amateur detectives in fiction had always annoyed Ella. They were so unrealistic. She didn’t intend to be the Rabbit Back version of Miss Marple or a cheap Baker Street knock-off, and she really didn’t like the idea of making the tabloids. That was no way to advance an academic career. She didn’t want to be an instrument of justice. She just wanted to do some literary research and earn a living.

¿De verdad tenía miedo de herir sus sentimientos? ¿O le tenía miedo a ella?

In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning—getting down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.

This may only be a dream of mine, but I think it can be made real. Ella Baker to Anne Braden, Mar. 21, 1960, SCLC Papers, box 32, folder 18

Se quedó desconcertado cuando el golpe seco hizo que ella se desplomara. ¿Tan fácil era matar a alguien? ¿Tan poco hacía falta para quitar la vida a alguien? Pensaba que aquel momento no sería tan fugaz, tan efímero, y se sintió culpable por descubrirse decepcionado.

Moses had been deeply influenced by Ella Baker, the brilliant organizer and civil rights leader. Baker shared Ross’s distrust of flashy mobilizations and spent her life encouraging strategies that put more emphasis on the development of local leaders.