Despite being one of the most prolific organizers of the Civil Rights Movement and an integral part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Ella Baker rarely receives the recognition she deserves. 

 

Ella Baker believed in collective leadership, and in the power and ability of the people to organize and fight for themselves. As she said, “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” 

 

She had an almost radical vision of organizing, believing that it was an organizer’s job not only to be cognizant of class antagonisms, but to get every person to identify with people different than them. 

 

Charles Payne wrote of her ideology: “An important part of the organizer’s job was to get the matron in the fur coat to identify with the winehead and the prostitute, and vice versa…Just as one has to be able to look at a sharecropper and see a potential teacher, one must be able to look at a conservative lawyer and see a potential crusader for justice.”

 

Bringing everyone into the movement was essential to her just as fostering the collective leadership capacity of ordinary people was paramount.