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Quote by Ella Baker

“I think you can find some rationales for that if we look at the background out of which he came. Martin [Luther King] had come out of a highly competitive, black, middle-class background.”

Quote by Ella Baker

Author

Ella Baker (December 13, 1903 – December 13, 1986) was a prominent African American civil rights activist known for her grassroots organizing and mentorship of young leaders. Born in Norfolk, Virginia, and raised in North Carolina, she was influenced by her grandmother's experience as a slave. Baker joined the NAACP in the 1930s, serving as a field secretary and branch director, expanding its membership across the South. She later worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), emphasizing collective action over charismatic leadership. Baker advocated for 'group-centered leadership,' empowering ordinary people and youth. Her work shaped the strategy and structure of the civil rights movement, though she often remained in the background. She died on December 13, 1986, at age 83. more

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“In your short stay in Atlanta, I'm sure you saw that there was great competition between Martin's [Luther King] father and John Wesley Dobbs in terms of family status. You know, the bragging about whose child got a master's degree first and whose child, maybe, was the first Ph.D. Out of a background like that, the business of becoming a chairman of an important movement or a movement that symbolizes a certain amount of prestige is something you don't resist easily.”

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Author:Ella Baker

“Unless you had developed a certain independence of value, a certain independent system of value, a system of values that was independent from this middle-class drive for recognition. This has been my explanation of part of [Martin Luther King] general role. So, he accepted this without too much resistance. In fact, none that I could ever see, and at certain points I was close enough to see something.”

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Author:Ella Baker

“After the '57 initial meeting - I was up this way working, not as a staff person - there became the need for a much more definite organized office. What you'd had prior to that time were these big meetings in different places, and there was nobody to pull anything together. Everything was left to [Martin Luther] King and the group that was around him.”

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Author:Ella Baker

“I think, to be honest, sort of emanated from the initial work of somebody else instead of SCLC. If you take Albany; I don't know whether you recall how Albany got started. There were two little guys who went up there first. One was Cordell Hull who was then in his teens - not Cordell Hull - Cordell Reagan, who came out of the Nashville movement, and Charles Sherrod, who came out of the Richmond, Virginia, movement.”

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Author:Ella Baker

“Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was more politically oriented. Part and parcel of the initial SNCC efforts was to not only go in for voter registration, but for political participation.”

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Author:Ella Baker

“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.”

“I don't know, except that the only simple answer, I think, is that SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] had never really developed an organizing technique. I've always characterized the difference in saying that they went in for mobilization. And, to be honest, in terms of the historical facts, their mobilization usually was predicated upon some effort at organizing by someone else. And, at this stage, it was largely SNCC.”

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Author:Ella Baker

“I'm sure, out of the context here of Stanley Levison's relationship with the Jewish liberal forces, that had made contributions. I remember one such contribution before they moved from Montgomery. An associate in the real estate business with Stanley had lost a son in the war, and she wanted to do something in memory of him. So, she made available certain monies to be used by the emerging leadership there in Montgomery. I'm sure other individuals did.”

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Author:Ella Baker

“I had known, number one, that there would never be any role for me in the leadership capacity with SCLC. Why? First, I'm a woman. Also, I'm not a minister. And second, I am a person that feels that I have to maintain some degree of personal integrity and be my own barometer of what is important and what is not.”

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Author:Ella Baker

“Martin [Luther King] wasn't, basically, the kind of person - certainly at the stage that I knew him closest - wasn't the kind of person you could engage in dialogue with, certainly, if the dialogue questioned the almost exclusive rightness of his position.”

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Author:Ella Baker