Latest Ella Baker Quotes from Interviews

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• 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.

  Ella Baker

  Integrity, Numbers, Important

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• 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.

  Ella Baker

  Kings, Kind, Luther

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• 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.

  Ella Baker

  Simple, Thinking, Differences

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• 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.

  Ella Baker

  Memories, Real, War

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• 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.

  Ella Baker

  Thinking, Virginia, Nashville

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• 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.

  Ella Baker

  Effort, Political, Voters

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• 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.

  Ella Baker

  Kings, Office, Together

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• 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.

  Ella Baker

  Kings, Children, Father

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• 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.

  Ella Baker

  Kings, Independent, Class

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• 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.

  Ella Baker

  Kings, Thinking, Class

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• The anniversary of the Montgomery boycott was being celebrated, and the handbill that was out, and all whatever literature that was circulated, didn't say practically anything about movement or what the movement stood for, what it had done, or anything, but was simply adulation of the leader, you know, [Martin Luther] King.

  Ella Baker

  Kings, Leader, Done

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• Martin [Luther King] wasn't one to buck forces too much.

  Ella Baker

  Kings, Bucks, Too Much

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• [Martin Luther] King was one of the two young ministers - and you know how directly oriented the Negro community still is towards the minister as the leader.

  Ella Baker

  Kings, Two, Community

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• I believe, the [Gunnar] Myrdal study had been made, and if we hadn't had anything else to raise questions, this in itself would have been something to provoke thought in the direction of the value of accommodating leadership.

  Ella Baker

  Believe, Raises Questions, Study

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• Nixon was the one force in Montgomery for a number of years that made any effort in the direction of challenging the power structure. Ed Nixon's source of direction for that comes out of his relationship with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Care Porters and the Randolph philosophy of mass action. So, Ed Nixon really was the force that conceived of the boycott and drew up the original papers for the boycott.

  Ella Baker

  Philosophy, Sleep, Years

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• I had been friendly with people who were in the Communist party and all the rest of the Left forces, which were oriented in the direction of mass action.

  Ella Baker

  Party, People, Friendly

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• I began to feel that my greatest sense of success would raise the level of masses of people, rather than the individual being accepted by the Establishment. So, this kind of personal thinking, combined with, say, even the little bit more radical thinking - because at one time the pacifist movement was a very radical concept.

  Ella Baker

  Thinking, People, Movement

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• When I came out of the Depression, I came out of it with a different point of view as to what constituted success. And that was even just even personal success.

  Ella Baker

  Views, Different, Point Of View

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• I think the reasons for not selecting persons like the Reverend Borders and John Wesley Dobbs were, in my book rather obvious reasons: because they were people who were basically oriented in the direction of the established method of not confronting the power structure, but trying to elicit concessions by various and sundry means of, well, let's call it accommodating leadership.

  Ella Baker

  Book, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• I think personally, I've always felt that the Association [NAACP] got itself hung-up in what I call its legal successes. Having had so many outstanding legal successes, it definitely seemed to have oriented its thinking in the direction that the way to achieve was through the courts.

  Ella Baker

  Thinking, Association, Way

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• This In Friendship - out of it came certain connections with the liberal labor establishment. Among the personalities that were involved were Bayard Rustin and a person from the American Jewish Congress, Stanley Levinson.

  Ella Baker

  Personality, Connections, Congress

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• I don't think that the leadership of Montgomery was prepared to capitalize, let's put it, on the projection that had come out of the Montgomery situation. Certainly, they had not reached the point of developing an organizational format for the expansion of it. So discussions emanated, to a large extent, from up this way.

  Ella Baker

  Thinking, Expansion, Way

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• I believe, the NAACP began to try to organize parents of Negro children to file petitions with the boards of education regarding the integration of the school system. You had some very severe economic reprisals against people in Mississippi and in South Carolina. So, in order to try to help to meet some of the physical needs and the economic needs of people in Clarendon County [SC] who had been displaced from the land, and otherwise, and in certain sections of Mississippi, we organized in New York City something called "In Friendship".

  Ella Baker

  New York, Children, Believe

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• I didn't have any close relationship with him because, although [William Edward Burghardt] DuBois may not have been as egocentric - I don't know - he certainly was not the easiest person to approach. I think, certainly, those of us who were younger sort of respected that in terms of his preoccupation with deep thoughts. So, I made no effort to establish any relationship with him. However, he was in and out then.

  Ella Baker

  Thinking, Effort, Deep Thought

  Source: www.crmvet.org

• My association with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is sort of predated by an effort that we were a part of here in New York City regarding the reaction to this 1954 Supreme Court [Brown v Board of Education] decision.

  Ella Baker

  Christian, New York, Cities

  Source: www.crmvet.org