Ella Baker at Shaw: Strong People Don't Need Strong Leaders
Near Raleigh Durham, North Carolina
Easter weekend, April nineteen sixty. One hundred twenty-six student delegates from fifty-eight sit-in centers in twelve states traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina, to meet each other. They gathered at Shaw University, a historically Black institution founded in eighteen sixty-five, on the edge of downtown. The woman who organized the conference was named Ella Baker, and Shaw was her alma mater.
Baker had graduated from Shaw as class valedictorian in nineteen twenty-seven. She had spent the next three decades as one of the most effective organizers in the Black freedom movement, first at the Young Negroes Cooperative League, then as national director of branches for the NAACP, then as a founding figure of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where she ran daily operations while being passed over, repeatedly, for executive director in favor of men with less experience.
She used eight hundred dollars from Martin Luther King Jr. to bring the student sit-in leaders to Shaw. King assumed the gathering would result in a student wing of the SCLC, a youth auxiliary he could lead. Baker had a different idea.
In her address to the students, she told them their struggle was much bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized Coke. She encouraged them to form an independent organization, not subordinated to King, not dependent on his leadership or his charisma. Her private counsel was more direct: strong people don't need strong leaders.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee emerged from that weekend at Shaw with a structure explicitly designed around collective leadership. Marion Barry became its first chairman; John Lewis took over in nineteen sixty-three. The students launched Freedom Rides and voter registration campaigns that the SCLC had not attempted. The organization Baker helped birth outlasted the one she had served for years.
Baker never sought or received a monument. She died in New York City on December thirteenth, nineteen eighty-six, her eighty-third birthday.
