Rethinking Leadership: Ella Baker as Role-Model

What anarchists are missing is a conception of leadership that we find relevant; one that defines leadership by the processes, activities, and relationships in which people engage, rather than as the individual in a specific role, having authoritarian power over others.

Organizers throughout history have struggled with the question of non-hierarchical leadership. Civil rights organizer [with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Southern Christian Leadership Conference] Ella Baker demonstrated one different form of leadership. As Chris Crass [an anarchist organizer with the Catalyst Project in San Francisco] writes, "Ms. Baker had an innovative understanding of leadership, an idea which she thought of in multiple ways: as facilitator, creating processes and methods for others to express themselves and make decisions; as coordinator, creating events, situations, and dynamics that build and strengthen collective efforts; and as teacher/educator, working with others to develop their own sense of power, capacity to organize and analyze, visions of liberation, and ability to act in the world for justice. Ella Baker believed that good leadership created opportunities for others to realize and expand their own talents, skills, and potential to be leaders themselves. This did not mean that she didn't challenge people or struggle with people over political questions and strategies. Rather, this meant that she struggled with people over these questions to help develop principled and strategic leadership capable of organizing for social transformation."

As Crass notes in his article, Baker's practice as an organizer was infused with principles and ethics that could be considered anarchist, though Baker herself probably never identified as such. As anarchists, we understand that transforming society will require a means that reflects the ends we wish to achieve: breaking down hierarchy, building consensus, and transforming ourselves -- the very processes that spoke to us and brought many of us to anarchism in the first place. In the words of James Mumm's [essay Active Revolution, in which he argued for a fusion between anarchist insights and community organizing], we would do better to "stop trying to build a movement of anarchists, and instead build an anarchistic movement."