“Ella Taught Me: Shattering the Myth of the Leaderless Movement’
“Borrowing from my research on Baker and my own participation in social movements, I want to refute the notion that this movement is leaderless. As some contemporary youth activists such as #BlackLivesMatter co-founder and Dignity and Power Now founder Patrisse Cullors have asserted, their movement is not leaderless, it is leader-full…
When Oprah Winfrey complained that recent protests against police violence lack leadership, she was describing the King style of leading, or at least the way in which the King legacy has been most widely branded: the reverend as the strong, all-knowing, slightly imperfect but still not-like-us type of leader.
[Ella] Baker represented a different leadership tradition altogether. She combined the generic concept of leadership — “A process of social influence in which a person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task” — and a confidence in the wisdom of ordinary people to define their problems and imagine solution."
Long but valuable — read by sections, as they interest you.
Related: HBR on Old power/New power that I find super continuous with this discussion
