Ella's Daughters

About Us

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We are Katrina survivors. We are women of color and white women. We are Palestinian and we are Jewish. We are anti-war activists and labor organizers. We are college professors and students; poets and performance artists; janitors and office workers. Our people come from many countries, and many are landless. We make films, write books, and walk picket lines. We build and support organizations and one another. We belong to hundreds of groups, committees and community-based institutions. We are lesbians and non-lesbians, elders and youth. We are angry and we are hopeful. Some of us are mothers, all of us are daughters, Ellas’ Daughters.

Veronica Precious Bohanan - Kristin Millikan - Sherie Randolph - Ann Russo - Barbara Ransby - Lisa Yun Lee - Tracye Matthews - Cathy J. Cohen - Ainsley Lesure - Elizabeth Todd - Latoya Stampley -Darlene Nava Munoz -Miryam Rashid -Leena Odeh - Beth E. Richie - Bernardine Dohrn - Marta Ayala - Alexandra Navedo - Aisha Truss - Summer R. Coleman - Yvette D. Hyter - Jane M. Saks - Christ H. Ketchum - Lynette Jackson - Leah Hodges - Mokerah Bradley - Linda Hillman - Inhe Choi - Premilla Nadasen - Camille Odeh - Jennifer Bing-Canar - Sussan Navabi - Rupal Soni - Chikamnario Ugbaja - Jenine Wehbeh - Corina Pedraza Palominos - Alexandra Moffet-Bateau - Dara Cooper - Indian Summer Day - Catherine Chandler - Wisdom Baty - Fallon Wilson - Maria Flanagan - Martha Biondi - Zorayda Ortiz

Special Events

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10/20 - Public Square: Festival of Democracy http://www.thepublicsquare.org/

10/21 - Breakfast with Laura Flanders http://www.lauraflanders.com/

10/31 - National Action Against Violence Against Women of Color http://www.documentthesilence.wordpress.com/

12/14 - Ella's Daughters Fundraiser

12/15 - Ella Baker Life Celebration

11AM – 2PM
Roosevelt University
Downtown Chicago on Michigan Avenue in the Congress Lounge on the Second Floor

2/1/08 - ED Event
2/2/08 - ED Event

4/16/08 - Columbus Refectory

Contact Us

2006-08-24T19:44:00.000-05:00

Principles

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WHAT ARE THE PRINCIPLES THAT UNITE US?  

• Making more visible ongoing activist work
• Bringing together progressive activists, scholars, and artists across lines of difference 
• Supporting democratic grassroots organizations 
• Seeking creative strategies for complex problems 
• Forging global visions and global alliances 
• Striving for collective analysis
• Creating forums for discussing our differences 
• Fostering democratic decision-making
• Engaging in direct action 
• Exploring RADICAL CRITIQUES OF INEQUALITIES AND OPPRESSION 
• Imagining a more just world 
• GIVING PRIORITY TO THE MOST OPPRESSED SECTORS OF OUR COMMUNITIES AND WORLD 
• Speaking truth to power 
• Sharing resources and lessons learned across generations 
• EMPOWERING WOMEN TO SPEAK OUT AND GIVE LEADERSHIP TO ISSUES OF SOCIAL CHANGE that affect their lives and the lives of others.

Background

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Why Ella?

During Black History Month most of the talk is about Malcolm and Martin and the next month it is Stanton and Steinem. One progressive political tradition coming out of the United States context, out of the Black Freedom Movement in particular, that is not often discussed or advanced, is the tradition embodied in the work of Ella Baker (1903-1986). Ella Baker is best known as the intellectual and spiritual force behind the Student Non-violent Coordinating committee (SNCC) formed in 1960, but her career as an activist spanned over fifty years. She worked in the cooperative movement in Harlem in the 1930s, was a field secretary and director of branches for the NAACP in the 1940s, and worked alongside Dr. King is setting up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1950s. She worked with the Third World Women’s Alliance, the Mass Party Organizing Committee and the Free Angela (Davis) Campaign.  

Ella Baker made an enormous impact in her lifetime. The challenge today is how to make her legacy a living lesson, challenge, and inspiration for younger generations of women? The challenge now is how to use the story of Baker’s life and teachings as a tool for building a stronger social justice movement today.

Some activists worry about the absence of a galvanizing political leader today in the mold of a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Some people feel activists need a single issue like the war in Vietnam or Jim Crow segregation in the South to focus our energies. Well, the long and eclectic political career of Ella Baker offers a hopeful response to these questions. First of all, Ella rejected the idea that any single charismatic leader can save us. "Strong people don't need strong leaders," she insisted. Do we need a single issue? The movement of the 1950s and 60s was never about a single issue. The war in Vietnam and the struggle for black freedom provided two focal points but embedded within those struggles were also struggles around jobs, education, economic justice, civil liberties, sexism, welfare, self-determination, anti-violence and anti-imperialism. Ms. Baker's political philosophy always embodied working on multiple fronts at once. She belonged to multiple organizations and borrowed from various ideologies to make sense of the world around her and to fashion a strategy to transform it. She supported Puerto Rican independence, and condemned South African Apartheid. She opposed the war in Vietnam and supported women's rights. She exposed the inequities embedded in the capitalist economic system and demanded democratic processes of decision-making within progressive organizations. She worked on multiple fronts at the same time and enjoyed political relationships with a variety of progressive activists. There was not a sectarian bone in her body. But when choices had to be made, which inevitably they did, Ella Baker stood with the most oppressed sectors of society: the poor, the unemployed, the victims of violence and colonialism, women, children and those without formal education. She stood in solidarity with them, not in service to them. Baker was also a strong supporter of young women’s leadership.

Ella Baker was a critical force in uniting disparate sectors of the progressive movements of the 20th century. Ella’s Daughters alone will not constitute such a movement in the 21st century, but can and will help facilitate critical connections that can move us in that direction. In the women’s quilting tradition, Ella’s Daughters can sew together the different fragments of a movement, one stitch at a time.

Ella Baker's Tradition

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So, what does it mean to organize and work in Ella Baker's tradition?

We are a loose network of women who respect and admire Baker’s legacy, and are either interested in or already engaged in work that represents a continuation of her democratic, egalitarian humanistic tradition. We do not want to reinvent the wheel or duplicate or compete in any way with existing efforts. An argument can be made that the potential for a renewed progressive movement already exists and is embedded in the local trench work of organizers like Ella Baker. From the Atlanta-based work of women like Christi Ketchum at Project South to the amazing organizers of Power U in Miami to the work of Linda Burnham at the Women of Color Resource Center in Oakland to the performance artists of Mango Tribe in Chicago to tireless work of Ruby Sales at Spirit House in Washington -- and the list goes on. The problem is that much of this work is grounded in local communities and therefore not seen as "fronts" in a national movement. The mainstream media ignores us and many of the national organizations are so busy fighting the big fight that they are not building bridges to connect different sectors of the would-be movement. So, our overarching goal is to connect, to make visible, to facilitate collaborations and the sharing of information and resources among already existing and emergent organizations and campaigns.

Yes, we all already participate in and support other groups who share part of this mission but few groups have the express purpose of supporting and publicizing other groups. That is one contribution that Ella’s Daughters can make. And in addition there are too many women, writers, artists, unaffiliated activists who simply don't want to join what already exists. There is always something exciting about a new effort as long as it is in coordination with and not in competition with longstanding and deep-seated work that already exists. The reason Ella's Daughters is necessary is that for every informal mobilization or call to action that occurs there are ten that should have and didn't occur. To set up a network poised to intervene and doing ongoing networking puts us further down the road of building long-term movement infrastructure. It was also to provide a community where new collaborations could be conceived.

Why is there a need for this type of network? In some ways it is about using history as a tool for organizing and reclaiming a part of the history of progressive movements that can inspire us and push us in the direction of inclusive, pro-feminist, democratic and anti-racist organizing that respects and supports some of the most oppressed sectors of our communities. The creation of Ella's Daughters is also predicated on the notion that we have the ingredients for a movement, just not the recipe. There are many localized and issue-specific struggles around the country and the world. These are movement building blocks, patches of our movement quilt. And in the woman-centered quilting tradition, we need to take time to stitch those patches together to make something whole and functional.

Goals:

• Highlight and publicize ongoing work through a website, emails and publicity campaigns. Make visible the extensive work that is ongoing and help women connect across geographic, issue, race and class divides.
• Help facilitate new initiatives in Ella Baker's tradition by connecting people with other people and with resources that can help to launch new projects
• Convene an annual or bi-annual gathering of the family of activists that constitute Ella’s Daughters in order to share, celebrate, strategize, commiserate and support one another.
• Advance awareness about Baker and those she worked with who represent the basic tenets of her beliefs.