Yes, look at this way. Here are four or five organizations, very
different kinds of organizations and working in overlapping but
different ways. For example, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee believed in organizing people. That is if we could get
leadership in a community and people to follow that leadership to build
a movement, then we could go away and the movement would go on. Dr. King
and
Page 26the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
believed in mobilizing people. That is to say marches, protests, and
demonstrations, and we did that too. But that wasn't our main focus. Our
main focus was trying to create something that would be in the community
for months and years to come, some kind of organization because, quite
obviously, fifty people together are stronger than one person standing
alone. So we wanted to get as many people as possible involved. We were
also profoundly democratic, with a small "d". We believed in group
decisions. We believed in group organization. Our mentor was a woman
named Ella Baker. Ella Baker used to say, "Strong people don't need
strong leaders," because they themselves are strong. They don't need
somebody saying, "Follow me," or "Do this" or something. So that put us
at odds with SCLC because they had the strong leader, Martin Luther
King. Even though we generally did whatever it was King said let's do.
We didn't like the idea of someone saying, "Let's do this." We liked the
idea of everyone saying, "What about this? What about that? Why don't we
do this?" So anyway, here are all these organizations with overlapping
styles, a common, or nearly common, agenda, but each one proud of its
own identity because this identity is tied to our fund-raising efforts.
If we participate in a demonstration and no one knows we're there, then
we can't say, "Look at what we did," because no one knows that we did
it. So my job, in part, and Mary's job was to make sure people knew what
we were doing. In many places we weren't in actual competition with
these groups, we were the only group. But we didn't want people to say,
"Negroes marched on City Hall in Jackson, Mississippi." We wanted to
say, "The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organized a march of
Negroes on the City Hall in Jackson, Mississippi." So people in the
North with big checkbooks could say, "Oh, I like that. Let me write a
Page 27check." So part of it is a fight for
organizational identity. Again just on the surface, people say, "Gee,
why'd you have to do that? Couldn't you all work together in common
cause?" Well, we were working together in common cause, but we were also
fighting so we could say, "We're doing this. These other people are
doing that. We don't think what they're doing is bad. But we think what
we're doing is good," and we want people pay attention.