“Strong People Don’t Need Strong Leaders”
On Saturday, Carleigh attended the 50-50-1 “Rage Against the Regime” protest in Concord. She was inspired to speak about one of her heroes from the Civil Rights Movement, Ella Baker, who famously said, “strong people don’t need strong leaders.”
This is amazing to see how many people are here because they care about what is going on right now.
On the way here, Siralina asked “are we going to another protest?” and I asked “is it Saturday?” She responded “Mom! What are these protests? What is the point of protesting?”
I think it’s a really good question, because a lot of times we come out and the energy at the protests the past few months has been awesome—full of love, and excitement and jubilation because of all of you. And I said “Siralina, the point of protest is to show up and show that we care.”
Democracy is a participatory sport, it’s not something that happens in dark closed rooms, it’s something that happens with all of us on Saturdays just like this one.
I’m a historian, and something I love to teach my students about is the civil rights movement. They ask me “I know a little bit about the civil rights movement, I know a little bit about Martin Luther King Jr.” and I say “that’s awesome. He was really important. But there’s someone else who was equally important to the Civil Rights Movement who a lot of you may not have heard about.” That is who I’m going to talk to you about tonight. Her name is Ella Baker. Siralina asked, “was she a baker?” And, I said, “No, even better.”
Ella Baker thought of herself not as a frontman– someone who gets in front of a crowd and leads from the top– but as someone who helps bring communities together and keep them together when things get hard.
I see my job as someone who serves in local government in the state of New Hampshire, and as someone who is running for Congress, not to show up and tell you all what to think, say, and do. You all know why you’re here. You know what’s wrong with this country. And you also know exactly what we need to do to fix it.
I am here to listen to what you have to say and not walk away when the conversations get hard. It is my promise to keep showing up, to keep listening, and to keep amplifying your voices because protests can and do make a difference.
One of the things that Ella Baker said was “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” And what she meant by that was that strong people don’t need to wait for someone to come down from on high to save them. We don’t need a savior in New Hampshire. We don’t need a savior in the United States. We need all of us.
The people are not the problem, our leadership is. And we know that. So what do we need to do? We need to change our leadership. We need to change who is in charge, so that they enact the policies that we all believe in. We the people are in charge.
And one of the things that’s hard about New Hampshire is we have a lot of leaders who make a lot of assumptions about who the people are in this state and what they care about. And instead of making those assumptions, they need to start showing up, start listening to what the people on the ground actually care about, and fight like hell to enact the policies that meet the needs of the people who live here.
What I want to close on tonight– is this idea that we need to keep coming back. We need to find our people and we need to fight like hell to change the world. Because as Ella Baker said, and we all know, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.”
I look forward to the road ahead with everyone. And I want to say thank you everyone for showing up. Thank you for fighting for what matters and what is right. Thank you for believing it’s going to make a difference, because it already has.
