“Strong people don’t need strong leaders: the emphasis was on the organizing,” civil rights activist Jennifer Lawson tells us in “Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power,” Geeta Gandbhir (“Black and Missing”) and Sam Pollard’s (“Mr. Soul!”) documentary recounting the battle for Black suffrage and political justice in the Georgian county during mid-century America. Lawson here alludes to the ethos of bottom-up organizing endorsed by Ella Baker, a prominent architect of the American civil rights movement who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), led by Martin Luther King, Jr, and paved the way for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Baker’s insistence on community organizing is the through
