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Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. By Barbara Ransby. Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 477 pages.
The publication of this book brings to three the number published on the life and work of Ella Josephine Baker (1903-1986). Shyrlee Dallard published Ella Baker: A Leader Behind the Scenes in 1990, and Joanne Grant's Ella Baker: Freedom Bound followed in 1998. The former was directed more toward a juvenile audience, although it is a fine introduction to Baker. A thoroughly researched text with a very good story line, Grant's book is directed toward a more general audience and would appeal to the college-level Afrikanna studies program.
One who reads Dallard will thirst to read Grant's more substantive book. Having read the latter, much of the thirst-but not all-will have been quenched. One will wonder whether there are not many more underlying substantive details regarding the Ella Baker story and her contributions to and shaping of the civil and human rights movements-nationally and internationally-roughly from the 1940s through the 1970s. For one so interested Professor Barbara Ransby's Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision is a must read. Ransby learned from Dallard and Grant, but went well beyond both.
In twelve powerful, thoroughly researched chapters, Ransby, a historian of indisputable talent and skill, provides numerous intricate, heretofore unknown facts and details of Ella Baker's life while growing up in the South and the path that led to her involvement in civil and human rights efforts. Baker's life was essentially public from the time she worked with the New York branch of the NAACP as a field worker, planting and nurturing local branches of that organization throughout the deep South. At the time she could easily have been lynched, not...