| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Barbara Ransby. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. (Gender and American Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003. Pp. xvii, 470. $34.95
Writing the biography of a legend is a daunting task, and it is one that Barbara Ransby has accomplished thoroughly and gracefully. Ella Baker's name is not exactly a household word outside the ranks of activists and historians of the modern African-American freedom movement. Yet among that population—especially among its more radical thinkers—there is scarcely anyone more revered than Baker, who spent years on the staff of, first, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and then the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and who ultimately was spiritual mother to the more militant and more youthful Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Baker, a generation older than the students who formed SNCC, nonetheless became their most trusted adviser and political muse. She was instrumental in nurturing the vision of grassroots democracy, decentralized leadership, and indigenous knowledge that SNCC came to embrace.	1
That notion of social change "from the bottom up" and its corollary—that leaders are not born but developed—are at the heart of the shift in the post-World War II civil rights movement once SNCC "invaded" Mississippi after 1960. Those ideas also form the core of Baker's political philosophy—what Ransby calls "radical democracy." This book brings into focus Baker's quiet but profound contribution to the new phase of militancy that made the Mississippi movement possible and widened its objectives to yield a full-fledged political challenge to the Democratic Party in 1964 and to make possible the emergence of a poor people's movement. The idea that the oppressed should lead fueled subsequent social movements of the 1960s, however inchoately, and it remains a key principle of many community justice efforts today.	. . .

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