Ella Baker : freedom bound / Joanne Grant ; foreword by Julian Bond.

Includes a speech given by Ella Baker at the Institute for the Black World (pages 227-231).

Includes bibliographical references (pages 253-258) and index.

1. Roots of rebellion -- 2. Reveling in new ideas -- 3. Putting people in motion: the NAACP years -- 4. The travel was bum -- 5. The Northern challenge -- 6. Confronting "De Lawd" -- 7. Political mama -- 8. On the way to freedom land -- 9. Grassroots politics -- 10. In her image -- 11. Black power's gon' get your mama!

"This reverential, earnest biography of civil rights pioneer Ella Baker (1903-1986) should give her the wider recognition she deserves. Born in Virginia, raised in North Carolina, a community activist and New York newspaper reporter during the Harlem Renaissance, Baker in 1947 helped organize a series of interracial bus trips to test segregation laws in the South, a remarkable precursor of the bloody Freedom Rides of 1961. She was instrumental in establishing two key organizations: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which grew out of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. A mentor to civil rights workers, she supported SNCC's metamorphosis in the mid-1960s into an all-black, militant black power group and, as Grant notes, turned a blind eye to the prevalence of weapons among its zealous recruits. Grant, producer of Fundi, a PBS television documentary about Baker, chronicles her subject's battles for school desegregation; consumer, tenants' and labor causes; her faith in grassroots democracy; and the empowerment of ordinary people." -- from Publishers Weekly.