Mentor to a generation

Progressive, The, Nov, 2003 by William Jelani Cobb

The NAACP--where she eventually rose to the post of director of branches--was then headed by Walter White, whose leadership philosophy diametrically opposed Baker's. (White would go on to force W.E.B. Du Bois out of the organization and to block the return of William Pickens, who preceded Baker as field secretary.) Predictably, the two clashed, but Baker remained with the organization until 1946, overseeing the vast expansion of the NAACP to more than 500,000 members.

Baker's conflicts with powerful and egotistical black male leaders was to become a theme, and Ransby's treatment of such gender politics is one of the strengths of the biography. Neither White nor King was accustomed to stringent criticism from female colleagues.

Two of Baker's male peers, however, were capable of viewing Baker as an equal. Stanley Levison and Bayard Rustin, along with Baker, created In Friendship, an organization dedicated to providing aid that would offset the economic pressure on activists in the deep South. It was Levison and Rustin, in fact, who suggested to Martin Luther King that Ella Baker coordinate the SCLC'S Crusade for Citizenship. Baker respected King's talent and distrusted his charisma in equal measure. She was also critical of the tendency to overlook his philandering and that of other clergy associated with the organization.

Within three years, Baker had pushed SCLC to create the autonomous youth organization SNCC in response to the growing nationwide sit-in movement. Her involvement with SNCC was to culminate in her participation in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and its attempt to unseat the segregationist Mississippi Democrats at the 1964 Presidential convention. Baker mentored many of the young SNCC activists to political maturity only to find these relationships strained by the move toward black power in the mid-1960s.

In the wake of SNCC'S dissolution, Baker worked with the Southern Conference Education Fund and the Free Angela Davis Committee. She was a career activist.

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement is one of those rare compelling works by a biographer who unabashedly admires her subject. In many instances, that kind of relationship short-circuits a biographer's critical perspective.

To her credit, Ransby reckons with Baker's contradictions. In detailing the conflicts between King and Baker, Ransby leaves open the possibility that Baker may have been too hard on him--notwithstanding the preacher's difficulty in viewing women as equals in leadership. Ransby also raises the thorny subject of Baker's role in the anti-communist purges within the postwar NAACP, which she later regretted.

Ultimately, this biography works both as a narrative and as an activist study. Ransby has done much to carry Baker's legacy from margin to center and to bring her historical image into focus.

William Jelani Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman College and editor of "The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader."