Mentor to a generation.

• Author: Cobb, William Jelani

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: a Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby University of North Carolina Press. 470 pages. $34.95.

The names are more than familiar: King, the martyr, Abernathy, the point-man, Young and Jackson, the youthful disciples, Du Bois, the elder, and Wilkins, the race-man bureaucrat. Some thirty-nine years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the marquee names of the civil rights movement have been etched into our memories. The Great Man Theory of Racial Uplift holds that a handful of extraordinary personalities molded a radical, humanitarian vision after the Second World War and, by grit, charisma, and force of individual will, overthrew American apartheid. In this schema, the civil rights movement was assassinated on April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. This is a profoundly undemocratic view of the century's most recognizable movement for democracy.

In recent years, the work of civil rights historians such as John Dittmer, Charles Payne, Lynn Olson, and Chana Kai Lee has focused on the democratic inclusion of everyday people, local organizations, and women in our understanding of the civil rights movement. Barbara Ransby's long-awaited and excellent biography of Ella Baker fits into this trend. Until recently, Ella Baker has been one of those tantalizing figures who dwell in the historical penumbras--present everywhere, but always just out of focus. She was a formative influence in three of the movement's most indispensable organizations: the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which she helped to found. Baker was a mentor to an entire generation of activists and an indispensable critic-ally of Martin Luther King Jr.

On one level, Ella Baker's low profile is a product of the patriarchal practices that characterized many of the organizations she worked with. She, along with her contemporaries Daisy Bates, Pauli Murray, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Louise Thompson Patterson, worked with men who subordinated other issues to the allegedly all-encompassing race question. At the same time, however, Baker contributed to the haze surrounding herself. If the personal is political, she opted to keep certain politics to herself. Baker, as Ransby notes early on, was fiercely private--maintaining long-term friendships and activist ties with people who had no idea that she was even married. "Black women of...