Ella Baker

A civil rights activist for forty years, Ella Jo Baker took part in some of the most significant movements for social change in the twentieth century. Moving from North Carolina to Harlem in 1927, she threw herself into the political ferment of 1930s radicalism. After serving as national director of the Young Negroes Cooperative League and teaching "workers education" under the auspices of the WPA, she played a key role in the tremendous expansion of the NAACP during the 1940s, crisscrossing the country as a field secretary and then director of branches. In the early 1950s she headed the NAACP's New York branch. In 1957 she helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and then assisted Martin Luther King Jr. in getting the new organization off the ground. In 1960, recognizing the importance of the sit-in movement, Baker organized the conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, that gave birth to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She nurtured and advised SNCC during its most vital years, 1960-65, a sole elderly adult in an organization composed of young people.

Yet Baker is, admits Barbara Ransby, a "biographer's nightmare" (p. 373). Her private papers appear to be disappointingly thin and "chronicle only part of the story" (p. 7). Baker left no diary, no memoir, and little in the way of revealing personal correspondence. Although an intellectual, she did not commit her political ideas to paper in a systematic way. Above all, she guarded her private life so closely that she disclosed little of her emotional interior. Many of her contemporaries did not even know that she had once been married, and despite her own assiduous research, Ransby discovered little about the relationship. Given that modern biographers are often obsessively interested in the private lives of their public subjects-an interest that presumably reflects the appetite of the reading public-these omissions make for a dry read.

At the same time, the virtual absence of any private dimension to Baker's life testifies to an important theme of this biography. Black women have, despite the restrictions of patriarchy, played important public roles as teachers, churchgoers, clubwomen, and civil rights activists. Especially prominent in these public roles were pious middle-class women who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, saw themselves as the moral exemplars of southern black communities and bracketed their own quest for respectability with a commitment to the elevation of the less-fortunate masses, to "lifting as we climb." The biggest