The book received eight national awards and recognitions including: Lillian Smith Book Award, Southern Regional Council; Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, American Historical Association; Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize, Association of Black Women Historians; Liberty Legacy Foundation Award (co-winner), Organization of American Historians; James A. Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians; Honorable Mention, 2004 Berkshire Conference First Book Prize, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians; Honor Book, Black Caucus of the American Library Association; Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.“To young women, black and white, Baker embodied the possibility of escaping the restrictions that defined conventional femininity. It is absolutely the story of Ella Baker, but it also does such a good job of modeling what it says it’s going to do - centering the many lives and group of leaders in Baker’s orbit as well. Focusing on her leadership style and influence in a variety of different organization. As a professional woman who had to assert herself in the male dominated mid-century civil rights organizations of the NAACP and Southern Christian LeadershipElla Baker’s description of herself as somebody focused on being one of the many can easily be misunderstood.
Around the same time, Martin Luther King Jr. was also part of the civil right movement. I think I first heard of Ella Baker in the late 70s, when I heard Sweet Honey in the Rock's "Ella's Song": "We who believe in freedom cannot rest". I find that the greatest value of this book is the Bakers desire to empower people to be their own leaders and how she lived that praxis while navigating the various political affiliations of a 5 decade activistExcellent review of Baker's activist career. Born in 1903, Ella Baker’s grandmother was a slave. Ella Baker was an African-American civil rights activist who was known for her influential efforts as a community organizer alongside fellow civil rights activists Martin Luther King Jr. and W. E. B. Yeah. It was also these beliefs that contributed to her nickname: “Fundi,” which is Swahili for “a person who teaches a craft to a younger generation.” (The Child Defense Fund even has the Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.where hands-on work to safeguard democracy leads to civic improvementPlease note that because this is a free blog service, occasionally advertisements will appear on the screen. I find that the greatest value of this book is the Bakers desire to empower people to be their own leaders and how she lived that praxis while navigating the various political affiliations of a 5 decade activist career.What a fantastic book! The narrative takes us past some well known stops on the trail of the civil rights movement while also passing on lots of new information about Ella Baker herself. They were racial or ethnic minorities, LGBT, students, came from a different background or geographic region, or in a field not very receptive to those outside a particular mold. By that time, some of the organizations she had been involved with no longer existed. When SNCC nearly split apart over whether to pursue direct action (such as the Montgomery bus boycott and the Greensboro sit-ins) or voter registration, Baker suggested that the organization could do both, setting the stage for the 1961 Freedom Rides.The Freedom Rides were begun in 1961 as a response to a 1960 ruling, While the Freedom Riders traveled across the South, SNCC also pursued voter registration.