Book ReviewElla Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. By Barbara Ransby. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

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E lla J. Baker wanted the economically oppressed black people of the rural South, where she had maintained a network of connections since the 1940s, to take radical action on behalf of themselves and their communities. In Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, Barbara Ransby is tireless in substantiating Baker’s radical activism and intellectual prowess. Ransby’s task is not to be envied. Throughout the writing, Ransby says, she was constantly reminded by colleagues—hers and Baker’s—that Baker “was bigger than that” (171). She knew everybody in the black freedom movement and she was everywhere it was, like Bayard Rustin, her friend and fellow traveler. Baker was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1903; was raised in Littleton, North Carolina, her redoubtable mother’s birthplace; was educated away from home at Shaw Academy and University in Raleigh from 1918 to 1927; and migrated to Harlem—and not for the nightlife—in 1927. She maintained the same apartment there until 1986, the year she died of Alzheimer’s-related causes. From the 1920s at Shaw, when she led a group of students to petition the dean of women to allow women students to wear silk stockings, to 1964, when she shepherded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party onto the floor of the Democratic National Convention to challenge the credentials of Mississippi’s Dixiecrat delegation, Baker exemplified “the revolutionary in action, transcending more attendant concerns and reaching for something larger, greater, more inspirational” (319). For Baker, the black freedom struggle was always the crucible of that “larger freedom that encompasses all of mankind” (Baker, quoted in Ransby, 319). Ransby reprises the well-known story of Baker’s distrust of and her “disappointed