Ella Baker Freedom Bound (Book Review Sample)

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Ella Baker’s path to the pursuit of civil rights: insight from ‘Freedom Bound”
Summary of ‘Freedom Bound’
Freedom bound is a Biography about Ella Baker, a female activist during the civil rights movement period, written by Joanne Grant. The book offers an insightful glimpse into Baker’s life, helping the reader to understand circumstances that influenced her ideals and actions. Right from the beginning, Grant makes the reader understand that Baker came out of slavery, and this she lived with this fact. Her family had a tradition of rebelling against the status quo and she well carried on the family tradition. In the book, her life story is coloured with deeds to lead her people in the path of freedom by helping them fight battles, by working with prominent leaders, by helping building organizations: by basically being at the very forefront of the civil rights movement.
She was born in 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia to a mother who instilled in her a strong sense of independence and responsibility. She attended Shaw University in North Carolina and after which she move to Harlem in 1927 where she found new ideas and made new associations (Frantz Web). It did not take long for her to become an active organizer for consumer cooperatives and she soon started working for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). Grant identifies Baker’s involvement with the NAACP as the moment when she found her calling. From the nineteen forties onwards through the sixties, she was a core participant in the civil rights movement agitating for desegregation and mobilising African Americans to register as voters and engage in the electoral politics. She was passionate about people being involved in decisions that affected their own lives. Apart from her involvement in NAACP, Baker was a prominent member of other movements such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Congress. ‘Freedom Bound’ is an excellent biography that celebrates an extraordinary woman whose contributions in the quest for equality and freedom decades ago continues to inspire generations today.
Baker’s path to the pursuit of civil rights
Although Baker joined already established civil rights movements such as the NAACP, she did not adhere to their ways of operation and she often had differing views on the best way forward. In ‘Freedom Bound’, we see numerous circumstances in which she held a different opinion on how to handle civil rights issues. The most defining characteristic of her uniqueness is her strong belief on the importance of organising people to identify their problems, formulate their own queries and find their own solutions (Frantz Web). There are many ways in which she accomplished this.
During the Great Depression, while living in New York City, Baker started identifying with the unemployed whom she found to be suffering from the prevailing economic hardships. Through this, she discovered that the people were in a position where they had very little control over most of the social forces surrounding them. As a result, efforts by traditional civil rights movements to lead such people through activism would not be successful since these people had other pressing needs that were not being addressed. Baker realized that the only way to help such people was by starting activities that would help in addressing their most pressing needs and later integrate the civil rights activism within these activities. It is from this realization that she cofound the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League through which people with very little money could pool resources and buy more with what they had (Frantz Web). This led to the formation of groups called cooperatives which sold stuff but were different from ordinary shops since they were owned by the customers. Baker described her work as “…getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use.” (Frantz Web).
Baker’s efforts led to realization, by those she worked with, that the power to change did not lay with the bureaucratic activities of the civil rights organizations but with themselves. She was a constant traveller traversing different states in an effort to get in touch with the local people and understand their most serious problems. This was a sharp contrast to most of the other civil right movement’s leaders who spent most of their times in meetings. They had little time to engage with the ordinary person and understand their most basic problems. Mainstream civil rights activists were mainly of the opinion that their task was to provide legal aid through which the rights of African Americans would be recognized. Baker actions sharply deviated from such activities and she was more concerned with addressing...