Shining a guiding light on the path to freedom, Ella J. Baker stood at the forefront of the great struggle for civil rights. The battles she fought, the organizations she helped build, the prominent leaders she worked with, shoulder to shoulder - all these make her story a history of the movement itself. In Ella Baker Joanne Grant gives us the first full portrait of the incomparable Ella Baker.

Although she shunned the spotlight, believing the glare of the media more a hindrance than a help to her work, Miss Baker, as she was known to all, nonetheless found herself center stage in the struggle for civil rights. Throughout the nineteen forties, fifties, and into the sixties, she fought to desegregate the schools, to increase voter registration, and to encourage participation of African Americans in electoral politics.

Above all, she strove to get people everywhere more involved in the decisions that affected their own lives. In addition to her position as a national officer of the NAACP, Baker helped found Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In a political world dominated by men, there were those who did not always know what to make of this driven, feisty, intensely focused woman.

Her unceasing efforts brought her into conflict with Martin Luther King Jr. himself.