Ella Baker: Freedom Bound

This reverential, earnest biography of civil rights pioneer Ella Baker (1903-1986) should give her the wider recognition she deserves. Born in Virginia, raised in North Carolina, a community activist and New York newspaper reporter during the Harlem Renaissance, Baker in 1947 helped organize a series of interracial bus trips to test segregation laws in the South, a remarkable precursor of the bloody Freedom Rides of 1961. She was instrumental in establishing two key organizations: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which grew out of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. A mentor to civil rights workers, she supported SNCC's metamorphosis in the mid-1960s into an all-black, militant black power group and, as Grant notes, turned a blind eye to the prevalence of weapons among its zealous recruits. Grant, producer of Fundi, a PBS television documentary about Baker, chronicles her subject's battles for school desegregation; consumer, tenants' and labor causes; her faith in grassroots democracy; and the empowerment of ordinary people. Photos. (Apr.)