eugonline

a blog by eugene hernandez, editor-in-chief and co-founder of indieWIRE. more at: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

NY TIMES | Joanne Grant, 74, Dies; Documented Grassroots Efforts on Civil Rights

Sadly, good friend Mark Rabinowitz’ mother passed away earlier this week. As you can see from today’s New York Times, Joanne Grant was an accomplished writer and activist. On a more personal note, she was also an key supporter back in the earliest days of iLINE and indieWIRE; that will always mean a lot.

Joanne Grant, an activist who documented the grassroots efforts behind the civil rights movement through her journalism, filmmaking and commentary, died on Sunday…Ms. Grant wrote “Black Protest”, a documentary analysis of black resistance from 1619 on. One of the first books to trace the origins of the civil rights movement, it remains required reading in many classes on African-American history.

A former assistant to W. E. B. DuBois, Ms. Grant sought to profile the struggle for civil rights through its community leaders. Her award-winning documentary film “Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker” (1981), about an unsung matriarch of the civil rights movement, was broadcast nationally on PBS. She later wrote “Ella Baker: Freedom Bound”, a biography. In “Confrontation on Campus”, she described sit-ins at Columbia University and elsewhere.

eug posted to press clippings on January 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1)