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An important voice in the Civil Rights Movement, Joanne Rabinowitz Grant documented grass-roots efforts in the movement through her books, award-winning films, and articles in the National Guardian. She documented civil rights demonstrations and the work of organizations in rural southern towns that other publications ignored. While serving as a reporter for the National Guardian, her work took her to these towns to document the demonstrations that were taking place. She was a former assistant to W.E.B. Du Bois, a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and an organizer of benefits for social and political causes. “She was an important voice in the early writing on the civil rights movement,” said Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham in the New York Times. In the same source, Julian Bond said that “she exposed and explained the Civil Rights Movement in ways that the daily press either couldn’t or wouldn’t.” Some called her the “movement’s publicist,” who saw herself as a journalist and a civil rights advocate. Her works include Black Protest (1968), one of the first books to trace the Civil Rights Movement and its origin; Confrontation on Campus (1969), an account of the sit-in movement at Columbia University and elsewhere; and Ella Baker, Freedom Bound (1998), a biography of an unsung matriarch of the Civil Rights Movement. Her award-winning documentary film Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker (1981) was broadcast nationally on PBS.

Jessie Carney Smith