Gloria Richardson

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Gloria Richardson (b. May 6, 1922)

Gloria Richardson (a.k.a. Gloria St. Clair Hayes Richardson) is best known as the leader of the Cambridge Movement (Maryland), a human rights struggle in the town of Cambridge, on Maryland's Eastern Shore during the mid-1960s. Under Richardson’s leadership, the Cambridge Movement made significant strides against Cambridge’s racial caste system by bringing attention to the social injustices of inadequate wages, housing, and health care. The Cambridge Movement utilized the tactics of passive resistance and armed self-defense to achieve their goals. The social justice focus of the Cambridge Movement, along with its utilization of passive resistance and armed self-defense tactics signaled the beginning of the Black Power phase of the modern Black liberation struggle.

Gloria Richardson was born in Baltimore, Maryland on May 6, 1922 to John and Mable Hayes. John was a pharmacist, and Mable was a piano teacher and homemaker. During the early years of the Great Depression, the Hayes family moved from Baltimore to Mable’s hometown of Cambridge, Maryland on that state’s Eastern Shore. The family’s move to Cambridge was the result of encouragement from Gloria’s maternal grandfather, Herbert Maynadier St. Clair, who wanted his daughter to move back to Cambridge and because the city’s all-Black Second Ward needed and could support a pharmacist.

Herbert M. St. Clair was one of Cambridge’s wealthiest and most powerful citizens. He owned and ran a butcher shop, grocery store, and funeral parlor. He owned numerous properties in the city’s Second Ward. In addition to having real economic power in Cambridge, St. Clair was also the longest serving African American member of Cambridge’s City Council, having served for most of the first half of the twentieth century. In his capacity as Second Ward councilman, St. Clair was instrumental at securing public funds to support the Black public schools, as well as securing jobs for Black residents at the town’s canning factories. St. Clair secured these resources for Black Cambridge residents by engaging in a gradualist approach in race relations. The gradualist approach (exemplified by Booker T. Washington) was premised on the argument that the progress of African Americans against White supremacy would come about only through gradual and incremental steps which White people would see as non-confrontational.

Contents 1 Childhood 2 Howard University 3 Post-Howard 4 The Cambridge Movement 5 Leaving Cambridge 6 Reference 7 External links 8 Suggested Reading 9 See also

[edit] Childhood

Richardson has spoken fondly of her youth in Cambridge. She lived in a tightly knit community where her immediate and extended family lived within blocks of each another and everyone got together on holidays and for outings. Richardson appreciated her family’s intellectualism. The young Gloria was taught by her parents to critically interrogate and analyze all sorts of social, economic, and political issues of the day. Richardson’s socialization process was also carried out by the teachers at her racially segregated schools, and both her family and teachers taught Richardson to appreciate and respect African America’s resistance to White supremacy. For example, Richardson has stated that she was taught about fellow Eastern Shore natives Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and her family took her to important sites in American history such as the nearby Eastern Shore town of Salisbury where a Black man was lynched in the early 1930s, as well as Harpers Ferry, West Virginia where John Brown led an interracial group of warriors who raided the town’s arsenal in an attempt to start an overthrow of the nation’s racist hierarchy. The purpose of the Salisbury trip was to teach Gloria about European America’s penchant for barbarism against the nation’s darker citizens. In addition, lessons about Tubman and Douglass, and the raid on Harper’s Ferry showed Gloria that Black people had always fought their oppressors in various ways, including running away and helping others do the same, as well as engaging in armed liberation campaigns.

[edit] Howard University

In 1938, at the age of sixteen, Gloria graduated from high school. In the fall of that same year, she enrolled at Howard University, an historically Black institution in Washington, D.C. She received a B.A. in sociology in 1942. Some of her professors at Howard were among the nation’s most accomplished academics and intellectuals. These included historian Rayford Logan, literary scholar Sterling Brown, and eminent sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. Frazier would gain fame for, among other things, publishing the influential polemic The Black Bourgeoisie. The importance of these people to Richardson’s intellect cannot be overstated. Under the tutelage of Logan, Brown, and especially Frazier, Richardson learned to more fully appreciate her African ancestry, as well as how to hone her analytical skills in order to deconstruct and fight White supremacy.

[edit] Post-Howard

After graduating from Howard, Richardson stayed in Washington, working as a civil servant in the expanding federal government that came as a result of the nation’s entrance into World War II. Richardson stayed in Washington a short time and then moved back to Cambridge to be with her family. Upon her return to Cambridge, she quickly met and then married a local school teacher, Harry Richardson. They eventually had two daughters, Donna and Tamara. Eventually, however, Gloria and Harry divorced by the end of the 1950s.

[edit] The Cambridge Movement

Gloria Richardson credits her daughter, Donna, for getting her involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Donna was a high school student in the early 1960s and she worked with civil rights organizations including Baltimore’s Civic Interest Group (CIG) led by Clarence Logan, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC—pronounced “Snick”) as these groups targeted Cambridge for a desegregation campaign of public accommodations.

When this student movement lost momentum as a result of Cambridge’s White power structure’s foot dragging on desegregation, Gloria Richardson and other parents of local children decided to take matters into their own hands by organizing the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC). CNAC was the only adult-led affiliate in SNCC’s history. True to SNCC’s organizational structure, CNAC was group-centered and member driven. Shortly after its creation, Richardson was asked to join Enez Grubb as the organization’s executive committee co-chair. Richardson accepted the job because she felt strongly that she owed fellow Black residents a great debt because they were the people who had provided her and her family with a comfortable life through their patronage of her family’s businesses.

While desegregation of public accommodations was the original goal of the Cambridge Movement, activists quickly learned by way of survey information gathered in the Second Ward that Black residents cared more about social justice issues, such as jobs that paid a living wage, adequate housing, and health care, than being able to eat in a desegregated “greasy spoon.” CNAC therefore adjusted its goals accordingly.

Throughout the height of the Cambridge Movement, CNAC and its opponents engaged in demonstrations and counter-demonstrations which often became volatile and violent. Some of these encounters resulted in fist-fights and gun battles which prompted Maryland’s governor to send in the National Guard in the middle of June, 1963, and it stayed there for a total of more than one year.

Civil strife in Cambridge was put at bay by the third week of July, 1963, when CNAC and Cambridge’s White politicians signed off on a non-binding agreement that became known as the “Treaty of Cambridge.” The “Treaty” was negotiated by U.S. Justice Department members including its head, Robert F. Kennedy, and was signed in his office at the Justice Department. The “Treaty” contained a list of actions to be taken by the Cambridge City Council and other local elected officials and contained no specific action to be taken by CNAC. Among other things, the City government was to create a bi-racial “Human Relations Commission,” begin ending de facto segregation in the city’s primary schools, and initiate the building of a public housing project. The document also pointed out that Cambridge’s City Council passed an amendment to the city’s charter to desegregate public accommodations. The rub, however, was that this charter amendment could be put up for referendum by city voters if enough of them signed a petition to do so, and that was what happened. Enough White voters supported the challenge to the charter amendment and the amendment was put up for a popular vote on October 1, 1963.

Richardson boycotted the vote and her decision to do so drew heavy criticism. Her rationale for a boycott of the polls rested on her belief that people’s human rights were not something that should be voted upon by the general population, especially one that was so hostile to Black people. Richardson and many other Black voters stayed away from the polls that October day and the charter amendment went down to defeat, to the ire of the charter’s supporters. National civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr. argued that all eligible Black voters in Cambridge should go to the polls especially when so many millions of Black people in the Deep South were struggling just to get the right to vote. In response, Richardson argued that when your fellow citizenry put up your rights for popular vote its best to stay out of that process because while it may be legal, it is nevertheless an immoral and therefore illegitimate exercise of power.

Later that year, Richardson met Malcolm X and began collaborating with him in the creation of the civil rights organization, ACT. Richardson met X a number of weeks after the referendum vote when she traveled to Detroit to participate in a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) workshop. While she was in town she decided to attend a speech by Malcolm X. It was during this event, in which X gave his “Message to the Grass Roots” speech, that Richardson met the Nation of Islam minister. They quickly struck up a friendship and collaborated with Chicago school boycott leader Lawrence Landry, among others, to build the new civil rights organization ACT (not an acronym), whose focus was “to counteract the ‘paralyzing’ effect that mainstream civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and SCLC” were having on the Black liberation movement. Richardson also worked with X in his Organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU) until his assassination on February 21, 1965.

[edit] Leaving Cambridge

By the summer of 1964, Richardson resigned from the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee. She gave three main reasons for her decision. First, she did not want to become an icon who would serve as a retardant to the rise of other local leaders. Second, she was completely exhausted by the years of non-stop nerve-racking activism in which she confronted, among other things, weapon wielding police and National Guardsmen. Finally, she resigned from CNAC because she married freelance photographer Frank Dandridge and moved with him and her youngest daughter, Tamara, to his home in New York City.

Although she moved to New York, Richardson stayed somewhat active in the Movement in Cambridge (mainly in a behind-the-scenes role), and she volunteered at the SNCC office near her home. Gloria and Frank Dandridge were divorced by the late 1960s and Gloria continued to live in New York with her daughter, Tamara.

In the following years, Richardson held various jobs at places such as the advertising firm J. Walter Thompson, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), and the anti-poverty program Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited and Associated Community Teams (HARYOU-ACT). It was at these jobs that Richardson utilized her extensive organizing and leadership experience to deliver goods and services to the organizations’ target populations.

By the mid-1970s, Richardson landed a job with the City of New York where she has worked ever since. Currently, she works in the City’s Department for the Aging. She is also very active in her labor union, serving as a delegate and a role model and mentor to the union’s membership.

[edit] Reference

• All information for this Wikipedia biography posting of Gloria Richardson comes from Joseph R. Fitzgerald's Days of Wine and Roses: The Life of Gloria Richardson. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. Temple University, 2005. The dissertation, which is in the process of being published, is an intellectual history of Gloria Richardson similar in style and approach to Barbara Ransby's biography on Ella Baker.

[edit] External links

• GloriaRichardson.com http://gloriarichardson.com/

[edit] Suggested Reading

• Peter Levy's book, Civil War on Race Street: the Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), is the definitive study of the Cambridge Movement and a great text that shows Cambridge as a site of transition regarding the Civil Rights Movement's move toward Black Power.
• Anita K. Foeman, "Gloria Richardson: Breaking the Mold." Journal of Black Studies. Vol 26, #5. May 1996, 604-615.
• Sharon Harley, "'Chronicle of a Death Foretold': Gloria Richardson, the Cambridge Movement, and the Radical Black Activist Tradition." Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin, ed. "Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement" (New York University Press, 2001). pp. 174-196.
• Edward K. Trever. Gloria Richardson and the Cambridge Civil Rights Movement, 1962-1964. Thesis: M.A., Morgan State University, 1994.

[edit] See also

American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968)