Gloria Richardson: Civil Rights Hero

A prominent civil rights hero, Gloria Richardson, died last week at the age of 99.

Many people believe mistakenly that the civil rights movement in the 1960s was mainly Martin Luther King going around the country starting marches and demonstrations. But, contrary to popular belief, in many cities and towns across the country, especially in the South, African Americans developed local movements, including marches and demonstrations.

One of the great heroes of that era was Gloria Richardson. She led the Cambridge Movement in her Maryland hometown from 1962 to 1964 and taught the country a lesson as the movement won.  Richardson was in the black radical activist tradition of self-defense and uncompromising positions on equality.

Richardson was from a prominent African American family in Cambridge. Her grandfather had been a local Republican councilman in the later 1800s and the early 1900s, and her late father had owned a pharmacy.

In the beginning, Richardson played a sideline participant role supporting the protest activities of her daughter, other students, and two representatives from SNCC. As she became more active, she became the leader of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC).

Under Richardson’s leadership, CNAC affiliated with SNCC and expanded their demands to include employment and low-income housing, in addition to desegregation.

There were many protests and demonstrations, some before Richardson became the leader but many more afterward. As a result, Richardson and others were arrested and jailed several times.

The White city leaders tried to appeal to Richardson’s class as a member of a multi-generational middle and upper-middle-class family. When that tactic failed, they did the usual. They appealed to the established and moderate Black leaders, but Richardson quickly showed that her organization, CNAC, represented the all-Black Second ward and not these White-approved Black leaders.

Richardson traveled around the country gathering support for the Cambridge movement. At one point in the struggle, Cambridge city leaders planned to put some of the issues on the ballot, but Richardson and CNAC announced a boycott of such an election. She was denounced across the country about this strange move which was not in keeping with the regular civil rights movement. Not completely understanding the action myself, I went to hear her when she came to Washington. She explained clearly and convincingly that one should not vote about their rights.

Then, as expected, some whites resorted to violence, invading the Black community. But Richardson and CNAC believed strongly in self-defense. Consequently, many residents, including Richardson’s mother, functioned as armed guards at night. A shooting skirmish broke out one night, leaving two whites wounded by unidentified community members. By then, the Cambridge struggle was front-page news across the country.

Referencing the violence, Richardson obligated Attorney General Robert Kennedy to get involved. Kennedy eventually sent the National Guard and later met with Richardson and the city leaders to assist them toward negotiations.

The negotiations ended finally with a written agreement from the city—steps toward desegregation of schools and other facilities, job opportunities for Blacks, and a plan to apply for low-income housing.

After the “Treaty of Cambridge” in July 1963, Richardson was invited to speak at the March on Washington, but she was not called to the microphone; she thought because leaders were afraid of what she might say. And she confessed later that she was planning to urge the crowd to action, something the civil rights leadership and the Kennedy Administration wanted to avoid. That situation is why I declared in my circles a few days after the March that one’s protests are hollow if dictated by the protests’ object.

Richardson spent the next year traveling around the North speaking about civil rights and working on starting movements more suited to those areas than the civil rights movements of the South.  She was one of the organizers of ACT, an organization created to do just that.

Biographer Joseph Fitzgerald argues that Richardson, through her activism in Cambridge and the creation of ACT, was one of the key founders of Black Power.

Richardson became a friend of Malcolm X, and a prominent Black journalist hailed her as “the first civil rights leader to accept an offer of cooperation from” Malcolm X. Richardson may have given Malcolm the concept of “ballot or bullet.” Fitzgerald writes that Richardson speculated that the same militant attitude she was hearing in Cambridge probably existed in countless other black communities, so she asked Malcolm “to make it very clear that if it wasn’t the ballots [then] it would be bullets,” because “that was the only fallback position” Black people had.  Over the next three weeks, Malcolm X delivered three “ballot or bullet” speeches.

In 1964 Richardson got married again, moved to New York City, and began a career in social work, saying that it was time to leave the movement to the young people. However, she was with Malcolm as he established the Organization for African American Unity (OAAU) in 1964.