An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 8/25/2023
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"A first-class citizen does not beg for freedom. A first-class citizen does not plead to the power structure to give him something that the whites have no power to give or take away. Human rights are human rights, not white rights."
Meet "Glorious" Gloria Hayes Richardson (later Dandridge), the first woman to found and lead a grassroots civil rights organization outside of the Deep South, the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC). Born in 1922 Baltimore, Maryland during the Depression, Gloria was fortunate to be born into a reasonably privileged Black family --her father's family, the Hayes, owned real estate and operated businesses; and her mother's family, the St. Clairs, were politically active and well-connected --her maternal grandfather was the sole Black member of the Cambridge, Maryland city council. Gloria graduated from Howard University in 1942 and worked for various Federal agencies during World War II, but was unemployable in social services after the war due to her race. In 1948 she married schoolteacher Harry Richardson and spent the next 13 years raising their children, where the story might be expected to end.
It was her own teenage daughter Donna that changed Gloria's life trajectory. In 1961 Donna became involved with the Freedom Riders and then the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), in an attempt to desegregate Cambridge's public accommodations. Gloria also joined in the efforts but pointedly did not subscribe to, nor endorse, the SNCC's prevailing commitment to non-violence. When desegregation actions faltered, Gloria instead created the aforementioned Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC) as an adult-run SNCC affiliate. With the advantage of being in a so-called "border" state rather than in the Deep South, the CNAC was able to expand its scope of grievances, such as housing discrimination and health care. It also pursued its protest actions more aggressively (and with more violent consequences) than was the hallmark of the SNCC. In the summer of 1963 protest actions were sufficient to prompt Maryland Governor Millard Tawes to enact martial law. In an iconic photo (the basis for my illustration), Richardson visibly and angrily pushes back against a National Guard bayonet rifle. In July of that year Richardson actually landed a face-to-face meeting with then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and made it plain to him that the civil rights movement was not just about desegregation and voter registration drives, but also about systemic poverty and joblessness (Black unemployment ran to nearly 40% that year). In the aftermath of that meeting, the Treaty Of Cambridge was negotiated, which proposed to desegregate Dorchester County public facilities, establish provisions for public housing, and create a human rights commission.
Unfortunately Richardson's unapologetic means and methods, while certainly inspiring and headline-grabbing (and also placing her at No. 2 on the Ku Klux Klan's target list, just after Martin Luther King), also bore a cost: barely a month later, while she and five other women from the CNAC had been specifically invited to sit on the stage with King at the March On Washington, she was not allowed by its organizers to actually speak and only managed a quick "hello" to the assembled crowd that day, before her microphone was cut.
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, after two years of near-continuous demonstrations, an exhausted Gloria resigned from the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee and moved to New York. In later years she divorced Harry Richardson and married Frank Dandridge, a freelance photographer. For the rest of her life Gloria remained steadfastly committed to pushing back against entrenched white supremacy, and never compromised in her advocacy. Notably she did not support Barack Obama's presidential campaign, viewing him as lacking the same depth and background of the civil rights advocates of the 60's. However she did live to the age of 99 --long enough to be able to watch from her New York apartment window the hopeful spectacle of a new generation of angry protestors taking their outrage to the streets, after the murder of George Floyd. Gloria died shortly afterwards, on July 15, 2021. The city of Cambridge, Maryland now features her likeness on a 50' x 20' mural, just adjacent to a depiction of a fellow Dorchester County native, Harriet Tubman.
"This Supreme Court is backward and extremely right-wing. They did a job on affirmative action and will certainly go after Roe v. Wade."
--from a disturbingly prophetic interview in 2008
Next page - Lesson 137: Henry Highland Garnet