The Struggle is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation, by Joseph R. Fitzgerald (Kentucky, 2018), takes an important step in telling her story, a story that assuredly belongs on the shelf with Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and Harriet Tubman. Born in Baltimore in 1922, Richardson will turn 99 in May.

In January 1962, Deborah Richardson, Richardson’s older daughter, joined with schoolmates and some college-age members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to protest school segregation and racial injustice in Cambridge, Dorchester County, Md. At the same time, some Black Cambridge citizens organized the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC). Much like SNCC, CNAC’s purpose was to engage local people directly and immediately to act on their needs as they saw them, rather than slog through the legal system in slow-moving lawsuits overseen by judges mired in the status quo. Protests were organized not by outsiders, but by local school and college students.

Their efforts ceased when local leaders, Black and White, promised to desegregate local public accommodations. When this promise was unfulfilled, CNAC, led by Richardson, took over leadership of the Cambridge efforts. Like SNCC’s operations, CNAC’s were run locally, free of imposition from the established civil rights groups and churches. The egalitarian group, as Fitzgerald writes, “made a conscious effort not to privilege one person’s sexuality, political, or economic philosophy, or religion over another’s.” (Fitzgerald, 80)

To begin their efforts, Richardson (a Howard University sociology major) and CNAC conducted a needs assessment survey to ascertain what the community thought needed most attention. Despite the committee’s expectations, the survey found desegregating public accommodations unimportant. Instead, Black Cambridge residents cited jobs, housing, and schools as their greatest needs.

In the spring of 1963, after CNAC presented an extensive list of demands to the Cambridge City Council, essentially asking for what appeared in the earlier needs survey, CNAC and its allies held “nonviolent direct action training sessions” (Fitzgerald, 91) to prepare for demonstrations. At the end of March, demonstrations began at four locations. Richardson and others were arrested, but soon freed. The arrests numbered more than local resources could manage, so the accused were tried as a group in what became known as the “Penny Trial,” because the guilty were each fined one cent.

In May, the conflict’s momentum increased because police arrested teenage demonstrators roughly at the Dorset Theater and, in response, a crowd of protestors marched on the local jail. Two more teenagers were arrested, and soon the town boiled in civil conflict. Richardson telegraphed U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy for demonstrator protection, and two ministers asked for, but failed to get, immediate help from Maryland Gov. J. Millard Tawes. Eventually, a City Council request brought in the National Guard and martial law to make peace.

In Annapolis, Richardson and some Black and White leaders met with Tawes; little came from this meeting except Richardson’s demonstrating CNAC’s influence and letting state and federal officials witness the White Cambridge City Council’s failures.

In June, the Kennedy administration held mediation meetings with CNAC and other Cambridge civil rights leaders. In July, the City Council debated a charter amendment to require that public accommodations to be open to all. Richardson found their amendment proposal worthless because the White majority could easily use a referendum to undo the charter change. She also argued that Whites should not have the power to determine Blacks’ rights. The charter amendment passed, Governor Tawes lifted martial law, and withdrew the Guard, and, according to Richardson’s plan, CNAC resumed demonstrations the next day at a local restaurant. The subsequent all-night conflict included, according to a state police official, gunfire “almost on the scale of warfare” (Fitzgerald, 109). So, the National Guard returned four days later.

A week after martial law resumed, Richardson and the Guard commander met in a shop. When Richardson left the building to calm a physical conflict outside, a Guardsman, with fixed bayonet, tried to prevent her. She pushed the rifle away and continued on. An Associated Press photographer caught Richardson’s determined face as she pushed away the rifle. His photo showed her courage and determination. The famous photo still circulates today.

Attorney General Kennedy held a meeting in July; the attendees included Richardson, SNCC Chairman John Lewis, Maryland Attorney General Robert C. Murphy, and the National Guard commander, Gen. George M. Gelston. Cambridge city officials were not invited. Out of this meeting came the “Treaty of Cambridge,” containing measures CNAC had earlier proposed from the previous community needs survey. In return, CNAC pledged to stop demonstrations. Richardson agreed to ending them because she expected the city government would not keep the agreement and thereby invalidate it. Her role was widely and highly praised. In spite of that recognition, her role at the August 1963 March on Washington was limited, perhaps because March organizers feared controversy from her, including her belief that direct action should be carried out that day.

That summer, as Richardson expected, the White establishment organized a referendum petition to undo the earlier desegregation charter change. Richardson urged Black voters to boycott the referendum because the charter change granted rights already guaranteed by the Constitution. Voting on the charter change gave White voters unjust power over Blacks’ rights, according to Richardson. Fortunately, the referendum vote defeated the amendment.

In the summer of 1964, Richardson’s Eastern Shore civil rights work ended. She left CNAC and (having divorced Harry Richardson in 1960) moved to New York and married photographer Frank Dandridge. According to Fitzgerald, Richardson had intended to lead CNAC only so long as it needed her.

As this review has suggested, Gloria Richardson’s civil rights work was distinctive. The Cambridge movement was not connected with the older, larger civil rights organizations, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Richardson wanted an operation free of the traditional gradualist and male-dominated approach.

In the egalitarian Cambridge movement, she, as a woman, became a key figure. She moved to New York, but her influence in Cambridge remains. She was honored at a Cambridge banquet in August 2010. As a child, Victoria Jackson-Stanley, Cambridge’s first Black mayor (2008-2020), revered Richardson and has said, “Harriet Tubman and Gloria Richardson have been my idols since I can remember. They set the path for me.”


Joseph R. Fitzgerald, The Struggle is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation (Kentucky, 2018)



Jim Block taught English at Northfield Mount Hermon, a boarding school in Western Mass. He coached cross-country, and advised the newspaper and the debate society there. He taught at Marlborough College in England and Robert College in Istanbul. He and his wife, Penny, retired to Chestertown, Md. in 2014.