Half century later, unsung civil rights hero feted

One of the most important figures in the civil-rights movement was stopped from speaking at the historic March on Washington and has spent the last half-century in virtual obscurity.

But a month before that 1963 march, it was Gloria Richardson, a full-time mother who kept guns in her house, seated next to U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy during the signing of the historic "Treaty of Cambridge."

As the leader of a group that became a national model for the likes of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the burgeoning black power movement, she was instrumental in brokering that agreement, which lay the groundwork for desegregation in an Eastern Shore town in Maryland.

On Wednesday, Richardson, 92, was honored at Cabrini College with the Ivy Young Willis and Martha Willis Dale Award for her years of public service, as part of the Radnor Township school's Unity Week events. She spoke about her unsung activist career, too.

Richardson was the on-the-ground tactical leader of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, or Cambridge Movement.

"I felt it was my responsibility," she said. "When they asked me [to lead the effort], I couldn't say no."

Before an audience of more than 100, Richardson chatted with her biographer, Joseph R. Fitzgerald, an assistant professor of history and political science whose  book  The Struggle Is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation is scheduled for publication late next year.

Unlike the SCLC and many other groups of the time, Cambridge was a secular movement; its members believed in armed self-defense; and its leader was a woman.

The larger movement "wanted to pray and change white folks' hearts," she said. "I didn't care about the hearts as long as they opened up the opportunities."

There lies much of the reason for Richardson's and the Cambridge Movement's relative obscurity, Fitzgerald said. Cambridge "disrupts the narrative" of a nonviolent movement led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other men.

Richardson and her fellow protesters focused on "bread and butter" issues like housing, jobs, and health care, Fitzgerald said. They already had the vote. Students from Swarthmore College and residents of Chester were among those who traveled to Cambridge to assist.

During a protest in 1963, a group of demonstrators was jailed and beaten by police. The community stood up and civil unrest engulfed the town. Government officials called in the National Guard, and negotiations among town officials, Kennedy, and local organizers began.

"Kennedy acknowledged that Richardson educated him a lot," said Peter B. Levy, chair of the history department at York College of Pennsylvania and author of Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge.

The treaty called for changes that included housing and school desegregation and the construction of affordable housing.

With that success behind her, Richardson was named one of several women to be honored at the March on Washington. She was escorted to the stage by the activist Bayard Rustin of West Chester, who was a lead organizer.

But just before Richardson was to speak from the stage, someone snatched the microphone from her hand.

"They were afraid of what I was going to say," Richardson said. She had been branded as a militant.

In 1964, Richardson, by then divorced, married the photographer Frank Dandridge and moved to New York.

In Manhattan, she worked with youth groups and the Department for the Aging. Her place as a role model in civil rights was tucked away in an often-frightening three years in Cambridge.

She didn't talk about those years, not even to family.

"I was scared all the time," Richardson said. "But when you believe in what you're doing, you get used to it."