Gloria Richardson

Gloria Richardson Dandridge (born Gloria St. Clair Hayes; May 6, 1922 – July 15, 2021) was an American civil rights activist best known as the leader of the Cambridge movement, a civil rights action in the early 1960s in Cambridge, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore. Recognized as a major figure in the Civil Rights Movement, she was one of the signatories to "The Treaty of Cambridge", signed in July 1963 with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and state and local officials. It was an effort at reconciliation and commitment to change after a riot the month before.

At the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Richardson and five other women were honored by being seated on the stage at the Lincoln Memorial, but none of the women were invited to speak to the crowd. The next year Richardson moved to New York City, where she worked locally in Harlem on civil rights and economic development.

Early life and education

Gloria St. Clair Hayes was born in 1922 to John and Mable (née St. Clair) Hayes in Baltimore, Maryland, the largest city in the state. Her mother was part of the affluent St. Clair family of Cambridge, Maryland, which owned and operated a successful grocery store and funeral home. Her family was also involved in politics. Her maternal grandfather was Herbert M. St. Clair, a businessman, real estate investor, and city council member in Cambridge, Maryland for 50 years, serving from 1912 to 1946. One of Mable's brothers, Fredrick D. St. Clair was a lawyer in the state of Maryland. Her ancestors had been free people of color since before the Civil War. During the constraints of the Great Depression, the Hayes family moved to Cambridge, where Mable had grown up.

From a young age, Gloria had a strong personality nurtured by her parents and maternal grandparents. She developed a strong sense of community and started to form her own views on such human rights issues as racism. She attended a neighborhood public school. Her parents encouraged her to speak up and to be comfortable in front of large groups, such as performing at Sunday school programs. Her grandparents always taught her to value people for their actions and not for their socioeconomic status. Within that ward, blacks had built up substantial religious and business communities. They still lived under Maryland state Jim Crow laws and customs in the city at large.

Hayes earned a B.A. in sociology in 1942 from Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, DC. She became involved in social activism as a student protesting with others at the Peoples Drug store near campus because the store refused to hire Black workers. In college, she also picketed a segregated Woolworth's store in the capital, where blacks were not allowed to have lunch at the in-store counter. People were surprised by her leadership and her status as a woman from an elite African-American family. They were used to dealing with poor black women who were less outspoken.

Through her experiences in Washington, she realized that even 50 years of Black participation in the legal system had limited results. She could see that Cambridge was still highly segregated, and learned that Blacks suffered one of the highest unemployment rates for that size city.

Return to Cambridge After Hayes returned to Cambridge after college, she married Harry Richardson and began to explore civil rights. When the city government hired black people as social workers, they were to serve only black clients in the all-black ward. After she was passed over for a social worker position in the "black" ward, she decided to focus on her family and civic work. In an interview with Robert Penn Warren for his book Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), Richardson said that in Cambridge, blacks were "the last hired and first fired", a phrase applicable to minorities in other places as well.

When she divorced from Harry Richardson, she was a mother with two daughters. She worked at a pharmacy and grocery store owned by her family in a predominantly Black community. Richardson has said that her motherhood sparked her activist role.

Richardson held a formal office in the Cambridge Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (CNCC). She also served as an adult adviser to the CNCC. At one point she was the only Black woman to head a local civil rights agency. Richardson and Yolanda Sinclair, also mother of a protester, were among parents who wanted to show their support for these actions.

In 1961, a Freedom Ride came to Cambridge. The black city council member had attempted to discourage the campaign by insisting that the city was already desegregated. At first Richardson rarely participated in civil disobedience, because she could not accept the original SNCC nonviolence rules.

By 1962, the Civil Rights movement was picking up steam around the country. Students attempted to desegregate public facilities in Cambridge. At the time, the city had a population of around 11,000, of whom about one-third were Black. The initial protests, including picketing and sit-ins, were peaceful. Although White supremacists attacked demonstrators, police arrested the protestors. The protests did not yield results until Richardson was chosen to lead the movement and CNAC.

On January 13, 1962, the city's Black community held its first civil rights demonstration of the 1960s. Dozens of Black high school students, including Richardson's daughter Donna, joined a number of young men and women from Baltimore's Civic Interest Group (CIG) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and two members of the SNCC.

Richardson continued to pay attention and stay engaged in current politics and social justice events. In a 2021 interview with The Washington Post, Richardson recounted that she watched as outrage over the murder of George Floyd prompted thousands to take to the streets. She was frustrated by what seemed like a lack of progress since her own work in the 1960s. in a review for The Journal of Popular Culture, Ray Schuck writes, "When Gloria Richardson mentions how she and others put red pepper on their legs to deter attack dogs, you understand the enormity of the struggle for equality".

In 2017, the state of Maryland honored her legacy by dedicating February 11 as "Gloria Richardson Day". This made Richardson the only living person in Maryland to have an official day declared by a governor in their honor. Although Richardson was not able to travel as planned to Cambridge's historic Bethel AME Church to be recognized in person, she spoke to the packed church in a live remote broadcast from her apartment. Five months later, a fireside chat was facilitated by Kisha Petticolas, the co-founder of the Eastern Shore Network for Change (ESNC), at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay Resort in Cambridge. Richardson was a featured speaker at the Reflection's banquet, where her remarks "brought 300 guests to their feet in a sustained standing ovation".