Pages from the Archives
FACING DOWN RACISTS
St. Clair was a native of Cambridge and the first cousin of Gloria Richardson, a homemaker who would go on to lead civil rights protests in this city.
“ My cousin suggested that the civil rights protesters organize in Cambridge,” Richardson, now Gloria Richardson Dandridge, says,“ because it was totally segregated there.”
H. Rap Brown in handcuffs / Associated Press Photo
Richardson-Dandridge says that SNCC left several organizers behind in Cambridge. Soon the CNAC was formed with St. Clair as the chairman.
low; black unemployment was high. To address these inequities and to desegregate the city, the city’ s blacks formed the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, which was cut from the activist mold of SNCC.
“ I got involved in the movement because I was supposed to,” says Enez Grubb, who joined CNAC as a high-school student.“ I’ m sure, like most African Americans when we were growing up and studying slavery, we thought there was something we could have done if we lived back then.”
CNAC also received an assist from President John F. Kennedy’ s administration – which responded not as much to the degrading situations blacks in Cambridge faced, but to the potential for bad public relations.
Diplomats from newly independent African countries traveling between New York and Washington, D. C. found themselves subject to Maryland’ s Jim Crow laws once they crossed the Mason- Dixon Line.
Many restaurants in Maryland refused to serve the diplomats because they were black.
Someone in Kennedy’ s administration – then locked in a battle with the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of Third World countries – figured that this was not a good thing. So federal officials – as well as civil rights activists – pressured Maryland Gov. J. Millard Tawes to push for passage of a state public accommodations law that would force those restaurants to desegregate.
But with that effort civil rights activists were just warming up.
Some of them decided to go on“ freedom rides” to stage sit-ins at segregated restaurants. Soon they turned their attention to restaurants along a major thoroughfare on the Eastern Shore.
After several protestors were arrested in the seaside town of Crisfield – Tawes’ hometown – Frederick St. Clair decided it was time activists turned their attention to Cambridge.
But St. Clair’ s duties as a bail bondsman who had to get protesters out of jail made him leave the post. Richardson-Dandridge became the new chairman.
Most of those protesters, Richardson- Dandridge says, were high-school students. One was William Jarman, who participated in demonstrations in 1962 before he left Cambridge to attend college.
“ We would march down Pine Street, come down Muir Street,” Jarman remembers during a recent drive through Cambridge.
As he approached of Poplar Street and the famous( and, perhaps, appropriately named) Race Street – which at one time divided black Cambridge from white Cambridge – Jarman’ s thoughts lapsed back to a troubled time.
“ It was on these corners where things were thrown at you,” he says.“ Once the word got out that African Americans were demanding something, you had this mobilization of those who didn’ t like blacks.”
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