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Gloria Richardson: Homemaker who found her place in streets, not the kitchen
By GREGORY P. KANE
NEW YORK- When 85-year-old Gloria Richardson-Dandridge emerges from her apartment in lower Manhattan, onlookers probably see just another slender, whitehaired woman.
But what they’ re really watching is the most famous civil rights activist they’ ve likely never heard of.
More than 40 years ago Richardson- Dandridge, then a homemaker and mother of two known as Gloria Richardson, led civil rights demonstrations in Cambridge, Md., during a time when a visit by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairman H. Rap Brown and an ensuing riot put it in the national spotlight.
Even today, Richardson-Dandridge remains an activist at heart.
“ Yes, you have to vote,” Richardson- Dandridge says.“ That’ s one of the tools in the basket. You have to go to court; that’ s another tool in the basket. Sometimes you have to use the third tool – direct action.”
The latter was a tool Richardson- Dandridge and her compatriots used effectively and often in the 1960s, when she was chairwoman of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee – and when Malcolm X singled her out in his famous 1963“ Message to the Grassroots” speech as one of the few local civil rights leaders who began to“ stir up our people at the grassroots level.”
She was at the Rev. Albert Cleage’ s church in Detroit when Malcolm gave that speech. She had gone to that city for meetings the traditional and more mainstream civil rights groups – the Urban League, the NAACP and Martin Luther King Jr.’ s Southern Christian Leadership Conference – were having.
But Richardson-Dandridge had never been quite in step with traditional civil rights leaders. She’ d felt that way ever since King had turned down the request of CNAC leaders to visit Cambridge. She soon found herself tuning out the speakers in Detroit.
“ A guy came up to me and said‘ You’ re in the wrong place,’” Richardson- Dandridge recalled.“ He told me to go to Rev. Cleage’ s church and that Malcolm would be speaking. That’ s when I first met Malcolm.”
Richardson-Dandridge is convinced that mainstream civil rights organizations had no more use for her or Malcolm than she did for them. She did indeed get an invitation to speak at the 1963 March on Washington, but remembers that the people who extended the invitation told her not to wear jeans and wanted her to speak for one minute.
When she was at the march, a reporter from Great Britain took her aside for an interview.
When she was done Bayard Rustin, the civil rights activist who handled logistics for the march, led her to the stage to take her seat.
Photo by Gregory P. Kane
“ When I got there they said‘ they took your chair away,’” Richardson-Dandridge recalled.
Today she feels it was perhaps just as well.
“ If I had spoken,” she said,“ I was going to tell( the marchers) to sit there until civil rights legislation was passed. I didn’ t even get to say that.”
Richardson-Dandridge remembers someone told her that she was treated that way because march leaders didn’ t want too many women on the stage. But she has another theory.
“ It was because of the whole attitude among traditional civil rights leaders about Cambridge,” she insists.
Those leaders supported the efforts to desegregate Cambridge, of course. But just a month earlier Richardson- Dandridge had called for blacks to boycott a referendum on a charter amendment that would have outlawed segregation in Cambridge.
The amendment was defeated, and some civil rights leaders accused her of betraying the movement. Yet 42 years later Richardson-Dandridge still believes she was right.
No group of people, she says, should be asked to put their basic rights up for a vote.
“ I wasn’ t going out there to get any votes for a referendum,” Richardson- Dandridge said.“ In this country, with referendums, the wrong side always has the most money.”
Richardson-Dandridge left Cambridge and moved to New York City when she remarried in 1965. She worked in several anti-poverty jobs before finding employment with the city’ s Department for Aging. She’ s now retired and living in an apartment building in lower Manhattan. •
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