Xing Wu
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Ms Richardson was invited to speak at the March on Washington in August 1963, though organizers hesitated when she showed up in her signature jeans. She compromised on a denim skirt. Shortly before Dr King’s remarks, she rose to the microphone to speak, but was cut off after saying “hello”, apparently out of fear that she would say something off-message.
Protests in Cambridge continued into 1964, but out of deference to the Attorney General, whose brother, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Ms. Richardson ended her street level activism. She became the co-founder of an organization, Act, which pushed for systemic change and economic justice in the North.
Ms. Richardson was encouraged by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which not only enforced desegregation, but also fought discrimination in employment and education. At that point, she had decided to take a step back from the Cambridge movement, partly because of the stress but also because she feared becoming an icon – better, she said, than new ones. leaders take over.
And they did. His departure coincided with the arrival of a new generation of activists like Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers, who moved beyond the reformist efforts of Dr King and others to embrace the kind of change Ms Richardson had pointed out.
“They saw Ms. Richardson as the kind of hard-line black radical leader they should emulate,” Joseph R. Fitzgerald, associate professor of history at Cabrini University in Radnor, Pa., And author of “The Struggle Is Eternal : Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation, â€said in an interview. “She showed that you shouldn’t be satisfied with half a loaf of bread. You should take it all.
Gloria St. Clair Hayes was born in Baltimore on May 6, 1922 and moved with her family to Cambridge when she was 6 years old. Her father, John Hayes, owned a pharmacy and her mother, Mabel St. Clair, was a housewife.
The St. Clairs were one of the richest and most influential black families in Maryland. Her grandfather, Herbert St. Clair, was the first black member of Cambridge City Council.
