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."Gloria Hayes Richardson: Leader of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC)." Westside Gazette.Dixon, Janelle Harris, How Gloria Richardson's Look of Righteous Indignation Became a Symbol of No Retreat, Smithsonian, February 9, 2022 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. The young Hayes pushed against what her parents considered to be respectable behavior for girls from well-to-do families. Her independence and persistence were later displayed also in her civil rights work. While aware of her family privileges, she realized that her college degree, her family's social position, and their navigation of the color line in Cambridge did not provide her or her family with true protection. Her grandparents always taught her to value people for their actions and not for their socioeconomic status.
The Hayes family was educated and relatively affluent, but still had suffered racial injustice. Most importantly, Gloria's father John Hayes died of a heart attack due to the lack of nearby medical care accessible to blacks. It forced the young woman to realize that racism was a matter of life and death.
Black males had been able to vote in Maryland since emancipation after the American Civil War. (Women were added when the 19th constitutional amendment became effective in 1920.) African Americans in the city of Baltimore were generally segregated into housing in one of five wards, the Second Ward. 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. When she became co-chair of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC), she began to identify goals beyond desegregation. She sought economic and social justice in housing, education, job opportunity, and health care. While co-chairing CNAC, Richardson gained insight into who to trust in the process of negotiating the expansion of rights of the Black community in Cambridge.
During her early activism, Richardson was arrested three times. When she was first arrested, Judge W. Laird described her tactics as "a disgrace to her family's name", attempting to shame her into silence. She continued to fight back harder. She was known for verbal attacks, describing national leaders as presenting "meaningless smiles" due to their failure to gain substantial change.
Cambridge movement
In December 1961, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) sent Reginald Robinson and William Hansen to Cambridge to organize civil rights actions. SNCC had been contacted by activists in the city. The two young men started sit-ins in February to protest segregated facilities. They targeted movie theaters, bowling alleys, and restaurants. Donna Richardson, Gloria's daughter, was among students who supported the demonstrators. Richardson and Yolanda Sinclair, also mother of a protester, were among parents who wanted to show their support for these actions.Women In The Civil Rights Movement
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. This was a result of weeks of coordinated planning by Cambridge's Black youths. It was viewed as the beginning of Cambridge's civil rights movement. Initially, when Richardson wanted to get involved with the protests, her daughter Donna sent Richardson home until Richardson could guarantee that she would demonstrate nonviolently, as the other individuals had been trained to do. It was a commitment Richardson could not make at the time; therefore, she focused on working with the Black community's secretive and highly efficient intelligence-sharing network, known as the "grapevine". Richardson provided information to CIG and SNCC about how Cambridge's political system operated and the opinions of the Black community. Her daughter acted as a spark in Richardson's activist journey. Through witnessing various demonstrations in support of her daughter's activism, Richardson struggled to remain silent in the face of counter-protestors that mocked the non-violent Civil Rights groups. Richardson was determined to involve herself in these social justice issues. At the time, she ran her family's business, but she decided to become a student again. She attended workshops, and special sessions where activists methodically trained for non-violence, to withstand the hatred of mobs, who often used slurs and demeaning acts to prevent peaceful assembly. This was supposed to be secured by the Constitution.
The March and April demonstrations resulted in a large caseload for the local court system where Richardson and other defendants were tried together. Richardson was one of more than 50 people who stood trial for charges of disorderly conduct. This became known as The Penny Trial and demonstrated how the Cambridge movement disrupted white elites' racial comfort zones. On the issue of violence, Richardson had the outlook that violence is not necessarily the answer, but she does not condemn violence as she believes it is a residue of frustration. She once said that "revolts seemed to be the only thing that America understands, and the nation's racial problems made revolts unavoidable".
In June 1962, Richardson was asked to help organize the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC), the first adult-led affiliate of SNCC. She became its official spokesperson. The organization had initially formed in March of that year. After CNAC canvassed African-American communities in a survey, they expanded the goals to work for economic equality: to improve housing, education, employment, and healthcare. Many blacks struggled with low wages or unemployment.
The Cambridge movement would be one of the first campaigns to focus on economic rights rather than putting the focus solely on civil rights. Richardson would also be one of the first leaders to publicly question nonviolence as a tactic. Due to the change in focus of the movement, protests demanded both economic and social equality as Richardson wanted to target discrimination and inequity in employment, poor wages, inferior schools, health care, and segregated facilities.
Richardson said in a later interview on why she was committed to CNAC's leadership reflecting the community. "The one thing we did was to emphasize that while you should be educated, that education, degrees, college degrees were not essential [here]. If you could articulate the need, if you knew what that need was, if you were aware of the kinds of games that white folk play that was the real thing".
In the summer of 1962, CNAC focused on voter registration and an effort to get out the vote. They wanted to replace state senator Frederick Malkus, who had opposed legislation that would have allowed additional industries into Dorchester County, Maryland. The lack of industrial jobs limited opportunities for the African-American community.