In Memoriam: “Glorious Gloria’s” Fearless Leadership of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee

In our research, we come across thousands of courageous individuals who dedicated their lives toward realizing the dream of a more just society whose stories deserve greater recognition. In this section, we will celebrate the lives of those who have recently passed by exploring their less-recognized contributions, presenting a fuller view of their impact on the freedom struggle.

By Brynn Raymond, Research Assistant

At the time of civil rights activist Gloria Richardson’s death on 15 July of this year, she had been crowned with many appellations including “Glorious Gloria,” “the lady general of civil rights,” and, more recently, “the queen of side-eye”—the last of which stemmed from her stern facial expressions in photographs taken during her 1962–1964 tenure as chairman of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC) in Cambridge, Maryland. In one such photograph, Richardson, clad in her characteristic outfit of a crisp white blouse tucked into dungarees, brushes aside a National Guardsman’s bayonet-tipped rifle with a look of annoyance on her face. Yet, Richardson remains relatively unknown and uncelebrated despite her unique position as one of few women to lead a local civil rights struggle in the 1960s. Although Richardson’s self-described “radical and mule-ish” approach made her unpopular with white segregationists and African-American moderates alike, under her leadership, CNAC prefigured the Black Power movement of the later 1960s. Richardson’s grassroots organizational approach prioritized the material and economic needs of her community, and she advocated for a modified nonviolent philosophy that encouraged self-defense, which made CNAC unique even as the organization also drew on tactics of the larger freedom movement—including, perhaps most notably, the use of music to de-escalate tense confrontations and unify demonstrators.

Richardson’s grassroots approach enabled the residents of Cambridge’s Black neighborhood, the Second Ward, to directly influence the structure and priorities of CNAC. Richardson had become chairman of the organization when her daughter started demonstrating with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), after which Richardson requested permission from SNCC to create CNAC, an affiliate organization for parents and adults. Her first actions as chairman were informed by her sociology degree (1942) from Howard University. She identified “whoever it was people looked up to, whether it was a man or woman” in each section of the Second Ward, and these twelve to fourteen individuals comprised her executive board. Working with students from surrounding colleges including Howard, Maryland State College, and Swarthmore, Richardson then distributed survey cards that asked residents to answer detailed questions about their housing conditions, employment, and overall priorities. The results showed a desperate need for better housing and revealed a sixty percent unemployment rate in the Black community. Richardson quickly centered the economic and material concerns of those most in need. As she stated, “it became clear that public accommodations was really at the bottom of the list,” noting that since the vast majority of community members were instead primarily concerned with better housing, employment opportunities, and health care, “we structured the demands around that” in negotiations with Cambridge city officials.

As tensions escalated throughout 1962 and reached a boiling point in the summer of 1963, white city officials and other civil rights organizations alike critiqued CNAC’s refusal to adhere strictly to a nonviolent philosophy. Although Richardson herself believed in the practicality of nonviolence, she did not censure the Second Ward residents who responded to the carloads of white groups who threw Molotov cocktails and shot at Black homes almost nightly with answering gunfire. This led to sharp reprisals from city officials, and Mayor Calvin W. Mowbray blamed Richardson for CNAC being “about as nonviolent as the Normandy beachhead on D-Day.” CNAC demonstrations themselves remained largely peaceful, and yet escalating tensions and commonplace post-demonstration shootouts led Governor J. Millard Tawes to call up the Maryland National Guard on 14 June 1963 and again on 12 July 1963, at which point troops declared modified martial law and remained in Cambridge for over a year. Finally, after eighteen months of demonstrations and with the personal mediation of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, CNAC representatives and white city officials signed a 23 July 1963 truce agreement known as the “Treaty of Cambridge.” CNAC agreed to halt demonstrations indefinitely, and the city agreed in turn to increase employment opportunities, begin school desegregation, build a public housing project, appoint a biracial committee to continue monitoring the city’s progress, and adopt a charter amendment to desegregate public accommodations. However, the city charter amendment remained subject to recall by referendum, meaning that whether public accommodations would be desegregated was left to a vote. Though Cambridge’s Black citizens had access to the ballot, Richardson urged a boycott of the vote. She called the referendum “unconstitutional, illegal and immoral” and instead argued that it was “an attempt to make the constitutional rights of the Negro people, as citizens of Cambridge, subject to the possible prejudices of the white majority.” Many civil rights leaders attempted to change Richardson’s mind, including Martin Luther King, Jr., and representatives of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but she held firm in her principled stance and dismissed the NAACP as having “misjudged the Cambridge movement” due to being “too class conscious” to champion working-class issues. 

Despite the ways in which CNAC was unique in its priorities and methods, the organization still drew on tactics of the larger freedom movement, including, perhaps most notably, a ubiquitous use of music. In one newspaper account, an onlooker told a reporter that Cambridge residents knew a demonstration was about to occur “if they start singing.” Two specific moments exemplify how freedom songs functioned in the broader Cambridge movement. First, during one demonstration, CNAC activists who were engaging in a sit-in at a restaurant called Dizzyland were pushed out of the establishment by the proprietor, Robert Fehsenfeld. When activists’ only response was to kneel in front of the restaurant and begin singing, Fehsenfeld hit one of the men demonstrating and “broke a raw egg on the man’s head, smeared it about his face, and threw a milkshake container of water on him.” Newspaper accounts note that “the man, 25-year-old Edward Dickerson of Cambridge, continued singing the theme of the integrationists, ‘We Shall Overcome.’” Dickerson’s act of singing in the face of violence, so common throughout the civil rights movement, demonstrates how music could amount to a refusal to engage, matching an act of aggression with an expression of hope and fearlessness. Music was used to keep a sense of calm purpose in the face of white violence and to protect already tense situations from further escalation.

Secondly, music unified individual demonstrators into an immovable collective. In May 1964, for example, approximately three hundred activists joined CNAC to protest segregationist Alabama governor George C. Wallace, who was in town campaigning for votes in the upcoming Democratic presidential primary. The Baltimore Evening Sun described the demonstrators pouring out of the local Elks Hall, and “as though at a signal they formed lines twelve abreast across the street, linked their arms and began chanting, ‘Freedom, oh, freedom now.’” When met with the National Guard, the CNAC activists simply “sat down and kept on singing” with Richardson in the lead. Guardsmen started arresting people, but the activists clung together in one “groaning, sweating, singing, limp human pyramid,” and as troops dragged them away one by one, “the demonstrators sang and shouted, and the Guardsmen cursed.” In such instances, music served as a tool to cohere individuals into a unified mass, keeping fear at bay and encouraging a passive resistance to police attempts to peel solitary individuals from the collective.

During the summer of 1964, Richardson married photographer Frank Dandridge and proclaimed that she was “retiring from civil rights entirely.” This was not entirely true, however, for although she no longer led CNAC, she went on to work for organizations including Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited and the National Council for Negro Women. Yet, even after a tenure of only two years as the leader of CNAC, Richardson influenced the trajectory of the freedom movement. She prefigured the Black Power movement of the later 1960s with her blend of methods that combined tactics of the broader civil rights movement, particularly the use of music, with her own convictions regarding the importance of community-dictated priorities and a modified nonviolent philosophy that encouraged self-defense. Richardson’s leadership style inspired many students who participated in the Cambridge movement, including a young Stokely Carmichael, who remarked, “Cambridge was crucial, really, a turning point in the struggle.”  

Richardson continued to advocate for radical change until her death at the age of ninety-nine, including during the 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd. In an interview with the Washington Post less than a year prior to her death, she reflected on how her leadership of CNAC contained lessons for today’s activists, stating, “We marched until the governor called martial law. That’s when you get their attention. Otherwise, you’re going to keep protesting the same things another 100 years from now.” When asked for other words of advice for young activists today, Richardson responded, “Fight for what you believe in, but stop being so nice.”