Gloria Richardson

King.

Um, and going back to the historical drama, um, we know the famous picture of Gloria Richardson looking like she is squaring up with the National Guard as she's pushing a soldier's bayonet with the look of disgust.

She was a major leader in the Cambridge movement in Maryland and an unconventional leader.

A woman, for one, uh, for self-defense, a Howard grad, and she criticized major civil rights leaders.

One of the things that I love about this book, it's, it concoms- it g- ugh, it encompasses women of various generations.

Mm-hmm.

And so what's interesting about Gloria Richardson, she comes to the movement because her teenage daughters are sitting in and getting arrested.

So she's in her 40s when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee comes to Cambridge, Maryland, and she soon becomes a leader of people of various ages, of various kind of political orientations, and she's immersing herself in movement.

And these women have these moments that are so, they're so clear as to what the problem is.

When Gloria Richardson, the head of the Cambridge-Maryland activism movement says, "I don't care about sitting next to a white person in a restaurant.

I want people in my community to have jobs to even afford a restaurant." And Rosa Parks is asking, is moving this effort to not just have humanely segregated buses, but to have an entire city that no longer separates people in order to demean them.

This is the layers of it that I think why we have to think about s- the ways that systems are working towards such a grave level of dehumanization, that you have to kind of show its granular parts in order for us to really understand what these systems were about.

You might not know the answer.

The answer may not become available to you, but the process and the struggle and the deliberation and the discernment is its own reward.

And I think I wasn't thinking about those things when I wrote this book when, but when I look at all of these women's lives, and some are able to get to ninety-nine years old, and in the case of Gloria Richardson, and I interviewed her granddaughter and her daughter, and they always talked about how she was always learning something.

She always wanted to know what was happening.

Well, so who was, who didn't remember, who thought the day didn't go well?

[laughs] Well, um, one of the people honored on stage is Gloria Richardson, and she-

Mm

... is the head of the Cambridge-Maryland Nonviolent Action Committee, and by August 1963, she has been through it.

We know that this system is killing us in, in, in, at various speeds, and we are going to choose a rapid death if, if it means for freedom." You know, and so all of this is to say that I think that when, for me, when I try to write these stories, I try to, to the extent that I can, which is impossible to do it fully-

Right

... is like really immerse myself in like, well, what did you actually see over the course of your lifetime, and what did you imagine, um, a big ask is? And so for Gloria Richardson, you know, an integrated restaurant i- i- is insignificant because that's not going to get people out of poverty and out of the desolation that they're feeling because they will never be a full citizen.

Um, I wanna talk about Rosa Parks-

what she did, what she accomplished.

Because when you know Gloria Richardson, you know your own

power.

Knowing your own power was exactly what Gloria Richardson was all about.

A fierce freedom fighter whose scholars credit with being the first woman to be the unquestioned leader of a major civil rights movement in the country.

She just forced us to be better and she was so unafraid in who she was.

That's Governor Wes Moore.

He's the governor of Maryland, Gloria Richardson's home state, and he's the only Black governor in the country.

about the role of organizations.

Someone I write about, like Gloria Richardson, she, from the very beginning, when she enters the movement through her teenage daughters, she's asking questions like, is integration in restaurants as important as getting jobs back in our communities and our quality of housing? What exactly are we talking about? And I think that A number of these women, even the beloved Rosa Parks, you know, at various moments, their persona non grata because they're pushing against this idea of what leadership is supposed to look like and how it's supposed to exist.

And so, you know, part of this book is part of a challenge that I took up a few years ago in terms of how do you write the history of civil rights without centering King? as both the model and the standard of what civil rights is.

And once you kind of step away from that premise, you open yourself up to learning about the various possibilities and models of leadership.