The Struggle Is Eternal
Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation
-
- $28.99
-
- $28.99
Publisher Description
Many prominent and well-known figures greatly impacted the civil rights movement, but one of the most influential and unsung leaders of that period was Gloria Richardson. As the leader of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC), a multifaceted liberation campaign formed to target segregation and racial inequality in Cambridge, Maryland, Richardson advocated for economic justice and tactics beyond nonviolent demonstrations. Her philosophies and strategies—including her belief that black people had a right to self–defense—were adopted, often without credit, by a number of civil rights and black power leaders and activists.
The Struggle Is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation explores the largely forgotten but deeply significant life of this central figure and her determination to improve the lives of black people. Using a wide range of source materials, including interviews with Richardson and her personal papers, as well as interviews with dozens of her friends, relatives, and civil rights colleagues, Joseph R. Fitzgerald presents an all-encompassing narrative. From Richardson's childhood, when her parents taught her the importance of racial pride, through the next eight decades, Fitzgerald relates a detailed and compelling story of her life. He reveals how Richardson's human rights activism extended far beyond Cambridge and how her leadership style and vision for liberation were embraced by the younger activists of the black power movement, who would carry the struggle on throughout the late 1960s and into the 1970s.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fitzgerald, a history and political science professor, offers "a key to understanding a person who is often considered a historical enigma" in this minutely detailed biography of Gloria Richardson, the central figure in the Cambridge Movement for civil rights on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1962. Drawing on interviews with Richardson and her associates, Fitzgerald gives a straightforward chronological account of her life: born in Baltimore in 1922 to a prosperous and well-established family with "a tradition of race service" and community involvement, Richardson attended Howard University and married Harry Richardson (in 1948) and then Frank Dandridge (in 1964), after which she moved from Cambridge, Md., to New York. Given most emphasis, however, is Richardson's public, political life; she was deeply involved in a wide range of voter registration drives, boycotts, and desegregation initiatives she sometimes characterized as creative chaos, "the strategy of using various tactics to keep opponents off balance and confused during any given situation." She was usually closely aligned with the broad goals of the civil rights movement in the deep South, but at times diverged from them, as can be seen in her relationships with such different figures as Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and Adam Clayton Powell. This informative and accessible account is a useful addition to African-American studies.
