Today,  we celebrate one of the long distance runners of the Civil Rights Movement, Gloria St. Clair Hayes Richardson.  A Baltimore, Maryland native who graduated from Howard University in 1942, Richardson gained national attention as the leader of the Cambridge Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the only adult affiliate of SNCC. Segregation and entrenched patterns of white supremacy met a formidable foe in Richardson, who over the course of her political career reached out to various ideological camps within the black liberation movement and organized labor.  You can hear Gloria Richardson’s reflections on the black freedom struggle in Cambridge at the 19:29 mark of the audio clip below. This speech was given at the University of Virginia in 1989 and sponsored by the Center for the Study of Civil Rights.  Enjoy.

1989 Conference on Civil Rights Studies