Peter Levy: Gloria Richardson and the Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland

When freedom riders arrived in Cambridge, MD, in the early winter of 1962, Gloria Richardson, a forty-year-old single mother, was busy working in her family store and raising her two teenage girls. Within less than three years, she had helped build one of the most vibrant social movements in the nation. She negotiated an unprecedented agreement with the Kennedy administration and won recognition as one of the “Negro Women Fighters for Freedom” at the 1963 March on Washington. Peter Levy, history and political science professor emeritus at York College, introduces us to this remarkable, though virtually unknown, activist’s life and ideas.