A first-class citizen does not beg for freedom. A first-class citizen does not plead to the white power-structure to give him something that the whites have no power to give or take away. Human rights are human rights, not white rights.

Gloria Richardson was born on May 6, 1922 in Baltimore, Maryland. She died on July 15, 2021.

Richardson led the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (a SNCC affiliate) in Cambridge, Maryland to fight against institutional racism.

Mrs. Gloria Richardson, head of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, pushes a National Guardsman’s bayonet aside as she moves among a crowd in Cambridge, Maryland, on July 21, 1963. (AP photo)

Learn More

The Struggle is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation by Joseph R. Fitzgerald (University Press of Kentucky, 2020)

Gloria Richardson’s article in Freedomways, 1964 on the CRMvet.org website.

2013 interview on Democracy Now! with Gloria Richardson.

Chapter by Gloria Richardson in Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC.

Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland by Peter Levy.

An overview of the struggle in Cambridge 1963 at CRMvet.org.

“Cambridge Town” a song by Joe DeFilippo, a Baltimore songwriter and retired social studies teacher. Performed by the R. J. Phillips Band. Watch a video of the song below.