The Struggle Is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation

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. (Nov.)