The Struggle Is Eternal

Abstract

Using an extensive body of sources, including more than thirty interviews, this biography details and analyzes the life of human rights activist Gloria Richardson, leader of the Cambridge movement in Maryland during the 1960s. Because her radical and uncompromising positions on black liberation were highly influential on the Black Power wave of the black liberation movement, this book depicts Richardson as a progenitor of Black Power who served in its leadership vanguard. This book also moves the geographic borders of Black Power’s roots south to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, detailing the Cambridge movement’s social justice campaign for more jobs and improvements in housing, health care, and education. Activists in Cambridge used the vote and armed self-defense to achieve their goals, and Black Power activists embraced these same strategies and tactics in the mid-1960s, seeing Richardson as a transitional human rights leader and role model. In addition to examining Richardson’s social, economic, and political philosophies—secular humanism, socioeconomic egalitarianism, and gender egalitarianism—and how they impacted her human rights activism, this book analyzes the gendered interpretation of Richardson’s activism and discusses how she was both similar to and different from other national civil rights leaders. Readers also get an insider’s view of her personal life before and after the 1960s, including her marriages, motherhood, and careers and her assessments of recent social justice movements.