“Tell those Kennedy brothers they both can go to hell”--Gloria Richardson

Amazon review by a comrade:

I got to see Gloria Richardson at a discussion of Malcolm X at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture a few years back. As I recall, she was the only panelist who had known Malcolm X, and definitely the only one there worth listening to.

I’m glad to see more biographies coming out about Black leaders, especially women, like Richardson, Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer.

Today middle class leftists think that pro-Democratic Party rallies "against Trump" are a mass movement. But everything that Trump has done, and worse, has been done by the Democratic Party (see The Clintons' Anti-Working-Class Record (Why Washington fears working people?)).

Richardson’s first protest activity was when she was a student at Howard University; boycotting and picketing stores that wouldn’t hire Black workers. Earlier, in 1937, a union organizing drive in Cambridge, MD made Richardson admire her grandfather’s oratory, but she disagreed with him and supported Blacks joining the union. This was the period when the CIO, a group of unions that had broken with the AFL, was organizing unskilled workers by industry, unlike the AFL, which organized skilled workers by trade. Although the CIO didn’t make a total break with racist practices, unlike most of the AFL, they organized Black workers. The results both in wage gains and self-confidence were enormous for these workers. The best book that tells this story is Labor's Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936-55.

When the US entered World War II, the Stalinized Communist Party supported Roosevelt’s attempts to impose a wage freeze, strike-ban, and an end to dissent about racism in the military. The failure to totally do this is illustrated in the Art Preis book, especially by the description of the coal miners’ strike of 1943. The failure to stem the fight against the attempt to “postpone” the fight against racism is well documented in Fighting Racism in World War II, which, although it is taken from the pages of the ‘Militant,’ frequently was based on reporting carried in the Black press across the country. Gloria Richardson certainly would have been aware of some of these struggles.

After the war in Europe and against Japan was over, tens of thousands of American GIs considered that their war was over and demanded to come home (see “1945: When U.S, Troops said No!” in New International no. 7: Opening Guns of World War III: Washington's Assault on Iraq). This enabled the Chinese Revolution to win and also led to a postwar strike wave. But the hated policies of the Stalinists made easier the imposition of McCarthyism, which had a devastating effect on the labor movement. It was not as effective in destroying the fight for civil rights, although it certainly made it more difficult; the FBI’s hounding of Dr. King is just the best-known example.

Despite the fact that its framework is the life of Dr. King, the 3-vol ‘America in the King Years’ by Taylor Branch is essential for background on the Civil Rights/Black Power movements. Branch used a wide variety of sources for his work, including the ‘Militant’ and the ‘National Guardian.’

You can find the “Message to the Grass Roots” November 1963 Detroit speech by Malcolm X that Gloria Richardson heard (and that mentions her) in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements.

My problem with this generally excellent book is too much academic jargon, and too few quotes from Richardson. I don’t doubt that Joseph R. Fitzgerald does a good job of summarizing her views; I’d just prefer hearing them direct.

One doesn’t need research on facial gestures to know why Robert Kennedy was uncomfortable with Richardson. Would a smile have made the difference? Robert Penn Warren (mentioned in the Fitzgerald book for an interview with Richardson) in a hostile interview with Malcolm X wrote that his “face suddenly breaks into his characteristic wide, leering, merciless smile….” Smile or not, white liberals knew when they were being barely tolerated, and they didn’t like the feeling! (Today this interview is mostly known by people who read the article written in response to it--“Two Interviews,” by Jack Barnes, who interviewed Malcolm X for the Young Socialist [see Malcolm X Talks to Young People: Speeches in the United States, Britain, and Africa]).

Richardson and the Cambridge movement didn’t have a commitment to non-violence in principle. They also raised economic demands which King didn’t do for a few more years. And their goal was desegregation, not “integration,” which didn’t seem either possible or desirable at the time. While some at the time and today tried to make a big distinction between the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the distinctions were not always that great, and there was a lot of overlap. The real distinctions were in degree of militancy, class outlook, where to find allies, and self-defense. Some of the Black Power movement, like CORE, became focused on “black capitalism.” Dr. King didn’t like capitalism, but his framework was always reform and work within the Democratic Party.

Malcolm X was attracted to the revolutionary socialism of the Cuban and Algerian Revolutions (the latter in its early years) and spoke three times at the Militant Labor Forum in addition to other collaboration with the Socialist Workers Party (see Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power).

There were people from both the Civil Rights and Black Power wings of the movement involved in the fight against the war in Vietnam. This was especially highlighted at the April 15, 1967 march in New York, headed by a large Black contingent, which both Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael spoke at. (See Out Now: A Participant's Account of the Movement in the United States Against the Vietnam War).

While the online index for the ‘Militant’ (something I work on) only goes back to 1979 at this point, other search features go back to the beginning (1928). I’ll just give a few of the references I found there to Gloria Richardson. In the August 19, 1963, issue, which was sold (and sold out!) at the March on Washington, an article appeared on a speech she gave in San Francisco. One paragraph reads:

“The Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee has proposed a program to benefit both white and Negro workers. Mrs. Richardson listed some of the major points: A proposed federal housing project should be built by a local contractor hiring an integrated work crew. Special classes to be instituted to train Negro and white apprentices. Integrate the school system and invite a special task force of outside teachers in to help raise the low standards of the formerly segregated schools.”

From the ‘Militant,’ September 2, 1963:
“It was very moving when A. Philip Randolph paid tribute to the women who have played a heroic role in the civil rights revolution. He singled out Mrs. Daisy Bates of Little Rock; Mrs. Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Ala., who touched off the historic bus boycott there by refusing to move to the back; Mrs. Herbert Lee, whose husband was shot in cold blood by a Mississippi racist for supporting the voter-registration drive; Diane Nash Bevel, a courageous young Deep South rights fighter; and Mrs. Gloria Richardson, the unflinching leader of the embattled Cambridge, Md., movement, which is affiliated to SNCC.”

The 'Militant' didn’t comment on the fact that none of the women got to speak, but it commented on the censoring of John Lewis’ speech, and ran the original version in a later issue.

From the June 7, 1965 issue:
“NEW YORK — Civil rights militants Fannie Lou Hamer of Mississippi and Gloria Richardson Dandridge, formerly of Cambridge, Md., were among the featured speakers at the memorial meeting for Malcolm X held at the Rockland Palace Ballroom here May 26. Malcolm’s widow, Betty Shabazz, who is expecting Malcolm’s fifth child this summer, was present and greeted the audience of some 500 persons.

“Fannie Lou Hamer said Malcolm was “one of the greatest men I ever met because he was one of the only men I ever met who had the guts to tell the truth.” Gloria Richardson Dandridge, who led the famous Cambridge Nonviolent Action movement until she married and moved to New York last year, said that unlike those people who disliked some sides of Malcolm ‘my admiration was for the whole man.’ She liked the direction in which Malcolm was moving, she said, and for ‘White America with its elaborate myths it was a more dangerous Malcolm who was developing.’ He was cut down, she said, when it only remained for him to ‘fashion the political weapon oriented toward the black people and necessary for our freedom.’

“Among the other speakers who appeared were Harlem rent strike leader Jesse Gray, comedian Godfrey Cambridge and actor-producer Ossie Davis. The meeting was chaired by writer Sylvester Leaks.”