Judy Richardson | |
|---|---|
 Judy Richardson at Choices at Brown University, April 2012 | |
| Alma mater | Swarthmore College |
| Occupation(s) | Activist, filmmaker |
| Known for | Students for a Democratic Society, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee |
Judy Richardson is an American documentary filmmaker and civil rights activist. She was Distinguished Visiting Lecturer of Africana Studies at Brown University. [1]
Richardson was born in Tarrytown, New York. [2] She attended Washington Irving Jr. High. [3] Richardson entered Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1962 on a full scholarship. [4] [5]
During Richardson's freshman year at Swarthmore in 1962–1963, she joined the Swarthmore Political Action Committee (SPAC), a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) affiliate. She graduated from Swarthmore in 1966. [6]
Richardson was an early participant with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1963 to 1966. During her time with SNCC, Ella Baker was her mentor. [7] [8] In 1963, Richardson traveled on weekends, with other Swarthmore SPAC volunteers, to assist the Cambridge, Maryland community in desegregating public accommodations. [5] [6] [9] The Cambridge Movement was led by Gloria Richardson with assistance from SNCC field secretaries, including Baltimore native Reggie Robinson. [6] In 1963, Richardson joined a SNCC organized sit-in at a Toddle House in Atlanta. [8] Richardson eventually joined the SNCC staff at the national office in Atlanta, where she worked closely with James Forman, Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson, and Julian Bond. [5] [6]
Richardson relocated to Mississippi during 1964 Freedom Summer after the SNCC national office moved there. [6] She worked with SNCC during their effort that summer to register African American voters in Mississippi, joining Amzie Moore, Bob Moses, Curtis Hayes, and Hollis Watkins. [7] [8] Richardson also worked in SNCC's projects in Lowndes County, Alabama (with Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture and others) and in Southwest Georgia. [6] Richardson became Julian Bond's office manager in 1965, during his successful first campaign for the Georgia House of Representatives. [6] [7] She also organized a northern Freedom School, bringing together young activists from SNCC's northern and southern projects. [6]
In 1968, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Richardson and other former SNCC staffers founded Drum and Spear Bookstore in Washington, D.C. It became the largest Black bookstore in the country, with Richardson as the children's editor of Drum and Spear Press. [6] Richardson said about the bookstore's name that the drum symbolized "communications within the diaspora" while the spear suggested "whatever else might be necessary for the liberation of the people." [10]
In 1970, Howard University's Journal of Negro Education published Richardson's essay on racism in Black children's books. [6]
Richardson attended Columbia University and received her degree from Antioch College in General Studies. [11] In 2012, Richardson received an honorary degree from Swarthmore and spoke at the 2012 commencement ceremony. [4]
In 2019, Richardson was the keynote speaker for National History Day. [8] In September 2020 she was featured on the USA Today Storytellers Project Live. [12]
Richardson serves on the board of directors of the SNCC Legacy Project, which preserves records of Black activism past and present. [5] [13]
Starting in the late 1970s, Richardson became an early researcher, series associate producer, and content advisor for the series Eyes on the Prize, which Henry Hampton executive produced through his company Blackside. [5] [7] [14] [15] Eyes on the Prize was a 14-hour documentary series on the history of the American civil rights movement, broadcast on PBS in 1987 and 1990. The series was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1988. [7] Richardson later co-produced Blackside's 1994 Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary, Malcolm X: Make It Plain (for PBS's The American Experience). [7] [14]
Serving as a senior producer for Northern Light Productions in Boston, Richardson produced historical documentaries for broadcast and museums, with a focus on African American historical events, including: a one-hour documentary called Scarred Justice: Orangeburg Massacre 1968 (South Carolina) for PBS; [7] two History Channel documentaries on slavery and slave resistance; and installations for, among others, the National Park Service's Little Rock Nine Visitor's Center, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the New York State Historical Society's "Slavery in New York" exhibit, and the Paul Laurence Dunbar House. [14]
Richardson co-edited Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts By Women in SNCC published by University of Illinois Press. [6] The book won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Nonfiction in 2011. [5] [7]
Bernice Johnson Reagon is a song leader, composer, scholar, and social activist, who in the early 1960s was a founding member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) Freedom Singers in the Albany Movement in Georgia. In 1973, she founded the all-black female a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, based in Washington, D.C. Reagon, along with other members of the SNCC Freedom Singers, realized the power of collective singing to unify the disparate groups who began to work together in the 1964 Freedom Summer protests in the South.
"After a song", Reagon recalled, "the differences between us were not so great. Somehow, making a song required an expression of that which was common to us all.... This music was like an instrument, like holding a tool in your hand."
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the principal channel of student commitment in the United States to the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Emerging in 1960 from the student-led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, the Committee sought to coordinate and assist direct-action challenges to the civic segregation and political exclusion of African Americans. From 1962, with the support of the Voter Education Project, SNCC committed to the registration and mobilization of black voters in the Deep South. Affiliates such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama also worked to increase the pressure on federal and state government to enforce constitutional protections.
Mary Elizabeth King is a professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the United Nations affiliated University for Peace, a political scientist, and author of several publications. She is a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University and has a doctorate in international politics from Aberystwyth University. She is also a Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute and a distinguished Scholar at the American University Center for Global Peace in Washington D.C.
Lawrence Guyot Jr. was an American civil rights activist and the director of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964.
Gloria Richardson Dandridge was an American civil rights activist best known as the leader of the Cambridge movement, a civil rights action in the early 1960s in Cambridge, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore. Recognized as a major figure in the Civil Rights Movement, she was one of the signatories to "The Treaty of Cambridge", signed in July 1963 with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and state and local officials. It was an effort at reconciliation and commitment to change after a riot the month before.
Doris Adelaide Derby was an American activist, documentary photographer, and director of Georgia State University's Office of African-American Student Services and Programs and adjunct associate professor of anthropology. She was active in the Mississippi civil rights movement, and her work discusses the themes of race and African-American identity. She was a working member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as well as co-founder of the Free Southern Theater, and the founding director of the Office of African-American Student Services and Programs. Her photography has been exhibited internationally. Two of her photographs were published in Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, to which she also contributed an essay about her experiences in the Mississippi civil rights movement.
The Albany Movement was a desegregation and voters' rights coalition formed in Albany, Georgia, in November 1961. This movement was founded by local black leaders and ministers, as well as members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The group were assisted by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). It was meant to draw attention to the brutally enforced racial segregation practices in Southwest Georgia. However, many leaders in SNCC were fundamentally opposed to King and the SCLC's involvement. They felt that a more democratic approach aimed at long-term solutions was preferable for the area other than King's tendency towards short-term, authoritatively-run organizing.
Jack Minnis (1926-2005) was an American activist, and the founder and director of opposition research for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the Civil Rights Movement era. Minnis researched federal expenditures and state and local subversion of racial equality. Minnis was white, but remained affiliated with SNCC even after it adopted a "blacks only" personnel policy, its only white employee for a long time. He helped to train such workers as Stokely Carmichael, Marion Barry, and John Lewis.
Prathia Laura Ann Hall Wynn was an American leader and activist in the Civil Rights Movement, a womanist theologian, and ethicist. She was the key inspiration for Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.
Fay D. Bellamy Powell was an African-American civil rights activist.
Charles E. "Charlie" Cobb Jr. is a journalist, professor, and former activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Along with several veterans of SNCC, Cobb established and operated the African-American bookstore Drum and Spear in Washington, D.C. from 1968 to 1974. Currently he is a senior analyst at allAfrica.com and a visiting professor at Brown University.
Faith Holsaert is an American educator and activist during the Civil Rights Movement.
Robert "Bob" Mants, Jr. was an American civil rights activist, serving as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Mants moved to Lowndes County, working for civil rights for the remainder of his life. Lowndes County contained the majority of the distance covered by the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march, and was then notorious for its racist violence.
Dorie Ann Ladner is an American civil rights activist.
The Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), also known as the Lowndes County Freedom Party (LCFP) or Black Panther party, was an American political party founded during 1965 in Lowndes County, Alabama. The independent third party was formed by local African-American citizens led by John Hulett, and by staff members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael.
The Cambridge movement was an American social movement in Dorchester County, Maryland, led by Gloria Richardson and the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee. Protests continued from late 1961 to the summer of 1964. The movement led to the desegregation of all schools, recreational areas, and hospitals in Maryland and the longest period of martial law within the United States since 1877. Many cite it as the birth of the Black Power movement.
Dorothy "Dottie" Miller Zellner is an American human rights activist, feminist, editor, lecturer, and writer. A veteran of the 1960s civil rights movement, she served as a recruiter for the Freedom Summer project and was co-editor of Student Voice, the student newsletter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She is active in the Palestinian solidarity movement.
Muriel Tillinghast is an American civil rights activist and former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field secretary. Her efforts include volunteering for the Freedom Summer Project in Mississippi where she helped start the famed 1964 Freedom School and led Mississippi's Council of Federated Organizations (COFO).
Martha Prescod Norman Noonan was a civil rights activist who is known for her work within the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and co-editing a 2012 book Hands on theFreedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC.
Debbie Amis Bell was an American Civil Rights activist, SNCC member, and active associate of the Communist Party USA. Bell was a Field Organizer for the SNCC. She is most well known for her work within schools, churches, her community, and Black owned businesses. Bell was also the head of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. Much of her work was carried out in Atlanta, Georgia. However, she was very active in her home state of Pennsylvania as well.