Judy Richardson

Judy Richardson

Biography: 

Picture of Judy RichardsonBest known as a film documentary producer and a former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field worker, Judy Richardson began her activism while at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, as a member of the Swarthmore Political Action Committee (SPAC), an affiliate of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 1963, Richardson helped the Cambridge, Maryland, community in desegregating public accommodations. The Cambridge Movement was led by civil rights activist Gloria Richardson, with assistance from SNCC field secretaries. Richardson joined the SNCC staff at the national office in Atlanta, where she worked with James Forman, Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson, and Julian Bond. Richardson also became involved in two particularly dangerous SNCC projects—Lowndes County, Alabama, where she worked with Stokely Carmichael, and southwest Georgia. In 1965, Richardson became office manager for Julian Bond’s successful first campaign for the Georgia House of Representatives. She also organized a northern Freedom School that brought in young southern SNCC activists.

After SNCC dissolved, Richardson participated in a variety of other ventures, most of which are connected to civil rights. In 1968, Richardson and other former SNCC staffers founded Drum and Spear Bookstore in Washington, D.C., which became the largest black bookstore in the country. In 1978, Richardson assisted Henry Hampton and Blackside Productions on an early version of what would become the highly-acclaimed six-hour Eyes on the Prize series for PBS. In the early 1980s, Richardson served as director of information for the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, participating in its protests against police brutality in New York City, and its bus caravans to the Black Belt to counter the Reagan administration’s intimidation of elderly African American voters. Richardson later produced Blackside’s 1994 Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary, Malcolm X: Make It Plain. Richardson and other SNCC women edited Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC (2010). She lectures, writes, and conducts professional development workshops for teachers about the history and values of the Civil Rights Movement and their relevance to current issues. Richardson received an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore and became a visiting professor at Brown University in the fall of 2012.

 

Content:

In this interview, Judy Richardson discusses her childhood, her initial involvement in the Civil Rights Movement through the Cambridge desegregation campaigns, the enormous influence of Dr. King and Ella Baker, and the hard work of SNCC activists, as well as the sorry state of the nation today. 

 

Video Link: