Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc./Patrick O Neill Riley
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article, which was published April 9, 2021.
In a cramped cell in a South Carolina prison camp, 22-year-old African American activist Thomas Gaither wrote, “I am presently in deep contemplation as to just what our nation and our particular region of the nation prizes most.”
It was Thursday, Feb. 23, 1961, and Gaither was serving a 30-day term of hard labor on a road gang for what police called “trespassing,” when he and students from Friendship Junior College staged a sit-in at a Rock Hill, South Carolina, lunch counter. The letter he was writing marked day 23.
Civil Rights Leader Gloria Richardson Dies at 99
Richardson, who organized and led desegregation efforts in Maryland with more militancy than many of her peers, passed away Thursday. Blackpast.org
Whoever started the phrase that they weren’t their ancestors must have missed their history classes. So many of our ancestors have shown remarkable courage in the face of violence and hostility in the Jim Crow era and in generations prior. Gloria Richardson was among them.
The civil rights pioneer passed away at 99 years old on Thursday, but her images had become iconic for a new generation of Black women and men.
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According to her son-in-law, Richardson died Thursday in New York.
Credit: (AP Photo/William Smith, File)
FILE - May 11, 1964 - Stanley Branche, left, Gloria Richardson center and Brig. Gen. George Gelson, right, in Cambridge, Md. Author: BRIAN WITTE Associated Press Published: 6:49 PM EDT July 16, 2021 Updated: 6:49 PM EDT July 16, 2021
ANNAPOLIS, Md. Gloria Richardson, an influential yet largely unsung civil rights pioneer whose determination not to back down while protesting racial inequality was captured in a photograph as she pushed away the bayonet of a National Guardsman, has died. She was 99.
Joe Orange, her son-in-law, said Richardson died Thursday in New York.
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