SOUTH HADLEY — Civil rights activist Judy Richardson moved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in ways she said might have not been possible in other organizations during the Civil Rights Movement — and did she move.
As a member of the SNCC from 1963 to 1966, Richardson helped lead student sit-ins to integrate segregate businesses in Georgia and Maryland.
This work led her to other initiatives, including organizing to desegregate public institutions in Cambridge, Maryland, and registering Black voters for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as part of the Freedom Summer movement. Alongside Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture, she traveled to Lowndes County, Alabama to raise awareness about the Black Power movement.
Richardson shared highlights of her moving journey during those memorable years last Thursday evening as the keynote event of Mount Holyoke College’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King Series on Racial Justice and Reconciliation. In a conversation with Mount Holyoke’s President Danielle R. Holley, the prominent documentary film producer and civil rights activist unveiled the secret to effective organizing.
“If you do nothing, nothing changes,” Richardson said. “Always, you kept hearing from a lot of the local leaders that we were being guided by that they didn’t know if any of this was going to work. But also you have to keep doing it so that the folks coming behind you don’t have to keep going through the same stuff.”
Before the discussion began, the college showed a 25-minute segment of “Eyes on the Prize,” an award-winning documentary on civil rights on which Richardson served as associate producer.
The short taste of the documentary zoomed in on the Freedom Summer Movement, where hundreds of students moved into Georgia to establish schools, libraries and “getting Black people registered to vote without getting them killed,” Richardson said. Over the course of the 10-week program, many people were arrested, beatened or shot.
“Recently, when we see so much violence in our country, especially from federal forces, against protesters, and you hear people say, ‘It’s unprecedented,'” Holley said. “Then we look right there and see exactly what happened in terms of violence towards citizen protesters.”
Civil rights activism was, and is, dangerous work, but Richardson’s community kept each other safe and lifted spirits. The groups often sang freedom songs, or popular liberation anthems. As part of the keynote event, Springfield singer and activist Vanessa Ford sang popular freedom song “We Shall Overcome,” as well as “Stand Up for Love,” by Destiny’s Child.
“We were a community, which is what you see now in Minneapolis. I mean, it’s neighbor and neighbor and neighbor,” Richardson said.
As a freshman at Swarthmore College, Richardson found her people by circumstance. She got involved with the Swarthmore Political Action Committee (SPAC), a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) affiliate, while the group organized to improve wages for all Black female dining employees. On weekends, SDS sent buses to Cambridge, Maryland to organize desegregation of all hospitals, schools and recreational spaces.
There, she met Baltimore civil rights organizer Reggie Robinson, who would connect her to SNCC, and learned the ropes from Ella Baker, the grassroots organizer who supported the civil rights efforts of W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr.
“These were all young people who were used to female leadership,” Richardson said. “They were used to seeing Diane Nash. They were used to seeing Ella Baker. They were used to seeing Ruby R. Smith Robinson as leaders, not just as troops, not as followers.”
Her leadership in SNCC was only the beginning of Richardson’s work. After producing “Eyes on the Prize,” Richardson continued as a documentarian for the Civil Rights Movement. Along with a slew of films for museums and national monuments, she co-produced the Peabody- and Emmy award-winning “Malcolm X: Make It Plain,” and co-edited the book “Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts By Women in SNCC.”
Behind Holley and Richardson, a slideshow of archival photos of civil rights activists put faces to names in the SNCC network. Richardson pointed out each civil rights organizer, rattling off stories and calling them by their nicknames. These were her people, after all, and, even in their 80s, they never stopped doing the work.
“It’s a sense that once you’re in the struggle, you probably won’t see the end of it,” Richardson said. “The importance of what we’re doing is that we are staying in community with one another, and we still believe that if you do something, things will change, [but] maybe not in your lifetime.”
