Performance Reading: Mrs. Richardson presented by Theatre Morgan

Saturday, March 8 | 1 pm 

When freedom riders arrived in Cambridge, Maryland in the early winter of 1962, Gloria Richardson, a forty-year-old single mother, was busy working in her family store and raising her two teenaged girls.   Upset by the brutal arrest of activists, as well as her daughters’ growing disillusionment, Richardson accepted an offer to co-chair the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, which had organized staged sit-ins to protest racial discrimination.

Celebrate Women’s History Month  through a performance reading of Mrs. Richardson written by playwright historian Dr. Peter Levy and presented by Theatre Morgan students of Morgan State University.  In less than three years, she helped build one of the most vibrant local movements in the nation, compelled the Kennedy administration to negotiate an unprecedented treaty agreement, which provided jobs, housing, and desegregated public accommodations, and established a collaborative project with Malcolm X.  Richardson was also one of seven “Negro Women Fighters for Freedom” officially recognized and seated on the stage of the 1963 March on Washington. 

This program is in conjunction with iWitness: Media and the Movement