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“Courageous stories from our history show us how to continue to struggle against injustice and anti-democratic forces,” was the thesis of Judy Richardson’s MLK Week keynote speech, which she delivered Monday, Jan. 27 in Trout Auditorium.
Richardson was a staff member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1963-1966, which was the only national civil rights organization started, led and staffed primarily by young people; Richardson joined when she was only 19. Since then, Richardson has gone on to become an educator, as well as a film and documentary maker, with projects such as Peabody- and Emmy-winner “Eyes on the Prize,” and films for the National Park Service and various other museums. She also continues to guide future generations of organizers through her work with the SNCC Legacy project. In her talk, Richardson shared what drew her to SNCC, her experiences in the deep end of the 1960s movement, how peers and older activists influenced her and how the lessons she learned in the Civil Rights movement relate to what is happening in the country today.
65 years ago on Feb. 1, four Black students in Greensboro, N.C. performed a sit-in to try to integrate a so-called “public” lunch counter. While Richardson noted that this was not the first-ever sit-in against segregation in America’s history, this act of nonviolent protest is what sparked students across other campuses and people throughout the country into further action. Ella Baker, then-Executive Secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), convened 120 student activists after the sit-ins had mushroomed and told them to remain independent, not to let the older people in organizations like the NAACP or SCLC diffuse or stop the energy they have been building. From this gathering, SNCC was born.
Richardson opened her talk with a photo from a sit-in at a Toddle House restaurant in Atlanta, Ga. in 1963. She points to herself in the center, then points out Joyce Ladner next to her (who went on to become a prominent sociologist, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and acting president at Howard University), John Lewis (the late, beloved Congressman) talking to Ladner and Ivanhoe Donaldson on lookout (who went on to run Julian Bond’s first successful campaign for the Georgia House of Representatives and was a campaign manager for five-time D.C. mayor Marion Barry).
Throughout the talk, Richardson made an explicit effort to share stories and accomplishments of everyone featured in a photo or everyone involved in a story, capturing that the Civil Rights Movement was not just figures like Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks, but a coalition of passionate, strategic individuals all organizing towards a more equitable and just country.
“It’s not just the incredible organization that draws me to SNCC,” Richardson shared. “It’s seeing folks who are brilliant strategists, organizing communities and getting the adult community involved at great risk to themselves. These local people were risking their lives and livelihoods, but also of their families and their whole communities by joining the movement.”
During her first visit to the SNCC national office in Atlanta, Richardson saw a man in overalls, sweeping the stairs, who she presumed to be a janitor. She quickly learned that the man was James Forman, the Executive Secretary of SNCC. In sweeping the stairs himself, as he did often, Richardson said he signaled that “every job is important to the organization, and no job is too important for anybody in this organization to do.”
And there were many jobs in the organization. SNCC used a variety of strategies to develop networks that supported their work organizing and empowering local grassroots leaders in rural Mississippi, Alabama, Southwest Georgia and Arkansas. One of those was using their Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS) line to call their friends of SNCC in other areas to collect information about church burnings, people being shot trying to vote, people getting arrested or going missing and more. They would share this information with the FBI and with their own network to make sure that local sheriffs knew that someone was looking at what they were doing and would have something to say about it.
The SNCC research department, headed by Jack Minnis, also compiled these WATS line reports to create press packets, distributed to show that a pattern of white supremacy was underpinning each individual act of violence. Communications Director Julian Bond focused on being able to frame the narrative of the violence that local people and national organizers were enduring for trying to register to vote and secure their basic human rights. Thanks to a photo department led by Danny Lyon, these stories were bolstered by photos of the violence inflicted because, as Richardson said, “no one really believes some atrocities unless they see it for themselves, and sometimes even that’s not enough, as we know.”
SNCC also had its own print shop to produce leaflets, press releases, research and a publication called “Student Voice.” Minnis’ event led members Bobbi Yancy and Lillian Gregory to buy stocks in Toddle House so that they could go to the stockholder’s meeting and confront the corporate powerholders themselves about their segregated chain restaurant.
To get all of this done, SNCC members were working 12-14 hours a day, with those on staff receiving about $10 a week. Richardson described the people at SNCC as “the best and the brightest. Many of them looked like [her], most were [her] age, 18-20 years old, and they were changing the world as [she] knew it.”
There were young people in the organization who Richardson described as leaders in their own right, like Dianne Nash, John Lewis, Marion Barry, Julian Bond, Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson, Stokely Carmichael and Cleveland Sellers. But there were also local adult leaders who played a big role–SNCC was based in local communities and intergenerational relationships with adults who also wanted real systemic change, and they guided and guarded the young students. These adults included folks like Momma Dolly Raines who would sit in front of her house with a shotgun on her lap when SNCC members stayed with her; World War II veterans such as Amzie Moore, C.C. Bryant and Bob Moses who guided SNCC when they first arrived in an area; and Ella Baker, who, even with decades of organizing experience, respected student work so much that she would sit in on SNCC meetings and let the young people figure out issues themselves.
Richardson quoted Baker, saying “sit-ins have to be about more than just a hamburger, meaning that integrating facilities to eat a hamburger in a white restaurant won’t mean anything unless ‘we all should have the ability to afford the hamburger.’”
Economic justice and equality for all people in the United States was a pillar of SNCC’s organizing, and it was later echoed by King in 1967 who stated that the country needed to undergo a “radical redistribution of economic power.” Richardson critiqued images of King that overlook the issues he believed in and fought for outside of his “I Have a Dream” speech, telling the audience, “Don’t neuter him and his message by keeping him in that dream.”
Economic justice continues to be an issue Richardson is passionate about, later criticizing billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Shou Zi Chew. Richardson then turned her attention to the current administration, telling the audience, “We are living in a time when the foxes are guarding the hen house. And the foxes don’t want to just eat the chickens, they want to destroy the hen house itself. They want to destroy the agencies that protect us.”
Richardson discussed attempts to strengthen Immigration and Customs Enforcement and to dismantle or weaken the Consumer Protection Bureau, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Center for Disease Control and the Department of Education, which she specifically defended, stating that schools give children access to education that affirms who they are and what they want to become and teaches fact-based history so that people don’t believe the ever-present misinformation nowadays. She also talked about the repeal of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts returning the country to “uniformity (as in White uniformity), inequity and exclusion.”
“Most importantly,” Richardson stated, “we’re living at a time when the violent mob of insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol and tried to overturn the election for the first time in our history are declared peaceful, even by the elected officials who ran in absolute terror in the very place being stormed by the mob.” Richardson labeled this as an attempt to “whitewash and delete our memories of what we actually saw” but advised the audience to resist and continue to tell the truth about events to which we bore witness.
That was not the only advice Richardson left with her audience. She reminded the audience that education itself is an act of resistance, so educating ourselves and teaching others are important first steps to larger organizing. To stay motivated through adversity, Richardson says to keep people around you who also believe that change is possible and that you can be a part of it. Richardson also offered that when you see injustice, you have a responsibility to challenge it. You may never see the change you are working for, she said, but if you do nothing, nothing changes.
In summation, Richard stated, “It’s folks like all of you in this room, your parents, your fellow students, your clergy, your teachers, your friends, all those like you in this room. These were the folks who made and sustained the movement, and if we don’t know that WE were the ones who did it, we don’t know WE can do it again.”
Richardson also participated virtually in Bucknell’s MLK Week events in 2021. Bucknell has been holding commemorations for Martin Luther King Jr. since at least 1991 and has hosted a week (or two) of events since 2015. This year’s theme is Learning to Action: Movement Toward Just Communities, which MLK Week Committee co-chair Cymone Fourshey described as an invocation or provocation to take individual and collective action that challenges or undoes centuries of injustice.