The Struggle Is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation by Joseph R. Fitzgerald (review)

The past two decades have seen a maturation in the study of black women’s leadership in the civil rights and Black Power movements. In particular, biographies of black women have led the way in transforming the historiography of the black freedom struggle. Joseph R. Fitzgerald’s remarkable biography of Gloria Richardson is a great contribution to this field, as it casts light on one of the movement’s fiercest and most undercelebrated freedom fighters of the twentieth century. What sets this biography apart is Fitzgerald’s ability to lean on Richardson herself to tell her story. To date, she remains one of the few surviving leaders of the civil rights and Black Power movements, and she continues to demand this country live up to its democratic ideals. This fact lends itself to the title of Fitzgerald’s aptly named work: The Struggle Is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation.

The book is at once a biography of Gloria Richardson and a local history of black life on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Fitzgerald emphasizes the importance of geography in Richardson’s story, and this analysis is one of the text’s strengths. Most of the story takes place in Cambridge, Maryland, where Richardson led efforts to end racial discrimination in all its forms through her strategy of “creative chaos” (p. 7). This focus on the mid-Atlantic region allows the author to highlight how the Cambridge civil rights movement reflected the broader movement’s southern and northern elements. Inhabiting a border state, black Marylanders were in a unique position, Fitzgerald argues, to make claims for racial justice. With the right to vote already secured, freedom fighters in the Cambridge movement “could concentrate on leveraging black people’s electoral power to gain the most from the political system” (p. 171). These demands included fair housing, quality health care and education, and access to decent jobs and wages. Yet black residents of the Eastern Shore found themselves battling racial segregation and were haunted by the reality of racial terror through lynching. As a young girl, Richardson was affected by the lynching of a black man in nearby Salisbury and again, two years later, in Princess Anne. After the Salisbury lynching, her parents took her to the site of the lynching to make certain she understood the seriousness of the violent event.

Richardson’s family history on the Eastern Shore undoubtedly shaped her social and political context. Here, too, the author’s masterful analysis shines as he unravels the interplay of race, class, and gender. Richardson’s maternal ancestors were free people of color who became part of the black business elite. Her paternal ancestors were enslaved. In slavery and in freedom, both sides of her family embodied a racial pride that was reflected in Richardson’s activism. Fitzgerald frames this tradition as “‘race service’” and makes clear that bringing together their pride and commitment to the uplift of the black community is a significant part of Gloria Richardson’s family history (p. 12). This race service followed Richardson from Cambridge to the national stage through organizations like the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and ACT (not an acronym, but a northern-based organization committed to black liberation).

Finally, readers will notice Fitzgerald’s use of “black liberation movement” to describe the twentieth-century black freedom struggle (p. 1). When abbreviated, its initials, BLM, remind readers of the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement. And this is no mistake; as Fitzgerald reminds his audience, “The unjust and oppressive systems [Richardson] fought more than fifty years ago are still with us today” (p. 10). Evinced by the book’s title, Richardson’s survival and the continuation of black oppression remind us that the struggle continues and, indeed, is eternal.