When Judy Richardson was navigating her way through her freshman year at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, she got distracted from her full-ride, four-year scholarship by efforts to force the school to boost the wages of its all-Black cafeteria staff. She joined the campaign to help the workers.
Pretty soon, it was on to another battle for “justice” in Cambridge, Md., where Blacks were protesting the city’s racially segregated facilities. Another battle followed. Before long, the Tarrytown, N.Y., native found herself in Mississippi working alongside the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. It was the summer of 1964.
With her mother’s reluctant blessing and despite her older sister’s protests, a 19-year-old Richardson joined other students from across the nation to help end Mississippi’s racist segregation laws.
“I had no sense of mortality,” recalls Richardson. “Somehow, I was able to get my mother and sister to understand this was important to me.”
Richardson, now 66, is a documentary film producer and college lecturer, a co-producer of the award-winning “Eyes on the Prize” documentary about the civil rights movement and a producer of the recent film documentary, “Scared Justice: The Orangeburg (S.C.) Massacre 1968.” She also is reveling in the success of a new book of personal essays she and friends from the movement have written about their experiences and those of dozens of other rank-and-file women of SNCC.
Published by the University of Illinois Press last September, Hands on the Freedom Plow, Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, has sold approximately 4,000 copies and is in its fourth printing.
Richardson says she and her colleagues hoped the nearly 600 pages of essays by the 52 women — Black, White, Latina, young, old, urban and rural — would help fill the gaps in history books about the roles women played in the modern civil rights movement. Richardson spoke with Diverse to discuss the book’s background and significance:
