Gloria Richardson was front-page news at the helm of the militant Cambridge movement. Malcolm X admired her as the new brand of leadership in 'A Message to the Grassroots' and Stokely Carmichael followed her into battle, but somehow the history books lost her in their leading-man narrative of civil rights. Finally, students have the long-awaited Gloria Richardson biography. Read this book and rediscover a golden age of street fighting and self-defense spanning civil rights and black power.
~Komozi Woodard, author of A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics
Fitzgerald has written the definitive biography of Gloria Richardson, arguably the least-known civil rights activist of the 1960s. By delving deep into available written sources as well as making use of multiple interviews with Richardson, family members, and Richardson's compatriots, he presents a vivid picture of a woman who stood alongside Rosa Parks and four others who were honored at the 1963 March on Washington as the 'Negro Women Fighters for Freedom.' Fitzgerald's biography of Richardson enhances our understanding of the civil rights movement of the 1960s by adding new layers of geographic, gender, and ideological complexity to it. At the same time, Fitzgerald makes it clear that Richardson's life and beliefs remain relevant to anyone who has an interest in the ongoing struggle for human rights today.
~Peter B. Levy, author of Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Struggle in Cambridge, Maryland
No history of the civil rights movement is complete without understanding the life and work of Gloria Richardson. Finally, we have a serious biography of her that will deepen our understanding of the key organizing and leadership roles women like Richardson played in the struggle. Joseph Fitzgerald's rich history of Richardson's leadership of the Cambridge movement, which fought for housing, education, jobs, healthcare and desegregation, offers much for reckoning where we have been in this country and where we must go today.
~Jeanne Theoharis, author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks
Joseph R. Fitzgerald's The Struggle Is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation provides the deepest exploration to date of one of the most significant, complex, and overlooked female leaders of the modern black freedom movement. Gloria Richardson's distinctive activist history brings into sharp relief broader debates over nonviolence and armed self-defense, civil rights and Black Power, models of black political leadership, and the roles of women in the movement, as well as the relationship between local campaigns and national racial change. Fitzgerald's analysis is a part of an important, growing body of historical work that challenges, complicates, and ultimately enriches popular conceptions of the movement era.
~Patrick D. Jones, author of The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee
The Struggle Is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation is such a necessary and welcome addition to the canon of scholarship that analyzes SNCC, the Black Power movement, and the struggle for racial equity in America. This incredibly detailed book clearly lays out Richardson's dedication to the Cambridge movement, the black radical movement, and the overall fight for black liberation. Richardson is tireless in her efforts and there is finally a book to honor and contextualize her many contributions not just to black history, but to American democracy.
~Christina M. Greer, author of Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream
Joseph Fitzgerald's The Struggle Is Eternal is the first book to fully examine the Cambridge movement and its leader, Gloria Richardson. In 1963, I saw that unforgettable magazine photograph of Gloria Richardson calmly facing an armed contingent of soldiers who were sent to put down the movement she led in Cambridge, Maryland. Mrs. Richardson evolved into a civil rights leader whom the authorities considered almost as dangerous as Martin Luther King Jr. She remains engaged in the struggle for social justice to this day. I am thrilled that Fitzgerald's work allows a broader audience to know Gloria Richardson, and to enhance their understanding of the civil rights movement, in which she played a significant role.
~Kathleen Cleaver, Emory University School of Law, and former communications secretary of the Black Panther Party
Fitzgerald captures the complexity of Gloria Richardson's activism: the family underpinnings of her political orientation, her dynamic role in the Cambridge, Maryland, civil rights movement, and as the principal leader of the Cambridge Non-Violent Action Committee, and her political evolution as an activist in the North. His portrait underscores how Richardson's political independence and self-reliance—traits cultivated by her family's multigenerational involvement in civic and political life—shaped her resistance as a fierce and unrelenting advocate at the height of the Cambridge movement in the 1960s. What makes Fitzgerald's portrait so fascinating is that it shows how Richardson struggled against the sexism and gendered patterns of organizing that plagued the movement and broader society.
~Sekou Franklin, author of After the Rebellion: Black Youth, Social Movement Activism, and the Post–Civil Rights Generation
Fitzgerald makes his literary debut with this thoroughly researched biography. An admiring celebration of one woman's important contribution to an ongoing struggle.
~Kirkus Reviews
Fitzgerald... offers 'a key to understanding a person who is often considered a historical enigma' in this minutely detailed biography of Gloria Richardson, the central figure in the Cambridge Movement for civil rights on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1962.... This informative and accessible account is a useful addition to African American studies.
~Publishers Weekly
With this illuminating biography, Fitzgerald brings to life the struggle for civil rights and Gloria Richardson's role in the movement. An important book for readers at a time in history when the rights of African Americans are again being questioned.
~Library Journal (starred review)
I finished the book inspired, grateful and ready to work.... It was Richardson who served as the architect to many of the philosophies of younger activists and organizers during the civil rights struggles in the 1960s and 1970s.... She is part of the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement and served as a hand steering the country toward equity and freedom.
~New York Amsterdam News
Fitzgerald's The Struggle Is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation explores the largely forgotten but deeply significant life of this central figure and her determination to improve the lives of Black people.
~Philadelphia Sun
Fitzgerald utilized a wide range of source materials to present an engaging narrative that charts Richardson's life from childhood on through the next eight decades of her life.
~The Philadelphia Tribune
Fitzgerald's longform research creates a rich, factual context to appreciate [Gloria Richardson's] work even more deeply.
~Janelle Harris, The Crisis
Joseph R. Fitzgerald's remarkable biography of Gloria Richardson is a great contribution to [the study of black women's leadership in the civil rights and Black Power movements] 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.
~Francis V. Gourrier Jr., Journal of Southern History
This book provides an in-depth account of Gloria Richardson's life and work and also a fascinating view of this period in the history of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It is engagingly written, extensively researched, and of interest to anyone interested in Maryland history, in the history of the Eastern Shore in particular, in African American history, in the civil rights movement, and in women's history.
~Maryland Historical Magazine
Fitzgerald uses these wide-ranging sources to compose a well-organized book that covers this lesser-known movement leader's familial history, long history of civic engagement, and postmodern Civil Rights Movement life.
~Journal of African American History
