It must be an unwritten axiom: When you meet people who are considered larger than life, you expect them to be physically larger than what they are.
So I was taken aback when Gloria Richardson Dandridge opened the door to her Manhattan apartment for me in October. She was still slender, as slender as I'd seen her in those pictures taken back during the 1960s, when she led civil rights demonstrations in Cambridge and served as chairwoman of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, better known as CNAC. Her hair was gray, but she stood only 5 feet 5 inches tall, if that.
Sometimes giants live in small bodies.
I had hopped on an Acela train - I don't drive in New York City if I don't have to - and then taken a PATH subway train down to 14th Street. The stop was only a few blocks from the building where the woman who came to define Cambridge's civil rights movement in the 1960s lived.
I'd been assigned to do a sidebar article on Richardson for a project called Kerner Plus 40, jointly sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies and the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
The IFAJS is located on the campus of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University in Greensboro, N.C. Directors of the two-school project sent reporters to several American cities that had riots in the 1960s to determine if any of the recommendations of the Kerner Commission Report, which was issued Feb. 29, 1968, had been implemented. (President Lyndon B. Johnson formed the Kerner Commission in 1967 to look into the causes of urban riots that were sweeping the nation.)
For three successive weekends, I visited Cambridge and talked to residents about the riots there in the 1960s - Cambridge had three - and how things had changed. But the person I most wanted to talk to was the very one who no longer lived in Cambridge. So when Dandridge opened the door to her apartment, it was as if I was looking at someone I'd been eager to meet all my life.
And in a way, I was. My mom had talked Gloria Richardson up constantly during the years 1962-1964. I heard more about what Richardson and other civil rights activists were doing in Cambridge than I heard about what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was doing in several cities across the country. During my research for the Kerner Plus 40 project, I learned that Dandridge and my mother were born in the same year and month - May of 1922 - and in the same city. (Dandridge, according to Peter Levy in Civil War on Race Street, was born here in Baltimore).
With all those coincidences and my mom's constant references to Dandridge, perhaps I was just destined to, someday, write something about her. But this Friday, I'll just be watching as Dandridge finally gets the props she deserves as arguably the most unsung civil rights leader of the 1960s. Dandridge, along with author Taylor Branch and former U.S. Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana, will receive an honorary degree during a convocation ceremony at Washington College in Chestertown.
Scant mention is made of Dandridge in most of the historical literature of the civil rights movement. She figures prominently in Levy's book, which is about the civil rights movement in Cambridge and the two riots in the summer of 1963 and the more famous one in the summer of 1967, which started after H. Rap Brown gave what some said was an incendiary speech.
Dandridge is mentioned briefly in Bruce Perry's Malcolm: The Biography of a Man Who Changed Black America as being one of several people who helped write the charter for the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the group Malcolm X formed after he broke with the Nation of Islam. She's mentioned a little more frequently in Peter Goldman's The Death and Life of Malcolm X, arguably the best biography of Malcolm X ever written.
Her name will be mentioned quite a bit two days from now, when Dandridge receives her degree. I don't know what she'll say, or if she'll even speak. But if she does, I have a good idea of what she'll talk about.
"I think they'll kill Roe" v. Wade, Dandridge said of the current Supreme Court in one of many quotes that didn't make it into my sidebar. "They've destroyed affirmative action and Brown v. Board of Education." She also chided presidential candidates for not criticizing that Supreme Court for ending diversity plans in schools in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle.
"Nobody, not even [Sen.] Barack Obama, said anything about those programs ... being abolished," Dandridge told me.
Forty years later, Dandridge is still a thorn in the side of those in power. Those who know her best would probably never expect her to be anything else.
greg.kane@baltsun.com