How Gloria Richardson’s Look of Righteous Indignation Became a Symbol of No Retreat
By Janelle Harris Dixon
In 1963, the civil rights leader shoved aside a guardsmen’s bayonet with disgust and defiance; photography preserved the charged moment.
Gloria Richardson sat regal and contemplative in an aquamarine recliner that faced a wall of windows inside her petite Manhattan apartment. Around her, family photos and mementos from a life lived in love and service to Black justice decorated nearly every space within her reach. Shelves of books scaled up her walls—I immediately spotted Jean Toomer’s Cane because I have the same edition. Beams of natural light brightened the living room but at its center, Richardson exuded her own brilliant radiance.
I had arrived late and flustered, upending all of the calm in the room to meet with this icon of the civil rights movement after my bus arrived almost an hour late from Washington, D.C.
My friends and creative colleagues, videographer Sabrina Thompson Mitchell and photographer Jamaica Gilmer, were there already setting up their photo and video equipment for our interview with the then-96-year old movement leader, who graciously invited me to catch my breath as I heaved apologies. With her long legs crossed and her fur-lined house shoes on, she waved me into a cushioned chair. “You’re here now,” she said warmly, “and that’s what is important.”
If you don’t know her by name, you know her from images depicting a woman in jeans, slender and strong, flat-palming the blade of a bayonet thrust directly at her by a charging National Guardsman and shoving it away from her body. One of the photographers to most vividly capture Richardson’s expression—a look that bridged disgust with defiance—was Fred Ward, whose indelible portrait of Richardson is now held in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).
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