In April 2015, human rights activist Gloria Richardson visited Cabrini, receiving the Ivy Young Willis/Martha Willis Dale Award for her public service.
A logical choice for this award, Richardson had a key role in America’s modern Civil Rights Movement; as the de facto leader of the Cambridge Movement in Maryland (1962–64), Richardson helped redefine and expand America’s meaning of freedom.
As a historian of the Civil Rights Movement—and, as it happens, Richardson’s biographer—I hosted a one-on-one talk with her in Cabrini's Mansion in front of a packed audience. One of the subjects discussed was the tradition of service in black families—also known as race service.
Gloria Richardson at Cabrini in April 2015
Race Service: A Tradition Passed Down Through Generations
According to Richardson, her parents and grandparents instilled in her an expectation that she should serve her race in whatever way possible. According to them, black people had patronized their numerous businesses in Cambridge, making it possible for Richardson’s family to live well and, for some family members, including Richardson herself, to attend college, which further enhanced the family’s ability to maintain and expand its wealth.
Richardson’s professors at Howard University reinforced this tradition of race service, providing Richardson and her classmates with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to go forward and make their world a better place. And when she became a mother, Richardson passed down this tradition to her daughters.
Service is a very common tradition in black American families, dating back to the Colonial Era, when British colonists enslaved Africans and forcibly migrated them to North America. Those African peoples and their descendants served however they could in order to survive Europeans’ oppression, from assisting people fleeing their enslavers (think Harriet Tubman’s work on the Underground Railroad) to organizing and carrying out other work in the Abolitionist Movement.
After the Civil War, black people served their race as elected officials in Reconstruction governments in the South. Others established fraternal and mutual aid societies, literacy programs, and self-help organizations. Each of these efforts sought to improve all facets of black people’s lives.
The motto of the National Association of Colored Women—“Lifting as we climb”—describes perfectly how Richardson’s family and countless numbers of other black people worked for their group’s freedom in America.
Race Service Through History
As the United States entered the Cold War, black people continued their efforts to make white Americans live up to their professed ideals of democracy and freedom. Among other things, members of the black community became plaintiffs in lawsuits against racial segregation in political parties, housing, and education. The most notable of these suits was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), which outlawed racial segregation in public schooling.
Around the same time, blacks were fighting to open up public spaces that whites had segregated. When Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, AL, in late 1955 for not giving up her seat to a white person, the Women’s Political Council (WPC) kicked off The Montgomery Bus Boycott. The WPC was an all-black self-help organization whose members believed that they should work to improve their own lives and those of their community. Parks herself was no stranger to race service; she had been involved in Civil Rights activism years before she was arrested.
Seeing little progress on the racial battlefront over the next handful of years, young black people in the early 1960s believed that the Black Liberation Movement needed another jolt.
On February 1, 1960, four young black men held a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, where they were attending college. Their action that day set off a wave of sit-ins around the South carried out by other college students.
Out of this sit-in movement came the most important American organization to be created in the second half of the 20th century: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
SNCC was an interracial organization, but it was predominately black. Its members—who ranged in age from late-teens to mid-20s—worked to force white Americans to cease supporting racially discriminatory laws and customs.
SNCC’s activism kept alive the tradition of race service demonstrated by previous generations of black people; its work is a key reason why the Federal government passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Connected Through Service
The tradition of service is not unique to black America. To one degree or another, it has existed among many American communities. It can be found, for example, in the work of Chinese-American communities who migrated to the West Coast in the 19th century as part of the mining industry and the building of the Transcontinental Railroad.
Even our very own Cabrini is tied directly to the tradition of service. Its namesake, Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, served numerous Italian immigrant populations here in the United States (e.g., New York, Denver, New Orleans) after millions of Italians left their homeland for the economic, social, and political opportunities offered by the United States.
Mother Cabrini worked tirelessly and selflessly to provide the aid and comfort these people needed so that they might navigate successfully a land that was new to them—and often quite hostile. Many Italian immigrants faced job and housing discrimination, among other forms of oppression.
Service has been a core mission of Cabrini since its founding in 1957, and is telegraphed by its credo of “service beyond oneself.” Additionally, Cabrini’s core curriculum (aptly titled Justice Matters) reinforces the expectation that students will serve others.
I build and teach my courses much like Gloria Richardson’s professors did at Howard University: I provide my students with the knowledge, skills, and abilities that they will need in order to be effective agents for change in their local and global communities. Equally as important is my training and guidance of students on how they can be a part of the solution to the problems of racism, sexism, poverty, human trafficking, and domestic violence, to name a few.
The tradition of service is one of the most important legacies that people—professors included—pass from one generation to the next. When we carry on this tradition, we help make the world a better place. The lives of Gloria Richardson and Mother Cabrini are testaments to this truth—just as we strive to be testaments to the tradition of service.
Joseph R. Fitzgerald, PhD, Assistant Professor of History and Political Science, can be reached at joseph.r.fitzgerald@cabrini.edu or 610.902.8513. "Dr. Fitz" played an instrumental role in the creation of Cabrini's Black Studies major. He also serves as the coordinator for the Black Studies program.
His biography of Richardson, The Struggle Is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation, is forthcoming.