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).
