Black History

Civil Rights Legend Gloria Richardson’s ‘Eternal’ Struggle

THE AFRO — Gloria Richardson might be better know by her photograph than by her name. A sequence of photographs captured her in Cambridge, 1963, forcing a bayonet out of her face while giving a White National Guardsman the most contemptuous of looks.

Published

7 years ago

April 7, 2019

Oakland Post

By J. K. Schmid

Gloria Richardson might be better know by her photograph than by her name.

A sequence of photographs captured her in Cambridge, 1963, forcing a bayonet out of her face while giving a White National Guardsman the most contemptuous of looks.

Cambridge was under martial law at the time, and tensions were at their peak. Jim Crow was strong in Cambridge. Schools, hospitals and churches were segregated and Black unemployment was quadruple White unemployment.

Richardson nee St. Clair, an heiress of the Baltimore Black elite, was born and raised on Stricker Street until moving to Cambridge at six years old. She attended St. James Episcopal Church and Public School No. 119. She played in Lafayette Park.

“Her family was not middle class, they were actually above middle class,” said Joseph R. Fitzgerald, assistant professor at Cabrini University. “Her family was so wealthy that when Ms. Richardson’s maternal grandfather died, he was a city councilman in Cambridge, Ms. Richardson’s family, they found IOUs where he was lending White politicians money.”

Fitzgerald’s latest work of scholarship is “The Struggle is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation,” what Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver called “the first book to fully examine the Cambridge movement and its leader.”

Cleaver goes on in her critique to describe the now 96-year-old Richardson as a leader “whom the authorities considered almost as dangerous as Martin Luther King Jr.”

And there was real danger. While spokesperson of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, Richardson nevertheless found herself at the fore of an armed uprising of disenfranchised Blacks, facing off against police, soldiers and White rioters.

The danger was so acute, that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was forced to intervene lest neighboring violence spread to the nation’s capital.

Kennedy, representatives of the Department of Justice, the State of Maryland, and local leadership all signed “The Treaty of Cambridge,” a guarantee of civil, economic and human rights for the people of Cambridge. The Civil Rights Act would not be signed into law until the next year.

Businesses, schools and hospitals desegregated over the summer of 1963.

Richardson has told a story of how her uncle died from a White hospital’s neglect when they refused to admit him and save his life.

Cambridge finally elected its first Black and first woman mayor, Victoria Jackson-Stanley, in 2008.

Dion Banks worked on Jackson-Stanley’s 2012 reelection campaign.

“When I talk about reclaiming our narrative, telling our story, one of the things I wanted to do was to make sure that Gloria Richardson was honored,” Banks said at a Red Emma’s book forum and signing with Fitzgerald. “In the state of Maryland you have to be dead in order to get a day declared for you.” Banks and other activists persuaded the Governor’s office to change the rule, but didn’t stop there. “February 11 in the state of Maryland is Gloria Richardson Day, which was the platform that we used to launch what we call Reflections on Pine to tell our story all across the world about Gloria and the Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge.”

Reflections on Pine is a walking tour of Cambridge, a city that historians have described as another-if not the second-Black Wall Street.

“She’s one of the icons who’s not recognized in my opinion, just like Robert Williams, another overlooked figure in the Black liberation movement,” Dr. Ken Morgan, assistant professor Interdisciplinary and Urban Studies at Coppin State University, offered during the forum’s question and answer period. “I just wanted to say that hopefully that, in Maryland at least she should be able to be recognized in the Hall of Fame as a great person who led a great struggle in Maryland.”

“Cambridge, we look at it as a second Black Wall Street, but Cambridge has problems, just like Baltimore City,” Morgan continued, recalling her example and conversations between her and his students. “As well as Salisbury, as well as Prince George’s County, as well as Montgomery County, as well as Frederick County, Hagerstown, other places. It’s going to be really significantly important for Black folks to get together in Maryland to make things happen.

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Activism

Diabetes in Black California: Turning the Tide from Crisis to Control

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data, nearly 17.9% of Black adults in California have been diagnosed with diabetes — above the national Black adult average of 16.8%, and nearly five points higher than California’s overall adult rate of 12.6% across all races. California ranks 24th out of 39 states with available data for Black adult diabetes rates.

Published

1 day ago

July 5, 2026

Oakland Post

Dr. Khadijah Lang is a family physician with a clinic in Los Angeles who specializes in several family medical practices, including prenatal care. Lang believes in family medicine. She says it is important to treat all members of a family. Thursday, June 5, 2026. Photo by Solomon O. Smith/California Black Media.

By Charlene Muhammad, California Black Media

Crystal Lambert knew something was terribly wrong with her three-year-old granddaughter as she sped down the street trying to get her to the hospital.

“I thought she got a hold of some poison,” Lambert recalled.

Doctors found Lambert’s granddaughter had a blood sugar level over 800, diagnosing her with Diabetic Ketoacidosis(DKA), a state in which the body, starved of insulin, begins to shut down.

Lambert said she was born with a pancreas that was not fully functioning — it lacked the specialized cells required to produce insulin.

Her granddaughter survived and is five years old today. Now, she gives herself insulin shots, asks endless questions about her condition, and runs like the spirited child she is. But the terror of that night transformed Lambert — and ultimately inspired her to launch the We Fight Back Organization, a mobile health and food access initiative serving underserved communities across California. Lambert is the executive director.

The Crisis by the Numbers

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data, nearly 17.9% of Black adults in California have been diagnosed with diabetes — above the national Black adult average of 16.8%, and nearly five points higher than California’s overall adult rate of 12.6% across all races. California ranks 24th out of 39 states with available data for Black adult diabetes rates.

Nationally, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Black Americans were 24% more likely than the overall U.S. population to have diabetes in 2024. They also died from diabetes 78% more often than the general population in 2022. Black Americans are also more than twice as likely as the overall population to develop kidney failure caused by diabetes.

According to the California Health Care Foundation’s 2024 Health Disparities Almanac, Black Californians have the shortest life expectancy in the state at just 74.6 years — due in part to chronic conditions like diabetes and its devastating complications.

Leon Rock, co-founder of the African American Diabetes Association, believes statistics, though revealing, only tell part of the story.

“There are a whole bunch of Black folks that don’t tell you that they have diabetes — or don’t know,” he said.

And the disease itself, Rock is careful to note, is not what kills. “They die from the complications. That’s heart attack, that’s stroke, that’s amputations of legs, of feet. Going blind. All those complications are inherent in a system that has impacted Black folks with diabetes in California and across America.”

Crystal Lambert, creator and executive director of We Fight Back. She started the organization out of a need to learn more about diabetes on behalf of her granddaughter. Now she is looking to spread the impact of her organization to the valley. Friday, June 6, 2026. Photo by Solomon O. Smith/California Black Media.

Crystal Lambert, creator and executive director of the We Fight Back Organization, started out of a need to learn more about diabetes on behalf of her granddaughter. Now she is looking to spread her organization to the valley, on Friday, June 6, 2026 Photo by Solomon O. Smith/ California Black Media

An Information Gap Fuels the Crisis

For Rock, part of the solution is diagnosis. He says the medical and public health systems are failing Black Californians by the absence of information designed for them.

“That is the bottom line. We need good information. Information that is culturally specific,” said Rock.

Telling people to eat healthy or exercise, he added, falls short when culturally specific alternatives are not provided, and when many residents of urban communities do not feel safe exercising in some neighborhoods – or outside at night.

Dr. Khadijah Lang, a family medicine physician and president of the Golden State Medical Association, agrees that the roots of the crisis run deeper than individual behavior — and blaming patients misses the point.

“We are not genetically predisposed to diabetes,” Lang said. “But the system under which we live increases the likelihood that we will develop it.”

What the Body Needs — What Communities Are Denied

Type 2 diabetes, which accounts for 90 to 95% of all diabetes cases, according to the CDC, develops when the body can no longer use insulin effectively to regulate blood sugar. Left unmanaged, it damages nerves, kidneys, eyes, and the cardiovascular system. The hemoglobin A1C test is a blood draw that reveals how the body has processed sugar over the previous three months — not just at the moment of the test. It is the standard tool for both diagnosis and ongoing monitoring.

That distinction matters, Lang emphasized, because patients cannot manipulate three months of blood sugar history the way they might fast for a day before a single blood draw.

“The pill is not meant to undo or control a sugar level that’s being constantly stressed,” Lang said. “It’s meant to work in conjunction with a low-carbohydrate diet and exercise.” She recommended at minimum 30 minutes of physical activity five days a week — breakable into 10-minute sessions for those who need it.

Lang stressed that education must be delivered in language people recognize and can relate to. The goal is to inform them of the choices that serve their health best, she said.

But for many Black Californians, even those informed choices remain out of reach, Lambert said.

“They need access to healthy foods and medication, too” she said.

California has made some critical policy advances. The state has expanded access to the Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM), which has transformed diabetes care for state residents. Assembly Bill 365, introduced in 2024, proposed requiring Medi-Cal to cover the costs of CGM and other related medical equipment but it failed in the State Senate. Since then, the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) reports that the core Medi-Cal CGM benefit now available to eligible patients was solidified through previous budget actions and pharmacy policy updates.

These measures, while meaningful, have not closed the gap for the communities most at risk, according to advocates.

Control Through Community

Health care advocates conclude that the solution must be communal, culturally grounded, and sustained — not a fad, not a celebrity moment, not a single clinic visit. For example, observed Lang, lifestyle shaped by shared values and collective accountability can move the needle where individual prescriptions have not.

Rock is building infrastructure to match the urgency, establishing local chapters of the African American Diabetes Association across the country, with California next.

“We have to do for self, period,” he said. “Health is wealth. We have to eat to live.”

And Lambert, whose granddaughter unknowingly started all of this for her, keeps showing up.

“Diabetes advocacy is about dignity, education, prevention, and hope,” she said.

Video: Diabetes Disparity Exposed in California

This article is supported by the California Health Care Foundation

(CHCF). Visit www.chcf.org

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Oakland Post: Week of July 1 – 7, 2026

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of July 1 – 7, 2026

Published

1 day ago

July 5, 2026

Oakland Post

To enlarge your view of this issue, use the slider, magnifying glass icon or full page icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.

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Arts and Culture

Prescott Circus Theatre Presents Free Summer Performance Series

Now in its 41st year, the Prescott Circus Theatre is a nationally recognized performing arts education program for Oakland youth. The circus offers safe environments that challenge Oakland youth, through circus arts training, to develop the skills and confidence to thrive on stage, in school, and in life.

Published

1 week ago

June 26, 2026

Oakland Post

Prescott Circus showcase pathways pyramid. Photo courtesy of Prescott Circus.

By Post Staff

The Prescott Circus, Oakland’s longest-running youth circus, is returning this summer with its free shows. Join the Prescott Circus’s young stars as they share their joys and talents through stilt-dancing, tumbling, juggling, and more.

At the heart of this one-hour show, which demonstrates teamwork, pride, and joy, are Oakland Unified School District students ages 8 – 17 from more than 10 different schools

This is accomplished through no-cost school and community programs for more than 300 Oakland youth each year. Performing company members from Prescott, where the program began, perform and make appearances at as many as 40 Bay Area events each year.

The summer program is funded in part by Oakland Fund for Children and Youth, California Arts Council, Port of Oakland, and the West Davis & Bergard Foundation.

Performances will be held Tuesday, July 14, 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. (ASL interpreted) and Wednesday, July 15, 11 a.m., at the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice St., Oakland. For free reservations go to

https://PrescottCircusSummerShows.eventbrite.com

For group reservations for camps, childcare centers, senior centers, go to www.prescottcircus.org

A community show will be held Saturday, July 18, 2 p.m. to 3 p.m., at DeFremery Park,1651 Adeline St., Oakland.