Cambridge, Maryland

Cambridge, Maryland--a town that at the time maintained segregated lunch counters and segregated public facilities--was the most northern of the civil rights “hot spots” in the early 1960s and not far from Swarthmore’s campus. Students from SPAC repeatedly travelled to Cambridge, Maryland to support the local movement for equal rights and desegregation. Some students only participated in demonstrations in Cambridge once or twice. Others, like Judy Richardson '66, spent summers in Cambridge working in tandem with SNCC organizers including Reggie Robinson and Bill Hansen. 

The local movement, led by Gloria Richardson and the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC) was addressing the extremely slow pace of school integration and economic discrimination in housing, labor, and other elsewhere. SPAC maintained contact with the CNAC and Gloria Richardson as controversy swirled locally over whether Cambridge and Dorchester County would opt into Maryland’s new public accommodations statute. In the spring of 1963 negotiations broke down and CNAC was determined to pursue direct action. Swarthmore students participated by picketing segregated businesses and many students were arrested as a result of police reprisals to demonstrations. Increasingly militant marches led to the Maryland National Guard patrolling the City. On campus, students and faculty members debated the Cambridge protests. Some Swarthmore community members questioned their effectiveness and warned student activists of the consequences of arrest. 

During the summer of 1963, CNAC, with assistance from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), including six Swarthmore students, organized a summer program to complete a community survey of conditions in the second ward, to operate freedom schools preparing local Black students to transfer to previously all-white schools, and to help with rural voter registration and other organizing efforts. Much of this period in Cambridge is recorded in Civil War on Race Street by Peter B. Levy (Univ. Fla. Press, 2003) though accounts in some cases contrast with those published in The Phoenix.