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The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland
University Press of Florida
August 2003
On Sale: August 7, 2003
264 pages ISBN: 0813028159 EAN: 9780813028156 Trade Size
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Non-Fiction | Historical
Civil War on Race Street, so named because Race Street was
the road that divided blacks and whites in Cambridge,
Maryland, is a detailed examination of one of the most
vibrant locally based struggles for racial equality during
the 1960s. Beginning with an overview of Cambridge,
particularly its history of racial and class relations,
Peter Levy traces the emergence of the modern civil rights
movement in this city on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Catalyzed by the arrival of freedom riders in 1962, the
movement in Cambridge expanded in 1963 and 1964 under the
leadership of Gloria Richardson, one of the most prominent
(and one of the few female) civil rights leaders in the
nation. In the years after her departure from Cambridge, the
movement went into decline until 1967, when it underwent a
brief revival that culminated with a riot allegedly incited
by black power spokesman H. Rap Brown. In the wake of the
riot, blacks and whites in Cambridge sought to rebuild their
city and return to a politics of moderation. However, Spiro
Agnew, then governor of Maryland, used the riot to advance
his political career and the fortunes of the New Right,
thereby garnering the attention of the public (as well as
Richard Nixon) and achieving the vice-presidency in 1968. At
the same time, H. Rap Brown saw his influence and that of
the civil rights movement decline. In addition to providing valuable insights into Richardson
and Agnew, this study is one of the few to examine a
community in a "border" state. Levy demonstrates that the
goals of the movement were not universal, that strategies
underwent constant political and social change, and that the
impact on the micro level was not as clean and immediate as
historians would have us believe.
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