few women to achieve that position during the entire civil rights movement. Richardson claimed that people working for the Kennedy administration tried to intimidate her into leaving the movement by threatening to reveal embarrassing gossip about her, including intimate details about her divorce and her affair. Richardson sent word to the administration that if the press ran that story, she would indeed resign from CNAC, but she would not go without a fight. In her personal life, she was not afraid of other people’s judgement, including her, at the time, uncommon decision to get a divorce. In December 1963 Richardson attended a national meeting of SNCC leaders in Atlanta, where they discussed the future direction of the organization. Present were Bob Moses, Charles Sherrod, Frank Smith, John Lewis, Courtland Cox, Michael Thelwell, Stokely Carmichael, Jim Forman, Dottie Zellner, Ivanhoe Donaldson, Marion Barry, and Joyce Ladner, as well as staff and volunteers. Ella Baker and Howard Zinn led questioning to help the mostly young leaders work toward their vision for activism. In Atlanta they discussed and planned for an extended voting rights program to be conducted in the South the next year, an election year. After Cambridge movement On July 14, 1963, Governor Tawes met with Richardson and other leaders . He offered to integrate schools, ensure that a Black person was “hired in the State Employment Office, make an application for a federal loan for a “Negro housing project”, pass a public accommodations ordinance, and name a biracial commission to work on the other problems that could not be solved immediately by legislation”, in exchange for a year-long suspension of civil demonstrations. Richardson rejected committing to stopping demonstrations unless there was a full desegregation of schools and complete fairness in job opportunities. She said, “We wish to make it unalterably clear that we will determine, and not the political structure of the city, who shall speak for the Negro community”. Richardson was criticized during and after the Cambridge movement on her role as a female leader. Many local and national figures said that she should have denounced the violence outright, but she continued to believe in self-defense. Later, Richardson was arrested again. Officials made one attempt to institutionalize her as mentally incompetent, but did not succeed. President John F. Kennedy described Cambridge as a town that had “lost sight of what demonstrations are about” because of the violence that had