Mount Holyoke’s annual Martin Luther King Commemorative Keynote will feature Activist and Filmmaker, Judy Richardson in conversation with President Danielle R. Holley.

About Judy Richardson: Judy Richardson was on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staff in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama (1963-66). Her experiences in SNCC continue to ground both her film and education work. She most recently produced the Frederick Douglass visitor center film for the National Park Service’s site at Cedar Hill in Washington, DC. She is currently working on 4 museum films, including those for the civil rights museums in Memphis and Atlanta.

In 1968, she was a co-founder of Drum & Spear Bookstore, once the country’s largest African American Bookstore. She was on the production team for all 14 hours of the seminal PBS series, Eyes on the Prize, as its series associate producer, then its education director. With Northern Light Productions she continued to produce documentaries: for PBS, the History Channel, and museums. She co-edited Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, a compilation of the testimonies of 53 SNCC women. She co- directed two NEH teacher institutes, co-hosted by Duke University and focused on “Teaching Grassroots Movements in the South (1940-1985)”.

She is a member of the SNCC Legacy Project board, was a Visiting Professor at Brown University, and has an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore College (PA).