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In 1963, Gloria Richardson lived in Cambridge, Maryland, a town so divided that a street called Race Street literally kept blacks on one side and whites on the other. No word on where everyone else lived, but we're guessing it was "Not White Lane" or the alley behind Hooker Town. Even though Cambridge had a terrible record at race relations, it was held up as a model of "separate but (winky eye) equal" to the rest of the country. Which was weird for local African-Americans when they couldn't get hospital care, jobs, or representation in government.

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"Whaddya gonna do about it?"

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Gloria Richardson led the Cambridge protests to make things right. The thing to remember here is that in 1963, lots of cities around the country were fighting for desegregated restaurants and theaters and tree forts. Participating in a sit-in was as common as changing your Facebook avatar to support favorite causes today, only you were actually leaving the safety of your private home and using your own physical body as the symbol for progress while men with guns arrested and beat you. So it wasn't the same at all, really. Sorry I made the analogy.

What was different about Richardson was that when the white establishment reached out to her to find a nice, safe middle ground between the blacks and the whites, she said "No thanks" and kept going with the protests. Robert "Effing" Kennedy himself summoned her to the White House to hash things out with white leaders of the town, and she ended up refusing to vote on the proposal they wrote together. Basic rights weren't up for a vote, in her eyes. What's next, voting on whether or not people could marry? Crazy, right? She put it this way: