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Next month PBS will rebroadcast the 14-hour series Eyes on the Prize, introducing a new generation to the triumphs and tragedies of ordinary people during the first wave of the Civil Rights Movement, a tumultuous and era-defining moment in American history. Judy Richardson worked on the Academy Award-nominated film from its first incarnation in 1978 and was the education director for the series, which first aired in 1987. She also co-produced Malcolm X: Make It Plain, a Peabody-winning biography for PBS’s American Experience.

Currently Richardson makes African-American history documentaries as a senior producer with Northern Light Productions; her films include Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters for the History Channel. She’s also producing a PBS documentary on the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre, and recently completed all the videos for the National Park Service’s Little Rock Crisis Visitor Center, about the Little Rock Nine’s historic 1957 struggle to desegregate Central High School in Arkansas.

To all of her film work, Richardson brings a long-time involvement with social justice issues. In the South in the 1960s, she worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on projects in Alabama, in Georgia, and in Mississippi, during its fabled 1964 “Freedom Summer.” She was office manager for current NAACP chair Julian Bond (then Communications Director of SNCC) during his successful first campaign for the Georgia House of Representatives. She also founded the then-largest African-American bookstore. In the 1980s, she was the director of information for the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice where she worked on a campaign against police brutality in New York City, and on a campaign to counter Reagan Justice Department intimidation of elderly Black voters.

Judy Richardson lectures nationally, and conducts professional development workshops for teachers, all focused on the Civil Rights Movement and its relevance to the issues we face today. She has written for several academic journals, and is co-editor of Hands on the Freedom Plow, which chronicles the civil rights activism of more than fifty SNCC women in the Southern Freedom Movement of the early '60s.