Mary Richardson papers

Mary Morehead Richardson was born on July 5, 1898 in Greensboro, North Carolina. She was the youngest child of a large family to parents Richard Morehead and Viney Davis Morehead. Growing up around animals and plants, she spent her childhood on a substantial farm that was more than fifty acres in size. In 1916, Mary Morehead attended the Kent Home industrial school for young women, which would later become Bennett College. On January 7, 1921, she married Robert A. Richardson and relocated to New Britain, Connecticut. Eight years later, in 1929, she gave birth to her daughter, Rena. Mary Richardson moved to New York the following year, where she began her dressmaking business. One of the first African-Americans to have full-time residence in Harlem’s Hotel Theresa, Richardson became a New York modiste with an elite Park Avenue clientele in 1934. She was a designer and fitter for celebrities that included Princess Grace Kelly Grimaldi, Loretta Young, Sophie Tucker, Mrs. Barbara (“Bobo”) Rockefeller and Mrs. Jules Stein. In 1935, her daughter died of rheumatic fever at six years of age. Mary Richardson would design and make an Easter dress to donate to a child every year thereafter in honor of Rena. Mary and Robert Richardson divorced in 1936. In 1940, Mary Richardson became the editor of a women’s fashion column, “So, Sew Prettily,” in the Louisville Defender. Though Mary Richardson was not in a financial position to provide artist endowments, she opened her home to young people in the arts and supported itinerant professionals with food and housing when they needed to be in Harlem for rehearsals or auditions. Among the artists were Anne Wiggins Brown (Gershwin’s first Bess in Porgy and Bess), and the soprano vocalist Joy Simpson of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Mary Richardson knew composer and pianist Eubie Blake, Congressman Charles Rangel, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dr. Clifton Johnson of the Amistad Research Center, among others. She died on December 30, 1989 in New York City.