Elsie Richardson

She is best known for founding the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council and contributing to the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, created after she advocated to Robert F. Kennedy.

[4] In 1941, she participated in the Harlem bus boycotts organized by Adam Clayton Powell Jr.[5][6] Through the National Youth Administration agency and the help of African-American attorney Simon N. Hillman, Richardson got her first job as a secretary.

[10][4] Other prominent female activists involved with the CBCC included Shirley Chisholm, Almira Kennedy Coursey, and Lucille Mason Rose.

[10] In 1966, Richardson invited senators Robert F. Kennedy and Jacob Javitz to tour Bed-Stuy as emissaries for Lyndon B. Johnson's "war on poverty" initiatives.

[3] Richardson led Kennedy on the tour in February 1966, with the final stop being a community meeting at a local YMCA, where she is remembered as saying, "We've been studied to death, what we need is bricks and mortar!"

[10] Her ideas included fixing up historic brownstones using black-owned construction firms, building parks and planting trees, setting up financial cooperatives, and funding local businesses.

Its sister organization was the Bedford-Stuyvesant Development and Services Corporation (D&S), which consisted largely of high-profile white, male business leaders, lawyers, and financiers such as Eli Jacobs and André Meyer.

[13] Richardson and the other women from the CBCC faced animosity from R&R chair Thomas Russell Jones and Sonny Carson, both Black men that Kennedy hoped would connect the newly formed BSRC to the male youth of the neighborhood.