Richardson (born June 10, 1954) is an American Harvard-trained lawyer and the founder and executive director of "The HistoryMakers", a national, 501(c)(3) non-profit educational institution based in Chicago, Illinois, committed to preserving, developing, and providing easy access to an internationally recognized archival collection of thousands of African-American video oral histories.
With more than 2,000 life oral history interviews with well-known and unsung African Americans, The HistoryMakers is the nation's largest African-American oral history collection of its kind.
Before founding The HistoryMakers in 1999, Richardson was a successful cable television executive and corporate lawyer.
She was the founder and CEO of both SCTN Teleproductions, which served as the local production arm for C-SPAN, and Shop Chicago Inc., which set standards for regional TV home-shopping ventures and received international attention with its combination of home shopping and infomercial formats.