She was born in Atlanta, Georgia. While a student at Atlanta's Spelman College (the second oldest college for black women in the US) in 1974, she met actor Samuel L. Jackson, then at all-male Morehouse College, who would later become her husband. She and Jackson married in 1980. They have one child, freelance film and TV Producer Zoe Jackson, born in 1982. After her daughter's birth, Richardson stopped working regularly, because, she said: “We’d vowed to be an intact revolutionary black family. But it was very, very hard.”