Florynce Kennedy (1916-2000) was a lawyer, activist, advocate, and writer who fought fiercely for decades, both on the ground and in the courts, in furtherance of women’s, civil, reproductive, and human rights.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Our woman of the day was a lawyer, activist, advocate, and writer who fought fiercely for decades, both on the ground and in the courts, in furtherance of women’s, civil, reproductive, and human rights. During a long and storied career, she famously used tactics like flamboyant dress and outrageous statements to draw attention to the vital causes to which she dedicated her life. Please welcome Florynce Kennedy.
Florynce Rae Kennedy, or Flo, was born on February 11, 1916 in Kansas City, Missouri to Wiley and Zella Kennedy. Wiley made his living as a Pullman porter and later started a taxi company.
The Kennedy family experienced poverty during the Great Depression, and racism from the local Ku Klux Klan after buying a house in a majority white neighborhood, but Flo nevertheless described her childhood as an incredibly happy one. Her parents were exceptionally supportive of their daughters. Flo once said, "My parents gave us a fantastic sense of security and worth. By the time the bigots got around to telling us that we were nobody, we already knew we were somebody."
Flo was an excellent student and graduated at the top of her class. After high school, she and her sisters opened a hat shop together in Kansas City. Flo also started getting involved in local political protests. She helped organize a boycott against a local Coca Cola bottler who refused to hire Black delivery drivers.
In 1942, Flo’s mother Zella died of cancer. Afterwards, Flo and her sister Grayce moved to New York City and rented an apartment together in Harlem.
In 1944, Flo started at Columbia University where she majored in pre-law. After graduation, Flo applied to Columbia Law School, but was denied admission. According to the Dean of the Law School, the denial was a result of Flo being a woman, not because she was Black. Flo wasn’t buying it and threatened to sue, at which point the admissions board changed its mind. She was one of only eight women, and the only Black woman, in her law school class.
After graduating in 1951, Flo joined a Manhattan law firm before starting her own practice in 1954. During this period, she represented both the Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker estates in attempts to recoup money owed by their record companies. Though Flo was eventually successful in both cases, she found her experience running up again and again against the legal system to be incredibly disheartening.
In 1957, Flo married a Welsh writer named Charles Dye who was 10 years her junior. He suffered from severe alcoholism and died a few years later from related complications.
While continuing to practice law, Flo became heavily involved in political activism in New York City. In 1966, she started the Media Workshop, an organization that advocated against racist representations of Black people in media and the lack of Black representation in advertising.
At one protest outside of a major advertising company, Flo and the other activists were eventually invited upstairs to state their case. This experience informed one of Flo’s favorite rules for successful activism: “'When you want to get to the suites, start in the streets.” From then on, she focused on using disruptive and attention-grabbing protest methods and always tried to focus on the biggest possible targets, generally those who contributed to or were perpetrators of systemic discrimination rather than discreet incidents.
During the late 1960s, Flo transitioned to doing mostly legal work of a political nature. She represented Civil Rights leader H. Rap Brown, Assata Shakur, and in 1969 she represented 21 members of the Black Panther party accused of conspiracy to commit a series of bombings in New York City. They were all acquitted.
Flo was also a major advocate for women’s reproductive rights. She spearheaded a lawsuit against the Roman Catholic Church claiming that their campaign against abortion constituted a violation of the separation of church and state. She also brought a lawsuit, along with a handful of other feminist attorneys, against the State of New York related to its abortion laws at the time. This suit led to legislative changes liberalizing those abortion laws. The famous line, "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament," is often attributed to Flo, though Gloria Steinem insists that it actually comes from “an old Irish woman taxi driver” who she and Flo once ran into in Boston.
In the late 1960s, Flo began giving lectures across the country on civil, women’s, and reproductive rights. After starting the Feminist Party in 1971 with Gloria Steinem and a number of other leading feminists of the day, she and Steinem went on the college lecture circuit together. Steinem referred to the two of them during that period as the ''the Thelma and Louise of the 70's.''
In 1973, Flo co-founded the National Black Feminist Organization which worked at the intersection of race and women’s rights on issues like reproductive rights that disproportionately target and effect Black women. She continued to be heavily active in on-the-ground protesting where she was always highly visible in her signature cowboy hat and pink sunglasses.
In 1974, People Magazine called Flo ''the biggest, loudest and, indisputably, the rudest mouth on the battleground where feminist activists and radical politics join in mostly common cause.'' She wore this description like a badge of honor.
Flo died on December 21, 2000 in New York City. Upon her passing, former New York City mayor David Dinkins said of Flo, ''If you found a cause for the downtrodden of somebody being abused someplace, by God, Flo Kennedy would be there,''
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