January/February 2001

Recalling Flo Kennedy

"If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."
-Flo Kennedy

The Women's Liberation Movement lost a founder on Dec. 21, when Florynce Rae Kennedy died at the age of 84. Flo was a Black women's liberationist when everyone said the women's movement was all white; she was an activist for gay liberation when lesbians were being vilified even by feminists; and she was a civil rights activist her whole life, from her experience growing up Black in Kansas City, Mo., and seeing her father, a Pullman porter, scare off the Ku Klux Klan with a shotgun when they threatened to chase his family from their home in a mostly white neighborhood.

I first encountered Flo at the very first national women's liberation action-the demonstration against the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, N.J. in 1968. You couldn't miss her and you couldn't forget her. No one knew how to wear pink better than Flo Kennedy and her flamboyant style and her witty put-downs became part of her trademark.

Kennedy became a lawyer as a way to fight oppression, but she had to fight oppression to do it: "Dean Willis Reese, a lanky man who talks with a lisp in a shrill voice and walks with a switch, hastened to assure me that I was being refused admission to Columbia Law School in 1948, not because I was black, but because I was a woman. I leaned on the ethnic angle, saying that some of my more cynical friends thought I was being discriminated against because I was a Negro (we weren't saying 'black' in those days), and in any case it felt the same. Law-school admission opened the door just wide enough for me..." By the early 1960s, however, she wrote that she began to have "serious questions...whether practicing law would ever be an effective means of changing society or even of simple resistance to oppression."

In 1966 she represented Black militant H. Rap Brown, and set up the Media Workshop to fight racism and sexism in print and TV, including advertising; in 1969 she, with other feminist lawyers, challenged the constitutionality of New York State's anti-abortion law, helping to overturn it the following year; in 1969 she helped represent 21 Black Panthers on trial for conspiracy to commit bombings. They were acquitted.

Throughout, she was active against the war in Vietnam. In 1971 she helped found the Feminist Party so as to nominate Shirley Chisholm for president; and in 1973, with Margaret Sloan, she founded the National Black Feminist Organization. In 1976 she co-authored one of the first books on abortion, ABORTION RAP. She never stopped her thought and activism and lectured throughout the 1970s and '80s, despite a fused spine and other serious and painful health problems.

There is no question, as we face Bush in the White House, that Flo Kennedy will be terribly missed. Her incredible wit would have made mincemeat of George Dubya. She would demand that we do it without her. The struggle continues.

-Terry Moon