Ishmael Flory

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section needs copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone or spelling.
You can assist by editing it now. A how-to guide is available. (June 2007)

Ishmael Flory (July 4, 1907-February 4, 2004) was a civil rights activist, trade union organizer, and Communist Party (CPUSA) leader in Illinois.

1 Biography
2 Civil rights activism
3 Political life
4 Sources
5 References

[edit] Biography

Ishmael was the youngest of nine children born to Samuel and Leola Hancock Flory in Lake Charles, Louisiana. In 1918, the Flory family moved to Los Angeles, where Ishmael graduated from Jefferson High School. Flory entered the University of California, Los Angeles in 1927. After taking a couple of years off in order to work, he received his degree from University of California, Berkeley in 1933.

[edit] Civil rights activism

After graduation from UC Berkeley, Flory was offered a fellowship from the Fisk University master’s program in sociology, which he accepted. While a graduate student at Fisk, he was involved in protesting the lynching of Cordie Cheek, a Nashville teenager. He also organized a protest that resulted in his being asked to leave the University. This episode was recounted in an essay written by Langston Hughes in 1934:

I see in our papers where Fisk University, that great center of Negro Education and of Jubilee fame, has expelled Ishmael Flory, a graduate student from California on a special honor scholarship, because he dared organize a protest against the University singers appearing in a Nashville Jim Crow theater where colored people must go up a back alley to sit in the gallery. Probably also the University resented his organizing, through the Denmark Vesey Forum, a silent protest parade denouncing the lynching of Cordie Cheek, who was abducted almost at the very gates of the University. —Langston Hughes, Cowards from the Colleges

In 1939, Flory moved to Chicago where he became head of Joint Council of Dining Car Employees; he became organizer for the Mine, Mill and smelter Workers and was elected president of Chicago chapter of the National Negro Congress. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, he worked with many civil rights activists. Some of the many included Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois and William L. Patterson. He was one of many activists to help integrate major league baseball.

In the 1960’s, Flory co-founded the African American Heritage Association.

[edit] Political life

Flory had been a member of the Communist Party since the 1930s, and was the head of the CPUSA in Illinois. He ran for Governor of Illinois on the CPUSA ticket in 1972 and 1976, and ran for U.S. Senate in 1974 and 1984.^[1]