Florynce "Flo" Kennedy (February 11, 1916 – December 22, 2000), was a U.S. lawyer, activist, civil rights advocate, and feminist.
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Florynce Rae Kennedy was born in Kansas City to an African American family. Her father was a Pullman porter, and later had a taxi business. She had a happy childhood, full of support from her parents, though she was exposed to racism in her mostly white neighborhood, and experienced poverty in the depression. She graduated top of her high school class. After high school, she worked many jobs including owning a hat shop and operating elevators. After the death of her mother, Flo (as she was called) left Kansas for New York, moving to an apartment in Harlem with her sister Grace.
Of the move to New York she commented, "I really didn’t come here to go to school, but the schools were here, so I went." In 1942 she began classes at Columbia University. She majored in pre-law. However, when she applied to law school in 1948, she was refused admission. In her autobiography Flo wrote, "The Associate Dean Willis Reese, told me I had been rejected not because I was a Black but because I was a woman. So I wrote him a letter saying that whatever the reason was, it felt the same to me, and some of my more cynical friends thought I had been discriminated against because I was Black."[1] Flo met with the Dean and threatened to sue the school. They admitted her.
She graduated from law school in 1951. By 1954 she had opened her own office, doing matrimonial work, and some assigned criminal cases. She was a member of The Young Democrats. In 1956, she formed a legal partnership, which proved disastrous, and she was left with huge debts. Her partner had represented Billie Holiday, helping her avoid drug charges during her final days. Florynce then came to represent Holiday's estate, and also that of Charlie Parker. She made waves in her attempts to recover owed monies for these estates.
She worked as an activist for feminism and civil rights, and the law cases she took on increasingly tended to be related to these causes.
In the 1970s Kennedy traveled the lecture circuit with writer Gloria Steinem. If a man asked the pair if they were lesbians — a stereotype of feminists at the time — Flo would famously answer, "Are you my alternative?"[2] She was an early member of the National Organization for Women, but left then in 1970, dissatisfied with their approach to change. In 1971 she founded the Feminist Party, which nominated Shirley Chisholm for president. She also helped found the Women's Political Caucus.
She is known for her pro-choice activism on abortion, writing a book called Abortion Rap, and stating that "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." In 1972, Flo filed tax evasion charges with the Internal Revenue Service against the Catholic Church, saying that their pro-life campaign violated the separation of church and state.
On the side of civil rights, Flo established the Media Workshop in 1966 to picket and lobby the media over their representation of Black people. She stated that she would lead boycotts of major advertisers if they didn't feature black people in their ads. She attended all three Black Power conferences and represented H. Rap Brown and the Black Panthers.
Flo was known for her flamboyant dress (often in cowboy hats and pink sunglasses) and attitude. Once, to protest the lack of female bathrooms at Harvard, she led a mass urination on the grounds. When asked about this, she said "I'm just a loud-mouthed middle-aged colored lady with a fused spine and three feet of intestines missing and a lot of people think I'm crazy. Maybe you do too, but I never stop to wonder why I'm not like other people. The mystery to me is why more people aren't like me." In 1974, People magazine wrote that she was "The biggest, loudest and, indisputably, the rudest mouth on the battleground."
Besides her legal and activist work, she also acted in two films. In The Landlord (1970), she played Enid the Maid. In the independent political drama Born In Flames (1983), she played Zella (credited as "Flo Kennedy").
In 1976, she wrote an autobiography called Color Me Flo: My Hard Life and Good Times, which talked about her life and extensive career. At the end of her life, she used a wheelchair. She died 21 December 2000, at the age of 84.