A Fighter For All Causes: Flo Kennedy ’51

Long before intersectionality became a watchword, Florynce Kennedy ’51 identified the confluence of race and gender discrimination, bringing to second-wave feminism a Black voice that was impossible not to hear. But first, she took on Columbia Law School.

Flo Kennedy speaking at a mic. Credit: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

Photo: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

Florynce “Flo” Kennedy GS ’48, LAW ’51 spoke out against racial and gender injustice during the protest-filled 1960s and ’70s. She was active in the civil rights and Black Power movements and in the fledgling National Organization for Women (NOW). She took on lightning rod cases, representing clients including the Black Panthers and the woman who shot Andy Warhol. When NOW became too mainstream for her, she founded the Feminist Party to support the presidential run of Rep. Shirley Chisholm in 1972. Like Bella Abzug ’45, Kennedy was fond of hats and almost always was photographed wearing a cowboy hat, sailor cap, or other headgear. She dressed to catch the eye, and she spoke in aphorisms designed to provoke. But her activism led to fundamental change, including New York becoming the first state in the nation to legalize abortion.

Read more about Flo Kennedy’s lifelong activism below. 

 

Florynce Kennedy GS ’48, LAW ’51 (1916–2000)

“I never stop to wonder why I’m not like other people. The mystery to me is why more people aren’t like me.”

1916

Kansas City Upbringing

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, on February 11, 1916, Kennedy grows up with a keen awareness of racism: From the family’s front porch, her parents faced down a mob of white men trying to force them out of the neighborhood.

1932–1943

Opposing Segregation

As a member of the Kansas City NAACP in the early 1930s, Kennedy helps organize a boycott of a Coca-Cola bottler that won’t hire Black workers. In 1942, Kennedy and her sister Grayce refuse to leave a segregated restaurant at a bus station in Missouri. Flo is dragged out by a white crowd, which causes lifelong injury to her back. Later, she sues the bus company and the restaurant and obtains damages. In 1943, Kennedy moves to New York with Grayce and studies pre-law at Columbia University School of General Studies (then the Program of Undergraduate Studies).

1948–1951

Demanding Equal Opportunity at Columbia Law

Kennedy applies to Columbia Law School and is not admitted. In her 1976 autobiography, Color Me Flo: My Hard Life and Good Times, she relates that she had discovered she was rejected not because of her race but because she was a woman; she responded that “whatever the reason was, it felt the same to me.” Columbia agrees to reverse its decision, and Kennedy enrolls. In 1950, she joins the Women’s Law Society (now the Columbia Law Women’s Association), which tries to help the handful of female students find jobs at a time when the Columbia Law career services office would not send women on job interviews. After graduating, Kennedy takes a job assisting the bookkeeper at Hartman, Sheridan and Tekulsky, a small Manhattan law firm.

Woman in cowboy hat pictured on the cover of a book

Learn More About Flo Kennedy ’51

Color Me Flo: My Hard Life and Good Times, by Flo Kennedy (Simon & Schuster, 1976)

Florynce "Flo" Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical, by Sherie M. Randolph (UNC Press, 2018)

Photo: Simon & Schuster