Flo Kennedy

[Bright Moments]

i came accross this on the web and thought that i would share!

Flo Kennedy

Flo Kennedy, who called herself "radicalism’s rudest mouth," died in New York on December 21, 2000 at the age of 84. She was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1916, one of 5 daughters, in a mostly white, very poor neighborhood. As a little girl, she saw her father, Wiley, stand up to the Klu Klux Klan who stood in front of their home, a shack, by getting a gun and threatening to shoot.

Unable to go to college immediately after high school, she ran a hat shop in Kansas City and when the local Coca-Cola bottler refused to hire black truck-drivers she helped organize a boycott. In 1942 she enrolled as a pre-law student at New York City’s Columbia University. She graduated with an A average, but still couldn’t get into law school -- because she was a woman they said, but Flo suspected it was because she was black. The threat of a lawsuit won her admittance in 1948, one of eight women, and the first African American admitted to Columbia law school. She went into her own practice in 1953.

Flo represented former Black Panther H. Rapp Brown. She became the lawyer for the Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker estates, and successfully fought to recoup lost royalties. But she was so disillusioned with the law after that battle that she gave up her practice and became a full time activist. She was married for a short time in the 1950’s to science fiction author Charlie Dudley Dye, but they divorced and Flo never remarried or had children.

In 1966 Kennedy founded the Media Workshop to combat racism in the news media and advertising. She founded the feminist party which nominated black Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York for president in 1972. She led various boycotts during the 60’s and 70’s and was arrested at CBS headquarters for refusing to leave the building. She helped stage a "pee-in" at Harvard University to protest the lack of women’s restrooms. In 1969, she was a member of the legal team which was instrumental in liberalizing the New York State Abortion laws. (She was co-author of Abortion Rap). In 1981 she wrote an influential handbook on sex harassment, Sex Discrimination in Employment: An Analysis and Guide for Practitioner and Student. In 1979 she was a featured speaker at the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, where she infamously changed the words to an old standard to sing "Nothing could be sweeter than to find out that Anita [bryant] is a lesbian."

In 1997, after 2 strokes and other health problems, she still pressed a sexual harassment case against the National Urban League, one of the largest civil rights groups in the country.

Well, fortunately Flo wasn’t a poet (though she did write an autobiography, "Color Me Flo"), so we won’t be violating our no-poetry rule. But she was one of the most acerbically witty feminist loudmouths of our time, so here are some memorable quotes:

"The spending of our tax dollars by the Pentagon represents the greatest social disease of our country; I call it Pentagonorrhea."

"Always do direct action. If you are lying in a ditch with a truck on your ankles, you don’t send somebody out to find out how much it weighs – you get it off."

"I don’t know why anybody would want to give anybody else a blow job, but in my opinion, it is not for me or the church or anybody else, to tell people which of these rather unaesthetic activities they ought to be involved in."

"Sports is one of the major preoccupations of our society -- I call it ‘jockocracy’ -- and it is fascinating to note the preoccupations of our society with balls. Tennis balls, footballs, basketballs -- there shouldn’t be a season without some balls to focus on."

"If men got pregnant, abortion would be sacrament."

(This tribute was largely cribbed from one by Robin Tyler, who was apparently a friend of hers.)

Edited May 15, 2007 by Bright Moments

[AllenLowe]

I met Flo Kennedy sometime in the 1990s when she came to speak to a feminist group at Yale. She was a riot, quite profane, full of gratuitous sexual references and remarks that her audience clearly did not know how to take - plenty of blow job remarks, as a matter of fact.

She had been Al Haig's lawyer, so I wanted to talk to her about his murder case, and her comments were intersting, to say the least (though superceded, unfortunately, by the new and very important Haig book that recently was issued by Cadence)-

Edited May 15, 2007 by AllenLowe

[paul secor]

I remember hearing Flo Kennedy regularly on WBAI in NYC in the late 60's/early 70's. At one point she said that the station had too many music programs and needed more political programming. I felt just the opposite was true.

[Christiern]

I knew Flo very well. We first met when Timme Rosenkrantz and I rented an apartment from Louis McKay, in 1961. She being the attorney for the Billie Holiday estate, I had to pay the rent to her, which I did at her office. Later, Timme and I found out that Louis was over-charging us and that he really didn't own the apartment--but that's another story.

Flo was, indeed, a character. In the mid-seventies, for about a year and a half, she stopped speaking to me. It turned out that she did not like the fact that I (in my Bessie Smith bio) corrected the myth re Bessie's death. "But I found proof that contradicted the old story," I said. "I know you did," she replied, but you should have kept it to yourself."

Apropos blow jobs, I have a video tape of a weekly show I once did where she says, "Nobody ever died fromn a blow job." Her sister, a probation officer, who also was a guest, chimed in. "You are wrong, Flo," she said. "We actually had a case where that happened."

I did not ask her to elaborate.

Flo and some of her feminist colleagues made asses out of the CBS crew at the Democratic Convention, Miami Beach, 1972. A documentary film, "The Year of the Woman", was shot there by an all-female crew, but it was never released. Still, I'm sure it's kicking around, somewhere. Look for it and check out the confrontation with Mike Wallace, et al.

[Aggie87]

Later, Timme and I found out that Louis was over-charging us and that he really didn't own the apartment--but that's another story.

Not a bad racket there, getting paid rent money (and over-charging at that!) for property you don't own. I wonder how many other apartments he "owned".