Celebrity Deathwatch: Flo Kennedy, Black Activist & Lawyer, 84

["Deathwatch Central" <cdw@slick.org>]

http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/12/23/obit.kennedy.ap/index.html

Flo Kennedy, flamboyant black activist and lawyer, dies at 84

December 23, 2000
Web posted at: 9:41 a.m. EST (1441 GMT)

NEW YORK (AP) -- Florynce Rae Kennedy, a flamboyant lawyer who fought for
civil rights and feminism with trademark flair, has died. She was 84.

Known simply as Flo and recognized in her cowboy hat and pink sunglasses,
Kennedy fought vigorously for abortion rights, represented Black Panthers
and joined feminist icon Gloria Steinem on the lecture circuit.

She was born the second of five daughters on Feb. 11, 1916, in Kansas City,
Missouri. Her father was a Pullman porter who with a shotgun once drove
members of the Ku Klux Klan off his land in a mostly white neighborhood.

After high school, Kennedy helped organize a boycott against a local
Coca-Cola bottler who refused to hire black truck drivers.

She then moved to New York with a sister and, ignoring pleas to become a
teacher, took pre-law courses at Columbia University. Her application at the
law school was refused. The rejection was not based on race, administrators
said, but on gender. She threatened to sue and graduated in 1951.

Kennedy practiced law after graduation, but she soon grew dissatisfied with
the profession, and turned to political activism, setting up an organization
called the Media Workshop in 1966 to fight racism in journalism and
advertising.

The same year, she represented civil rights leader H. Rap Brown. Two years
later, she fought the Roman Catholic church for what she viewed as
interfering with abortion. In 1969, she organized feminist lawyers to
challenge New York State's abortion law, an action credited with helping
influence the Legislature to liberalize abortion the next year.

Through the 1970s, she joined Steinem on the lecture circuit, sharing her
radical views on feminism and civil rights for around $3,500 a session.

Kennedy was called "the biggest, loudest and, indisputably, the rudest mouth
on the battleground where feminist activists and radical politics join in
mostly common cause" by People magazine in 1974.

She is survived by three sisters.

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may
not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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