The article below is from a recent issue of the New York Times. It's significant because it tells a story of heroism on the part of one white man and his family's fight against racism in both the US north and south. We normally only recall southern racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s; Lee's battles show that the north also had its share of racist institutional practices.
The other interesting aspect of this story is the role of Metropolitan Life, an insurance corporation that sat at the heart of the US establishment that claimed, during the cold war and especially in the 1950s and 1960s, that it stood for freedom, anti-colonialism and anti-racism. MetLife and its many chairmen and directors played significant roles in American national life and other significant organisations, such as the Council on Foreign Relations. Prominent among them was John J. McCloy, asst secretary of war during WWII, US High Commisoner for Germany after the war, the man responsible for organising the internment of japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, adviser to US presidents from then to Reagan: all the while claiming to stand with the most progressive forces in the world. And while the east coast establishment did belatedly discover anti-racism, its efforts stopped after the most superficial elements of American apartheid had been dismantled while the deeper institutional sources of racism remained largely intact.
Finally, it's interesting how Lee was cold-shouldered by black reformists and historically-black colleges that wanted to ingratiate themselves with that very establishment because Lee had communist sympathies.
He stood and sacrificed his life, which could have been very comfortable and outwardly successful, for his principle of the equality of people regardless of race and colour. Lee Lorch was, then, in his battle against segregation taking on a corporate and political establishment and should be saluted.
Lee
Lorch, a soft-spoken mathematician whose leadership in the campaign to
desegregate Stuyvesant Town, the gargantuan housing development on the
east side of Manhattan, helped make housing discrimination illegal
nationwide, died on Friday at a hospital in Toronto. He was 98.
His
daughter, Alice Lorch Bartels, confirmed the death. Mr. Lorch had
taught at York University in Toronto, and had lived in Toronto since
1968.
By
helping to organize tenants in a newly-built housing complex — and then
inviting a black family to live in his own apartment — Mr. Lorch played
a crucial role in forcing the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company,
which owned the development, to abandon its whites-only admissions
policy. His campaign anticipated the sit-ins and other civil rights
protests to come.
But
Mr. Lorch’s lifelong agitation for racial equality , not just in New York but later in Tennessee and Arkansas, led him into a life of professional turmoil and, ultimately, exile.
Photo
Lee Lorch; his wife, Grace;
and their daughter, Alice, at a news conference in 1949 concerning the
African-American family the Lorches invited to occupy their Stuyvesant
Town apartment.
Credit
Neal Boenzi/The New York Times
As he later put it, he had all the credentials: “A steady job, college teacher and all that. And, not black.”
In
1943, Frederick H. Ecker, the president of Metropolitan Life at the
time, told The New York Post: “Negroes and whites don’t mix.” If black
residents were allowed in the development, he added, “it would be to the
detriment of the city, too, because it would depress all surrounding
property.”
A
lawsuit against Metropolitan brought in 1947 by three black veterans,
and co-sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union, the American
Jewish Congress and the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, had
failed in the state courts ,
and no local laws prohibited such discrimination; the city had not only
supplied the land, and tax breaks, to the insurance company, but had
let it select tenants as it saw fit.
With
100,000 people vying for the 8,759 apartments on the 72-acre tract, no
boycott could possibly work. Any successful protest had to come from
inside: Polls showed that two-thirds of those admitted favored
integration. Mr. Lorch’s wartime experiences, like seeing black soldiers
forced to do the dirty work on his troop transport overseas, had
intensified his resolve.
Mr.
Lorch became vice chairman of a group of 12 tenants calling themselves
the Town and Village Tenants Committee to End Discrimination in
Stuyvesant Town.
“When you got into Stuyvesant Town, there was a serious moral dilemma,” he recalled in
a 2010 interview with William Kelly
of the Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village Video Project. “In the
concentration camps of Nazi Germany, people had seen the end results of
racism.”
Some
1,800 tenants eventually joined the group. “Stuyvesant Town is a grand
old town; but you can’t get in if your skin is brown,” went one of its
chants, wrote Charles V. Bagli of The New York Times in a book about
Stuyvesant Town’s history. A group of 3,500 residents petitioned Mayor
William O’Dwyer to help eliminate the “no Negroes allowed” policy, and
supported anti-discrimination legislation before the City Council.
But
Metropolitan Life held firm. And in early 1949, Mr. Lorch paid the
price. Despite the backing of a majority of colleagues in his
department, the appointments committee at City College blocked his
promotion, effectively forcing him to leave.
Mr.
Lorch was “unquestionably a fine scholar and a promising teacher,” an
alumni committee later concluded, but some colleagues “regarded him,
rightly or wrongly, as an irritant and a potential troublemaker.” Mr.
Lorch himself charged that the college “protects bigots and fires those
who fight bigotry.”
The
New York branch of the N.A.A.C.P. and other groups protested the
decision to the Board of Higher Education, to no avail. In September
1949, Mr. Lorch found a teaching job at Pennsylvania State University,
but his reputation preceded him; upon arriving at the campus, he was
taken directly to the university’s acting president.
“He
wanted me to explain this stuff about Stuyvesant Town — that they’d
been getting phone calls from wealthy alumni essentially wanting to know
why I had been hired and how quickly I could be fired,” he recalled in
the 2010 interview.
Mr.
Lorch’s wife and daughter had remained in the Stuyvesant Town
apartment, at 651 East 14th St., and he and his wife soon invited a
black family, Hardine and Raphael Hendrix and their young son, to live
there for the entire academic year.
Metropolitan
Life refused to accept the Lorches’ $76 rent check, and began devising
ways to get them out. At Penn State, Mr. Lorch was denied reappointment.
Accommodating the Hendrixes, a college official told him, was “extreme,
illegal and immoral, and damaging to the public relations of the
college.”
The
decision brought protests from Penn State students, Albert Einstein,
the American Association of University Professors and the American
Mathematical Society, as well as from The New York Times and The Daily
Worker, the paper of the Communist Party U.S.A.
The
Worker argued that Mr. Lorch, who was often linked to the Communist
Party, was “an all-too-rare sort of bird among academic circles these
days. He actually believes in the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees
the Negro people equality! And he not only believes in it, but stands up
and fights for what he believes. Amazing!”
In
June 1950, the United States Supreme Court declined to review the
insurance company’s exclusionary policy. Succumbing to political and
economic pressure, Metropolitan Life admitted three black families that
year.
But it also moved to evict Mr. Lorch and 34 other protesting tenants. They dug in.
“We
had decided — and this was the general feeling on the committee — we
weren’t going to go quietly, that we would resist, they’d have to throw
us out by force,” Mr. Lorch recalled.
In
the meantime, in September 1950, he accepted a new academic post,
becoming one of two white professors at Fisk University, the
historically black institution in Nashville, Tenn. His wife, a longtime
activist herself — she had led the Boston School Committee in its effort
to stop women from being fired as teachers the moment they married, as
she had been — returned to Stuyvesant Town, where the Teamsters union
supplied protection for protesting tenants.
In
January 1952, as tenants barricaded themselves in their apartments and
picketed outside City Hall and Metropolitan Life’s headquarters, the
company compromised: Mr. Lorch and two other organizers would move out,
but the Hendrixes got to stay.
Seven
years later, only 47 blacks lived in Stuyvesant Town. But the
frustration the campaign helped unleash culminated in the Fair Housing
Act of 1968, which prohibited discrimination in the sale, rental, or
financing of housing.
At
Fisk, Mr. Lorch taught three of the first blacks ever to receive
doctorates in mathematics. But there, too, his activism, like his
attempt to enroll his daughter in an all-black school and refusal to
answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee about
his Communist ties, got him in trouble. In 1955, he was again let go.
Only tiny Philander Smith College, an all-black institution in Little
Rock, Ark., would hire him, and then only when it could find no one
else.
Continue reading the main story
It
was Grace Lorch who made the headlines the next year, for comforting
Elizabeth Eckford of the Little Rock Nine after Ms. Eckford’s walk
through a group of angry hecklers outside Little Rock Central High
School, a moment which was captured in
a famous photograph .
Mr. Lorch, who had become an official with the Arkansas chapter of the
N.A.A.C.P., was working behind the scenes, accompanying the black
students to school, then tutoring them as they awaited admission to the
high school.
Once
more, whites abused the Lorches for their activities, evicting them
from their apartment, harassing their young daughter, burning a cross on
their lawn and placing dynamite in their garage. And black leaders,
mindful of Mr. Lorch’s Communist associations, kept their distance.
“Thurgood
Marshall has been busy poisoning as many people as he can against us,”
Mr. Lorch complained in October 1957, referring to the lawyer who was
leading the N.A.A.C.P.’s desegregation campaign in the courts, and who
would later become a justice of the United States Supreme Court. The
group’s field secretary, Clarence Laws, wrote to Mr. Lorch: “The best
contribution you could make to the cause of full citizenship for Negroes
in Arkansas at this time would be to terminate, in writing, your
affiliation with the Little Rock Branch, N.A.A.C.P.”
When,
at the end of the school year, Philander Smith declined to renew Mr.
Lorch’s appointment, it was official: No American college would have
him. So in 1959, he moved his family to Canada — first to the University
of Alberta and then, in 1968, to York University, until he retired in
1985.
Lee
Lorch was born on Sept. 20, 1915, at a home on West 149th Street and
Broadway in Manhattan, to Adolph Lorch and Florence Mayer Lorch. His wife, the former Grace Lonergan, died in 1974. Mr. Lorch is survived by his daughter, Ms. Bartels; two granddaughters; and a sister, Judith Brooks.
Mr.
Lorch was often honored by his fellow mathematicians. In 1990, he
received an honorary degree from the City University of New York.
In
his 2010 interview with Mr. Kelly, Mr. Lorch insisted that it was his
wife and daughter, not he, who had paid the greatest price for his
principles. Asked if he would do anything differently, he paused. “More
and better of the same,” he replied.
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