Though best remembered as an integration advocate in Arkansas, Lonergan Lorch’s foray into activism was defending women teachers in her native Boston in the ’40s
Donning sunglasses on her impossibly straight face, Elizabeth Eckford moved through the white mob to a bench. Followed, berated, and surrounded, the 16-year-old was alone after being pushed away by armed members of the National Guard in the infamous 1957 case of state resistance to integration at Little Rock Central High School. Among the white faces was a “short, white haired lady,” as the press called her, who fended off the mob and escorted Elizabeth away, riding the bus with her to safety.
“She’s scared!” the woman shouted at the crowd. “She’s just a little girl!”
Silent through the entire ordeal, Eckford, the youngest of the Little Rock Nine, didn’t know the woman, presuming her to be a communist, according to a 2015 interview. This is the legacy of Grace Lonergan Lorch, the white activist who helped Eckford at Little Rock High. Her actions gave hope to a horrible story of segregationist violence, actions which stuck in the public consciousness of both Little Rock and the country at large.
Lonergan Lorch’s intervention attracted burnt crosses and bombs to her home, invited the scrutiny of McCarthyism, and ultimately led to her leaving the country. Her and her husband’s activism pushed them from city to city, Little Rock being one of the last. It was her hometown of Boston, though, where her activism and organizing started, and where she took her first stand.
Two events in particular—her hearing before the Boston School Committee, and another one in Memphis, before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee—embodied the turbulent resistance to Lonergan Lorch’s radical activism.
Lonergan Lorch vs. the Boston School Committee
It was late afternoon in February 1944, and Lonergan Lorch took the stand. The seats behind her were filled with jeering crowds that spilled beyond the back of the courtroom into the corridors. Most of the five members of the Boston School Committee in front of Lonergan Lorch disagreed with her, and much of the crowd was there in opposition to her cause, drowning her out with hisses and calls to “shut up!”
The Dorchester teacher and president of the Boston Federation of Teachers was fired months earlier for marrying Lee Lorch, then a private in the Army who was stationed in Oklahoma. Marriage bans for women teachers were a longstanding practice that peaked in popularity in public schools across the country at the time. In the 20 years prior, school committees across Massachusetts were increasingly making official and enforcing rules against the employment of married teachers.
Each woman who unsuccessfully challenged their termination in court added to the legal precedent for the ban. Lonergan Lorch was the first to take such a publicized stand against the practice, and the pandemonium of the district-wide school committee hearing was irresistible to the news and public discourse.
Typically, married women were fired and subsequently rehired as temporary teachers, receiving $5 per day and little to no benefits. Lonergan Lorch’s union and the soon-to-launch Boston Teachers Union would continually fight against this treatment. Lonergan Lorch made $2,300 a year as a permanent teacher before her firing, about $42,000 today.
At the hearing, Lonergan Lorch was clear in her indictment of the current system, which she said was “allowing marriage for the privileged class but not for working women.” But the constant interruption, cries of “phooey” and “filibuster,” and the inability to speak over roaring opponents, forced Lonergan Lorch to cut short her prepared remarks.
The school committee voted to maintain the ban that day. It would stay intact for nearly a decade longer. This came less than two weeks after the Boston City Council defeated a similar proposal to lift the restriction, 17-1. Committee Chairman Patrick Foley, who supported marriage bans, said there were no disturbances at Lonergan Lorch’s hearing.
“You were the only one that I could see out of order,” Foley told her at a subsequent school committee meeting. The only committee member to support Lonergan Lorch, Clement Norton, was silent at the hearing, claiming that voicing his opinion would have gotten him into a fight.
Discrimination against married teachers
Nationally, Lonergan Lorch’s stand was unpopular; 87% of school boards had policies against hiring a married woman. The crowd that she addressed in 1944 was largely made up of women who supported the ban. Florence Birmingham, president of the Massachusetts Women’s Political Club, was one of those women. She made news years earlier for declaring that hiring married women was discriminatory against single women, since married women “chose a career when they took the marriage vows.”
Still, Lonergan Lorch had her supporters, especially within unions like her own. The Boston Globe ran several “What People are Talking About” columns in which people defended her speech. Among them, Harvard Teachers’ Union President Albert Coolidge wrote, “Such a ruling by the School Committee is as foolish and hypocritical as it is unfair.” A Maine resident quoted Lonergan Lorch: “Why is it that in all other walks of life marriage is a holy sacrament, but among teachers, a misdemeanor?”
Muriel Rossman, also of the BFT, called the case “a dramatic illustration of the inequality of the present ruling.” The BFT, already in the process of splitting into two rival unions, united to defend its president against the injustice of marriage bans, bringing it further into the press spotlight.
From NYC to the HUAC
Like the BFT, Lonergan Lorch was not long for Boston. In 1945 she and her husband Lee moved to New York City, where they invited a Black family to stay at their home for free in the then-segregated Stuyvesant Town. The act of kindness got her family evicted and Lee fired from both the City College of New York and later, Penn State, at the behest of MetLife, who co-owned “StuyTown” and whose policy of segregation the Lorches had violated.
The couple continued to move around, facing consequences for their activism wherever they went. They landed in Nashville, Tennessee in 1951, where Lonergan Lorch was briefly a teacher again (having been jobless since leaving Boston). She taught her daughter’s fifth-grade class in the Fisk Experimental School, which she did to keep her daughter out of the segregated white schools of the area. In 1954, after Brown v. Board of Education, the Lorches tried to send their daughter, Alice, to an all-Black school. They failed.
Alice Lorch Bartels later said it was this attempt that got Lee called before the House Un-American Activities Committee that year. He refused to answer their questions, invoking the fifth amendment, for which he was held in contempt of Congress. The mostly-white board of trustees at Fisk responded by firing Lee. McCarthyism had its grip on both of the Lorches, and three years later, the consequences of Lonergan Lorch’s Little Rock intervention would find her in front of HUAC’s Senate equivalent.
Facing segregationists in Memphis
It was October 1957, just weeks after Lonergan Lorch intervened at Little Rock High. She was, once again, appearing before an all-male government panel. Among them was Sen. James Eastland, a powerful segregationist and inheritor of his family’s cotton plantation.
Lonergan Lorch was called there last minute, and flew from Little Rock to the hearings in Memphis with her 13-year old daughter, who had never been on a plane before. She had no time to get legal representation and her subpoena did not say why she was summoned. Still, it was no surprise to her that her civil rights activism and union organizing got her there, and she’d prepared a statement.
The men towered above her on platforms and the seats behind her were once again filled with hecklers. In a 2017 interview with the Central Arkansas Library, Bartels said it reminded her of the Arthur Miller play “The Crucible,” her mother the victim of a witch hunt. Her inquisitors made up the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, known as the Eastland Committee, which targeted suspected communists.
Lonergan Lorch was one of several people subpoenaed, though because of the short notice, only around half of them showed up. She was the one the senators attacked most intensely, ending the hearing early after they had called her, said Bartels, who believed that the hearing was held just to go after Lonergan Lorch.
At one point, another of the accused—an old, near-deaf man—stood before the senators. The committee members asked their questions in a whisper and laughed at his refusal to answer. The cruelty nearly led Lonergan Lorch to tears, to her daughter’s shock. “My mother didn’t cry,” Bartels said. “Ever.”
Late on Monday, Oct. 27, 1957, Lonergan Lorch began to read her statement.
“It started off ‘I am here under protest,’” Bartels recalled. “That’s about as far as she ever got with it, and they started to yell at her.” Lonergan Lorch was berated by the senators, who shouted that she was a “troublemaker.” She became silent in the face of their harassment. Sen. Eastland asked her outright if she was a communist. Lonergan Lorch broke her silence: “We all know well what Mr. Eastland means by communism.”
“It was pandemonium, and it was deliberately made to be pandemonium,” Bartels said. “It was intimidation, it wasn’t made to get information.”
Targets of McCarthy and the FBI
Increased press from the hearing intensified the situation. People threw rocks at the Lorches’ residence in Little Rock and left burnt crosses on their lawn. One day in 1958, an unknown neighbor wedged a stick of dynamite underneath their garage door. Their daughter was bullied in school; she later recalled students writing that she was “‘an N-lover’” on the chalkboard, and some teachers leaving it up.
The family’s antiracism was branded with the communist label. In 1959, Lonergan Lorch was called a “Communist functionary” by Congressman Thomas Alford on the floor of the House of Representatives. Though the FBI identified her as a member of the Communist Party in 1943 and 1945, no other sources confirm her or her husband’s membership. Still, it’s likely the Lorches did have connections to the Communist Party given its active involvement in the struggle for civil and social rights.
Despite being widely recognized as a legend among mathematicians, Lee found it nearly impossible to find and keep a job in the US throughout his career. Through it all, his peers and students frequently defended him; his firing from Penn State in 1950 was met with a student petition of over 1,000 signatures and a letter from fellow educator and antisegregationist Albert Einstein. After a short stint at Wesleyan University in 1958, Lee said that “American universities, public and private, are still unwilling to offer stable positions to the victims of the Un-American and similar committees.”
Without financial stability and under the thumb of McCarthyism, Grace, Lee, and Alice Lorch fled to Canada in 1959. “She lost a lot,” Bartels said of her mother’s actions in Little Rock. “She was very much an American. She never really adapted to being in Canada.”
Lonergan Lorch died 15 years later, in 1974, nearly 20 years after her last teaching job. But the teacher and organizer in her never left.
“She didn’t like to fight,” Bartels said, on her mother’s personality in Canada, “but when it was a principle, she really was able to stand up.”
