Carolyn Gage
  • Home
    • Butch Visibility Project
    • Bio and Vitae
    • Endorsements
    • Production History
    • Catalog of Books and Plays
    • Online Essays >
      • Lesbian Culture and History Essays
      • Theatre Essays
      • Feminist Essays
      • Reviews
    • Interviews >
      • Audio/Video Interviews
      • Print Interviews
  • Books and CD's
    • Gage Play Anthologies
    • Feminist Thought And Spirituality
    • Lesbian Theatre
    • CD's and DVD's
    • Anthologies with Other Authors
    • Journal Anthologies
  • Plays
    • One-Woman Shows >
      • The Second Coming of Joan of Arc
      • La Seconde Venue de Jeanne d'Arc
      • Joana Dark - a re-volta
      • Giovanna d'Arco - la rivolta
      • ВТОРОТО ПРИШЕСТВИЕ НА ЖАНА Д’АРК (Bulgarian tranlsation of The Second Coming of Joan
      • 贞德再临_中文 (Mandarin translation of The Second Coming of Joan of Arc)
      • The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman
      • Crossing the Rapelands
    • Musicals >
      • The Amazon All-Stars
      • Babe! An Olympian Musical
      • How to Write a Country-Western Song
      • Leading Ladies
      • Women on the Land
    • Full-Length Plays >
      • The Abolition Plays
      • The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women
      • AXED!
      • Black Star
      • Coming About
      • Esther and Vashti
      • The Goddess Tour
      • In McClintock's Corn
      • Sappho in Love
      • The Spindle
      • Stigmata
      • Thanatron
      • Ugly Ducklings
    • One-Acts >
      • Ain't Got No - I Got Life
      • The A-Mazing Yamashita and the Millennial Gold-Diggers
      • Artemisia and Hildegard
      • Battered on Broadway
      • Bite My Thumb
      • The Boundary Trial of John Proctor
      • Cookin' with Typhoid Mary
      • The Countess and the Lesbians
      • The Drum Lesson
      • Easter Sunday
      • Entr'acte or The Night Eva Le Gallienne Was Raped
      • The Enunciation to Mary
      • The Evil That Men Do: The Story of Thalidomide
      • Female Nude Seated
      • The Gage and Mr. Comstock
      • The Greatest Actress Who Ever Lived
      • Harriet Tubman Visits A Therapist
      • Head in the Game
      • Hermeneutic Circlejerk
      • Heterosexuals Anonymous
      • Jane Addams and the Devil Baby
      • A Labor Play
      • Lace Curtain Irish
      • Lighting Martha
      • Little Sister
      • Louisa May Incest
      • Mason-Dixon
      • The Obligatory Scene
      • The P.E. Teacher
      • The Parmachene Belle
      • The Pele Chant
      • Planchette
      • The Poorly-Written Play Festival
      • Radicals
      • The Rules of the Playground
      • St. Frances and the Fallen Angels
      • Souvenirs from Eden
      • Starpattern
      • 'Til the Fat Lady Sings
      • Valerie Solanas At Matteawan
    • Short Short Plays >
      • 52 Pickup
      • At Sea
      • Black Eye
      • El Bobo
      • Brett Hears the Mountain Gods
      • Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter
      • The Clarity of Pizza
      • The Great Fire
      • Hrotsvitha's Vision
      • The Intimacy Coordinator
      • The Ladies' Room
      • Miss Le Gallienne Announces the New Season
      • On the Other Hand
      • Patricide
      • The Pickle Play
    • Dramatic Adaptations >
      • Amy Lowell: In Her Own Words
      • Brett Remembers
      • Deep Haven
      • El Bobo (one-act play)
      • El Bobo (short screenplay)
      • Emily & Sue >
        • Touring Production of Emily & Sue >
          • The Creative Team
          • Director's Vision
          • Adaptor's notes
          • Open Me Carefully
      • Georgia and the Butch
      • I Have Come to Show You Death
      • Speak Fully The One Awful Word
      • We Too Are Drifting (Screenplay)
    • Special Index: Plays That Deal with Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls
    • Special Index: Women's History Plays
    • Special Index: Romantic Plays with Happy Endings
  • Touring Work
    • Performances >
      • Lace Curtain Irish
      • Crossing the Rapelands
      • The Parmachene Belle (performance)
      • Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter (performance)
      • Gage on Stage
    • Lectures >
      • Lizzie Borden and Lesbian Theatre
      • The Secret Life of Lesbians
      • Paradigms and Paradigm-Shifting
      • When Sex Is Not the Metaphor For Intimacy
      • Meeting the Ghost of Hamlet's Father
      • A Theatrical Journey Through Maine's Lesbian History
      • Tara and Other Lies
      • Teena Brandon's Inconvenient Truth
    • Workshops >
      • The Art of the Dramatic Monologue
      • Acting Lesbian
      • Interrupting Racism: A Workshop
      • Playwriting Techniques for Poets and Fiction Writers
      • Ugly Ducklings Workshop
    • Residencies
    • The Lesbian Tent Revival >
      • Testimonials
      • The Lesbian Tent Revival Radio Hour Podcasts
      • The Lesbian Tent Revival Sermon on Dying Well
      • Sermons for a Lesbian Tent Revival
      • Supplemental Sermons
      • Hotter Than Hell
      • The Synapse Pendant
    • Cauldron & Labrys >
      • A Brief History
      • Upcoming Productions
  • Calendar
    • Productions of Gage's Work and Appearances
  • Contact/Storefront
    • Privacy Policy
  • Blog

Florynce "Flo" Kennedy

4/28/2016

1 Comment

 
PictureYes! Finally! A biography about this amazing woman!
Florynce Kennedy… The first and only time I ever saw her on camera was in the cameo role of "Zella Wylie" in the Lizzie Borden film, Born in Flames. A kind of women’s liberation “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Zella mentors the young female militants who are engaged in overthrowing the patriarchy and taking over the world in this feminist, science fiction classic.  Here’s "Zella," addressing an age-old feminist concern:
 
“All oppressed people have a right to violence. It’s like the right to pee: you’ve gotta have the right place, you’ve gotta have the right time, you’ve gotta have the appropriate situation. And believe me, this is the appropriate situation.”

 
And Florynce would know. She had organized a "pee-in" at Harvard University to protest the lack of women’s bathrooms.

Picture
Flo as "Zella Wylie," in Born in Flames. She apparently named her own character, choosing the first name of her mother, "Zella," and that of her father, "Wiley."
PictureValerie Solanas arrested.
In the 1960's Florynce was everywhere. Seriously, everywhere. Early in the decade, she became the attorney for the estates of Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker, discovering that their publishers had been collecting royalties without notifying the artists or their estates. Understanding the need to fight media fire with media fire, she contacted Adam Clayton Powell, the highest profile African American member of Congress. It was a shrewd move to politicize the fight, and she won. But it signaled another episode in her progressive disenchantment with the practice of law as a path to social justice. Her life experiences as a Black woman prior to law school had already, in her words, set her up for an “appalling lack of success in accepting, embracing, utilizing or even recognizing such valuable legal techniques as how to walk past a pool of blood and say, ‘what a beautiful shade of red.’”
 
Florynce would step up as legal advisor to Valerie Solanas after her attempted assassination of Andy Warhol in 1968. Solanas was insisting on conducting her own defense, and the first order of business was to prove to the courts that her mentee was not crazy. This required a writ of habeas corpus, because Solanas had been taken to a psychiatric hospital.

Picture
Florynce decided that the best defense was a good offense, and to that end, she placed the judge and the court on trial for sexism. When the judge attempted to reprimand her for pants in the courtroom, she didn’t miss a beat: “Well, your honor, you are there in a dress. How can you question me?” 
 
She was also an attorney involved with the landmark Abramowicz vs. Lefkowitz case, arguing for women’s right to safe abortions. This was the first case where women who had been victimized by illegal abortionists were called to testify. Prior to this, it had only been physicians, and this trial established valuable precedent for the later Roe V. Wade case. Florynce went on to publish a collection of some of this testimony, titling it Abortion Rap.
 
Florynce not only called out the National Organization for Women for their failure to stand with Valerie Solanas in her trial, but she would also call out the Black Power movement for its opposition to abortion rights, at a time when the male leadership was framing it as a genocidal conspiracy against women of color.

PictureFlo at a 1972 N.O.W. march.
And here, let me pause to say something about why so little has been written about a woman who was so aggressively and so outrageously present for nearly every social justice movement, every nationally prominent protest, and every media-circus courtroom trial in a decade of unprecedented historical unrest and reform. Why has it taken over a half-century for a comprehensive biography of her life to be written?
 
Author and tireless researcher Sherie M. Randolph gives us the key to solving this conundrum. In a word: intersectionality. Yeah, that thing that was supposed to have been absent from the 1960's. Well, Flo Kennedy was the Empress of Intersectionality, and, for that, she paid a price.
 
In an era where the media was identifying Women’s Liberation as a white women’s movement, and Black Power as an African American men’s movement, Kennedy was busy calling out the former on their racism and the latter on their sexism. She was dragging feminists from the National Organization for Women to Black Power conferences that specifically banned whites. She was arranging with a Black-owned resort in Atlantic City for housing and meals for the predominantly white protestors at the legendary 1968 Miss America Pageant.

Single-issue organizing was difficult enough, but Florynce wanted everyone to see the connections between the many oppressions and to follow her example in showing up for them all. As a result, historians found it easier to focus on less intersectional--and less controversial leaders. This reductive approach to history has led to the erasure of the anti-racist work of early feminists and the anti-misogynist work in the early Black Freedom Movement... and the erasure of Florynce Kennedy.

Picture
At a protest rally in support of Joann Little, a young African American accused of murdering her jailor-rapist in 1974.
Picture
In 1973, Florynce became one of the attorneys defending Assata Shakur. Prior to this, she had organized fundraisers and boycotts in support of Angela Davis, the Soledad Brothers, and various anti-war protestors. Noting the absence of white feminists in these struggles, she remarked, “As far as black women are concerned, I would certainly be most appalled if they all rushed into the women’s movement. It’s clear that most black people should be involved with the problems of the black liberation struggle.”
 
Interestingly, she also served as a defense attorney for Jerry Ray, the brother of James Earl Ray, convicted for the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. He was before a Senate sub-committee, and Florynce used the occasion to place the government on trial for conspiracy. Jerry had been accused of robbing a bank with his brother, in order to explain the large sums of money that had funded James’ elaborate escape. In the end, the committee decided that James Earl Ray could not have acted alone, but they rejected any theory of government involvement. (“What a beautiful shade of red...?”)

PictureShirley Chisholm running for President.
Kennedy supported Shirley Chisholm’s bid for the Presidency, and she went on the campaign trail with her, visiting colleges and universities. At this time, she founded the Feminist Party, envisioning Chisholm as the perfect candidate to bring about a coalition of  both black and white feminists. Two years later, in 1973, she organized the National Black Feminists organization.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Kennedy's biographer, Sherie M. Randolph. She spent fifteen years researching her subject. Florynce had written her own "autobiography," Color Me Flo: My Hard Times and Good Life, but it is less a biography and more a collection of speeches and interviews, with photographs and copies of leaflets. The papers she had donated to the Schlesinger were filled with gaps and omissions. Sherie found that Florynce's sisters had their own collections, but these were also incomplete. It is important to remember that Kennedy had been under FBI surveillance through many of her years of activism, and that, after her death, friends and colleagues had removed and destroyed  papers that they felt might have jeopardized the safety of other activists. Florynce's biographer has performed a Herculean feat in assembling the details of her subject's life and causes.  And now, finally, the errant papers are all at the Schlesinger, along with an extensive collection of video. And there is, at long last, a biography.
 
Florynce Kennedy’s life is a inspiration for the timid activist. She never hesitated to say the thing that was on her mind, no matter how disruptive or how unpopular it was.  She was never afraid to call out her own movements. She was not intimidated by accusations that she was being "divisive," that kiss-of-death word used so effectively to silence in-house dissent.  To her critics, she would say, “Unity in a movement situation is overrated. If you were the Establishment, which would you rather see coming in the door, five hundred mice or one lion?”

Oh, the lion, by all means. Give us the lion.

1 Comment
Michelle Thomas
5/4/2016 06:06:43 am

Excellent article! I'm Gen. X and hadn't heard of Ms. Kennedy, despite sharing her belief and penchant for social action through the law. Thank you to her biographer for making sure many others will be inspired by her legacy.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Picture

    Carolyn Gage

    “… Carolyn Gage is one of the best lesbian playwrights in America…”--Lambda Book Report, Los Angeles.

    SUBSCRIBE:
    To subscribe to the blog, scroll down and click on "RSS Feed". To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.

    Categories

    All
    Child Abuse
    Civil Rights
    Incest
    In Memoriam
    Interviews
    Lesbian Feminism
    Lesbian History
    Psychotropic Drugs
    Rape
    Reviews
    The Environment
    Women And Theatre
    Women's History

    Archives

    September 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    June 2022
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    July 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    September 2018
    June 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    October 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    December 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    July 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    August 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010
    October 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.