The mysterious woman in the polka dot dress!
Dear readers. Before you bid au revoir to this side of planet Earth, add Little Rock, Arkansas and, a few blocks away, the Little Rock Nine Museum, to your must-do bucket list. And if you get there, before leaving town take the walk down South Park Street – alone like I did years ago – in front of the imposing fortress of Little Rock Central High School. Hold that possibility until the end of this narrative and, with it, a recommendation.
But before the anti-DEI history erasing crowd comes gunning for my noggin, snatches me off a street corner and handcuffs me for a one way government expenses paid one way trip to a prison in El Salvador, I figured that I’d try to stay one step ahead of them with another little-known bit of history they’d prefer that you didn’t know about, namely that of one Grace Lorch.
Grace Lorch? Who’s she?
Well, it’s unlikely you’ve heard of Grace Lorch. Unless you are a serious student of African American history makers, her name likely won’t register. But when Grace Lorch helped another person you either don’t know or remember, Elizabeth Eckford of the “Little Rock Nine” in 1957, together they changed history.
Grace Lonergan Lorch (1903-1974) was a teacher and civil rights activist best known for her work as a white escort for the Little Rock Nine. Before then, she was a teacher in Boston and served as President of the Boston Teachers Union. Despite having been a teacher for two decades Grace was dismissed due to an 1880s era rule of the Boston School Committee that, get this, banned female teachers from marrying. Lorch appealed but the committee upheld the rule.
Before long, the negative publicity around her case led to a campaign to end the prohibition, which was successful nine years later when the legislature voted to end the ban on married female teachers.
After Boston, Grace and her husband Lee, who holds a PhD in mathematics, and their daughter Alice swung south and continued their civil rights activism in New York, Pennsylvania, Nashville, Little Rock, back north to Connecticut and finally to Canada.
In New York City’s Stuyvesant Town they fought to end housing discrimination and brought the issue to a head by allowing a Black family to live in their apartment as guests. That controversy cost Lee Lorch his job as a math professor; so the Lorches moved to the South where Lorch obtained a teaching position at predominantly Black Fisk University and later at predominantly Black Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Arkansas. As one of three white professors at Fisk, Lee chaired the math department and encouraged and mentored several Black students to earn PhDs in mathematics, the first in the United States.
Two weeks after leaving Nashville and moving to Little Rock, Grace wrote a letter to the local school superintendent asking that their eleven-year-old daughter Alice be allowed to attend the predominantly Black neighborhood school. The request was denied.
Continuing their civil rights activism, the Lorches were involved in the Little Rock branch of the NAACP and were intimately involved in the Little Rock Nine’s struggle to desegregate Little Rock Central High School.
On their first day of school, the nine Black students were instructed to arrive together; however, the instruction never reached fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford who arrived separately and found herself alone on South Park Street facing an angry mob threatening to lynch her.
Lorch’s rescue of Eckford made the Lorches a target. Dynamite was placed in their garage, they were harassed in the press, their daughter faced bullying at school and Grace was subpoenaed by the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. State and federal officials began harassing her for “communist activities.” Her husband Lee, a college mathematics professor, was harassed as well. Three weeks later she had to stand in front of the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and answer to accusations of communism.
This level of harassment of the Lorches soon escalated. The Arkansas Attorney General investigated them. Governor Faubus accused them of being communist subversives. Arkansas representative Thomas Alford denounced Lee Lorch as a communist functionary on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Now although the Lorches were not new to civil rights activism, this was the first public incident that put them on the radar of powerful segregationists.
Before it was over, they left Arkansas to escape further persecution and after one year in Connecticut they moved to Canada where they hoped that the persecution would end. But it didn’t. The attorney general of Arkansas supplied Canadian authorities with dirt on their supposed communist activities. Even after leaving the country, they still suffered.
In the end, there are a few things that need saying before bringing this to a close.
One, it should come as no surprise that social activism means resistance to change and personal sacrifices and can lead to ridicule and threats, let alone getting fired from jobs – as the Lorches can readily attest to.
Two, it would be a tragic example of historical negligence to ignore or erase Lee Lorch’s outstanding contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. Given the focus of this narrative – mainly on Grace, his wife – coupled with the limitations of this space, the reader would be well served to research Lee Lorch’s incredible lifetime of fighting racial injustice and the professional sacrifices he experienced.
Three, appreciate that like the Lorches example, American history is replete with examples of Jewish/African American relationships in social causes. Think philanthropist Julius P. Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, Dr. Martin L. King Jr. and one of his chief advisors, Stanley Levinson. Think Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two Jewish young men who lost their lives while working to get voting rights for Blacks in Mississippi. Explained to me by my friend “Deborah,” a Jewish American, among other explanations, historically Arican-American and Jewish Americans are connected by a common bond of oppression.
I close with a serious recommendation: get to the Little Rock Nine Museum before the anti-DEI history erasing crowd gets there first and scotch tapes this message on the museum’s front door…. Closed for good!
Terry Howard is an award-winning writer, a contributing writer with the Chattanooga News Chronicle, The American Diversity Report, The Douglas County Sentinel, Blackmarket.com, the Augusta County Historical Society Bulletin and recipient of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Award, and third place winner of the Georgia Press Award.