Civil Rights Activism
After graduation from UC Berkeley, Flory accepted a fellowship from the Fisk University masters program in sociology. While a graduate student at Fisk, he was involved in protesting the lynching of Cordie Cheek, a Nashville teenager. He was asked to leave the university after organizing a protest o Jim Crowe policies. This episode was recounted in an essay written by Langston Hughes in 1934:
I see in our papers where Fisk University, that great center of Negro Education and of Jubilee fame, has expelled Ishmael Flory, a graduate student from California on a special honor scholarship, because he dared organize a protest against the University singers appearing in a Nashville Jim Crow theater where colored people must go up a back alley to sit in the gallery. Probably also the University resented his organizing, through the Denmark Vesey Forum, a silent protest parade denouncing the lynching of Cordie Cheek, who was abducted almost at the very gates of the University. —Langston Hughes, Cowards from the Colleges
In 1939 Flory moved to Chicago, where he became head of Joint Council of Dining Car Employees, organizer for the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers and president of Chicago chapter of the National Negro Congress. In the 1940s and 1950s, he worked with many civil rights activists, including Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois and William L. Patterson. He was one of many activists to help integrate major league baseball.
In the 1960s, Flory co-founded the African American Heritage Association.
Read more about this topic: Ishmael Flory
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