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
Famous quotes containing the words civil rights, civil and/or rights:
“Civil Rights: What black folks are given in the U.S. on the installment plan, as in civil-rights bills. Not to be confused with human rights, which are the dignity, stature, humanity, respect, and freedom belonging to all people by right of their birth.”
—Dick Gregory (b. 1932)
“They who say that women do not desire the right of suffrage, that they prefer masculine domination to self-government, falsify every page of history, every fact in human experience. It has taken the whole power of the civil and canon law to hold woman in the subordinate position which it is said she willingly accepts.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“When we lose love, we lose also our identification with the universe and with eternal values—an identification which alone makes it possible for us to lay our lives on the altar for what we believe.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 3, ch. 2 (1962)