Black leaders were critical to the formation of the modern reproductive rights movement. Black History Month provides an opportunity to pause and remember some oft-forgotten leaders who shaped the movement in the years before Roe v. Wade.
Florynce ‘Flo’ Kennedy: Abortion as a Civil Right
Florynce “Flo” Kennedy remains one of the most unfairly forgotten contributors to reproductive politics since the 1960s. Kennedy was an early member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the women’s civil rights organization founded in part to pursue the agenda Black and white feminist lawyers Pauli Murray and Mary Eastwood outlined in their essay, “Jane Crow and the Law” (1965).
Kennedy graduated from Columbia Law School in 1951, disillusioned with a legal mainstream that in her view demanded “an almost mathematical mind, the kind of person who can walk past a pool of blood and think, ‘What a beautiful shade of red.’”
In 1967, Kennedy attended the first meeting of NOW’s first local chapter New York. She had already, in 1964, published an article calling for the liberalization of state abortion laws. At the same time that she joined NOW, she was helping to organize the first national Black Power Conference. Kennedy proposed that this new women’s rights group ally with Black Power to become a more encompassing movement against oppression. The idea died on the floor of the meeting, as did a proposal to restrict women’s support for the war in Vietnam (which, in Kennedy’s words, made NOW founder Betty Friedan and her close ally Muriel Fox “bonkers”).
When the group discussed abortion, Friedan argued it was better not to take a position, and to let NOW’s national board sort out its approach first. Kennedy joined the overwhelming vote to instead “recommend that the national Board open discussion of abortion as a civil right of women”—from the bottom-up instead of top-down.
Florynce Kennedy used law as a tool for social change. She was the only Black lawyer on a five-feminist legal team that brought the first-ever federal abortion litigation from the movement for women’s liberation. The case was Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz, instigated by white activist and lawyer Nancy Stearns, was the first brought in the name of hundreds of plaintiffs who had been or could become pregnant.