Thirty-year-old Lee Lorch first walked onto the City College of New York campus, where he had just been hired to teach math, in 1946. The eminently qualified Manhattan native, just back from three years of World War II military service in the Pacific Theater, had earned an undergraduate degree from Cornell University and a doctorate from the University of Cincinnati.
He also possessed something even more significant than his degrees: a conscience that wouldn’t overlook injustice. Lorch had seen it firsthand; his wife Grace had been forced to resign from her Boston teaching position after the couple had wed in 1943 because of an 1880s-era rule banning teachers from marrying.
Because of the housing shortage created by the flood of discharged military personnel following World War II’s end, it took the Lorches two years to find suitable living quarters for themselves and their young daughter. Ultimately, they were among 25,000 fortunate souls chosen to move into a private residential development on Manhattan’s East side, nominally created to house returning war veterans. Owned and operated by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, Stuyvesant Town had been built with financial and legal support from New York City. Initially, the young professor and his family were thrilled, but Metropolitan Life’s discriminatory “no negroes” housing policy troubled them.
“Negroes and whites don’t mix,” the company’s president had told the New York Post in a 1943 interview, adding that black residents moving into the development, “would be to the detriment of the city, because it would depress all surrounding property (values).”
The NAACP, the ACLU and the American Jewish Congress sued over the issue, rightfully questioning the fairness of New York City officials using public monies to supply both land and tax breaks for a private development, and then letting the corporation, which had reaped the benefits of the city’s largesse, unfairly choose its tenants as it saw fit. But the case was dismissed, as there were no local laws prohibiting such discrimination at the time.
Feeling compelled to act, Lorch became vice chairman of a small group of tenants trying to right what they saw as a serious wrong. A boycott wasn’t possible; there were 100,000 people wanting the just-under 8,800 available Stuyvesant Town apartments. But thanks to the tireless awareness-raising of Lorch and less than a dozen others, 3,500 residents signed a petition asking Mayor William O’Dwyer for legislation that would eliminate racially discriminatory housing.
Ultimately, Lorch and his fellow crusaders made their point, but not without cost. Despite the backing of most of his CCNY colleagues, Lorch’s promotion at the university was blocked in 1949, which effectively ended his career there. An alumni committee conceded at the time that Lorch was, “unquestionably a fine scholar and a promising teacher,” but that some colleagues “regarded him, rightly or wrongly, as an irritant and a potential troublemaker.”
Shortly thereafter, Lorch secured a teaching job at Penn State University, leaving Grace and their daughter back in Stuyvesant Town. The Lorches subsequently invited a black family of three to live with them in their apartment for that academic year. Outraged Metropolitan Life bigwigs schemed to evict the Lorches, refusing to accept their $76 monthly rent check. Spineless Penn State officials aided and abetted the effort to stifle Lorch by denying him reappointment there. A university official wrote that housing the black family under his (Lorch’s) roof was, “extreme, illegal, immoral, and damaging to the public relations of the college.”
Effectively blacklisted from teaching at major American schools, Lorch’s next academic opportunity came at Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, Tenn. Despite performing with distinction there, his activism ”“ which included attempting to enroll his daughter in an all-black school and refusing to answer questions from the House Un-American Activities Committee ”“ resulted in his being let go yet again.
After a stint at another all-black school (Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark.), Smith’s American educational career ended. His advocacy for equality had rendered him unhirable in the United States. Fortunately, he landed where extraordinary ability was valued more than social activism was feared. He taught for more than a quarter of a century at two Canadian universities (the University of Alberta and York University) before retiring in 1985.
Lorch died last month in Toronto. According to a lengthy and fascinating obituary in the New York Times, when asked in a 2010 interview if he’d do anything differently, the then-95-year-old widower replied, “More and better of the same.”
He may never be as well-known as Nathan Hale, Thomas Paine, George Washington, Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr., but Lee Lorch clearly had at least as much courage in his convictions as any better-known members of the pantheon of American heroes had in theirs. He truly “walked the walk.”
— Andy Young teaches English and literacy intervention at a high school in northern York County.
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