The Lorches

A piece in the September 19, 1957, issue of Time magazine focused on the confrontation between Governor Orval Faubus and the Eisenhower administration. Passing reference was made to how Grace Lorch defended Elizabeth Eckford against a racist crowd outside Central High School on September 4; the incident was portrayed in terms of a “white-haired woman” coming to the aid of a “little girl.” Such characterizations helped shape the conventional narrative of the Central High crisis.

Who was Grace Lorch? The history of the desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School and the civil rights movement isn't complete without considering her, her husband Lee, and their daughter Alice.

Lee was a professor of mathematics at Philander Smith College and an active member of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Grace was a former elementary school teacher. White Northerners, both were rumored to be members of the Communist Party (CPUSA). Alice was in junior high school.

Born into an Irish-American working class family in 1903, Grace Lonergan taught public school in Boston, Massachusetts. She belonged to the Boston Teachers’ Union and the Boston Central Labor Council. After marrying Lee in 1943, Grace challenged a ruling that female teachers must resign if they marry. Her unsuccessful appeal inspired challenges by other Boston teachers and eventual repeal by the Massachusetts legislature.

Lee was born in New York City in 1915. His grandparents were German-Jewish immigrants. A 1935 graduate of Cornell University, Lee received a Ph.D in mathematics at the University of Cincinnati in 1941. During World War II, he briefly worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics before joining the Army. Because Lee helped to organize protests by fellow white tenants in a segregated Manhattan housing project in the late 1940s, he lost jobs at City College of New York and Pennsylvania State University. He taught at Fisk University from 1950 to 1955.

A request that Alice be allowed to attend a black elementary school was denied by Nashville public school authorities in 1954. Several weeks later, Lee was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Dayton, Ohio, to testify about membership in the CPUSA. He cited the First Amendment as rationale for not cooperating. HUAC charged him with contempt of Congress. Fisk did not renew his employment contract.

The Lorch family moved to Little Rock's black community and were neighbors of Daisy and L.C. Bates. Little Rock School Board head Virgil Blossom did not respond to a request that Alice be transferred to a Negro School.

Lee claimed in the Memphis Commercial Appeal that he watched the events at Central High on the morning of September 4, 1957, from afar. When the Little Rock Nine were barred from Central High, he, Grace, and Daisy organized classes for them at Philander Smith College. The Lorches also had a cross burned on their front lawn and dynamite shoved under their garage door. Alice was beaten by children at school.

Three weeks after defending Elizabeth Eckford in public, Grace had been summoned before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in Memphis, Tennessee, about her relationship with the CPUSA in Boston. In a tension-fraught hearing, Senator James Eastland asked if she was a communist. Grace broke her silence to say, “We all know well what Mr. Eastland means by communism.” She understood that the Red Scare was not as simple as it was made out to be.

Lee considered Blossom's desegregation plan to be "phony." Grace regarded most opponents of desegregation “not as the direct victims of race prejudice, but as victims of poverty and ignorance.”

Arkansas Attorney General Bruce Bennett harassed the Lorches, using the 1951 Communist Registration Act as a pretext. Along with Daisy Bates and Arkansas Gazette editor Harry Ashmore, the Lorches were subjects of concern in a Special Education Committee hearing in late 1958. Several weeks later, Arkansas Congressman Thomas Dale Alford denounced Grace as a “Communist functionary.”

There was little consensus among civil rights activists about Communists in the movement. Lee worked comfortably with Georg Iggers, a German social-democratic colleague at Philander Smith. Although Lee was acquitted by a federal judge of the 1954 contempt of Congress charge, the NAACP’s national leadership distanced itself from him—a position not shared by local activists. Lee’s actions were often interpreted sympathetically in the black press.

Due to official harassment and Lee's job insecurity, the Lorches left Little Rock in the spring of 1958. Lee spent the rest of his life in Canada, teaching at the University of Alberta and York University. Grace died in 1974. Throughout his career, Lee would back various social causes and encourage African-American students to pursue higher studies in mathematics. He died in 2014.