Rating: WORTHY!
Florynce Kennedy died at a ripe old age on the winter solstice of 2000. She had led a long life of feminism, black activism, and radical advocacy. She didn't lead a perfect life (no one does!) and this author doesn't try to pretend she did, which is nice. It's nice that we see Kennedy in all her glory - and lack of it - but one thing I missed was context. The author writes this as almost a series of cameos or vignettes of Kennedy's life, but it's oddly divorced from her times. We're catapulted from one instance to another, rather like character David Rice in the 2008 movie Jumper, with nothing in between and with changing backgrounds none of which are really explored in too much detail - or any at all in some cases.
That said, we do get a choice series of snapshots view of Kennedy - a woman I would never have heard of were it not for this book, and I would have been the worse for it. We see Kennedy organizing and protesting, or attending meetings or organizing them, and we see her unjustly arrested by racist police, and starting up some organization or other, including her own law firm as a black female lawyer in an era of appalling racism and white male chauvinism. In 1940 there were only 57 black female lawyers in the entire USA. By 1950, two years before Kennedy passed the bar, there were only 83. She was a rough in the diamond.
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We learn that Kennedy was one of five daughters in a relatively well to do - but still appallingly poor - family in Kansas, and pretty much her earliest big memory is a gang of white men coming to the door and trying to intimidate the Kennedys into moving from their own home, which Wiley Kennedy, the girls' father, owned outright. Her mother was a strong, independent woman who had no more problem standing up to these men than she did leaving her husband to better her life and that of her daughters, even when her husband wasn't a bad guy. It was this mom who informed Kennedy on the kind of woman she herself wanted to be, and she took this and ran with it when she moved to New York City and put herself through law school against the odds (yes, she's the tiny black face hidden away down the row of white male faces in her law class in one photograph included in this book) and determined for herself what kind of life she'd lead, even if it meant, at times, supporting violent radicals.
It led her into law, into representing the challenged and trodden down, and into deciding that the law wasn't going to do enough (or even anything!) by itself, which is when she got "radical" and started speaking up. The thing is her views were radical then. They're mainstream now - that skin color and gender should not be relevant when it comes to pay and fair treatment. That the big picture is a much better one to keep in mind than endless minor details when it comes to reforming injustices, and that you cannot divorce one struggle for equality from another when you're dealing with an entrenched and biased authority structure.
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This book not only misses a chance to place her in a solid context, it also really leaves us in the dark about the woman's personal life. We learn of her marriage and divorce, and of the absconding with over fifty thousand dollars by one of her law "partners", a sum which Kennedy worked for twenty years to pay back, but we really don't get a lot of the person except i'on the context of her radicalism and activities. I think that the book suffered for that; it would have been nice to have seen more of the woman that underlay the activism, because as interesting and important as that was, it wasn't all that she was. For example, Kennedy acted in a least two films: 1970's The Landlord, and 1983's Born In Flames, but you would never know that from this book.
That said, this still worth reading, even if we get somewhat obscure quotes from Kennedy of this nature: "...law school made me see clearly for the first time how the law was used to maintain the bullshit rather than to change things, that justice was really a crock of shit." I don't know if she meant by that, that those who make the laws maintain the bullshit, or the law itself maintains it, because that's exactly what law is supposed to do - not bullshit per se, but status quo. It's the lawmakers who are at fault if the law fails to do the job properly. The actual laws themselves are precisely intended to define and maintain status quo! A Lawyer ought to know that! But this is a minor quibble.
Another such quibble is this one weird sentence: "In the summer of 1964, Kennedy was one of several black and white women..." Forget the oddity of the ideas of a "black and white woman" - that's just ill-advised grammar - but this sentence was intended to convey that a group of woman, not all of the same race, attended a function. A majority of white people might well assume that the women were white, so once we know that Kennedy is among them, we know the group is composed of black and white people, but this appeared right after a bit on Kennedy's frustration with some fictitious attackers being characterized by race! It seemed like an odd juxtaposition to specify race here when it was the problem beforehand! Again, a minor oddity related to writing.
So, overall, I consider this to be a worthy and informative read, whether or not you like the subject of this biography or agree with all of her views!
