Two years later, the nation watched the integration drama play out in the city. As vice president of the Little Rock branch of the NAACP, Lorch was intimately involved in the process of integrating the nine students who were attempting to become the first African Americans to enroll at Little Rock Central High School. The superintendent had instructed them to arrive separately, but when the NAACP received a tip the night before that Governor Orval Faubus was going to call in the Arkansas National Guard to keep out the black students, it was decided that the kids (and a group of chaperones) would arrive together. However, word never reached fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford. When she got to Central the next day, she assumed the soldiers were there to protect her, but soon found herself facing a menacing mob. That's when Grace Lorch arrived, having just dropped off her daughter at a nearby junior high, and escorted Eckford home on a city bus.
Grace was every bit her husband's match for fearlessness and social conscience. Twelve years older, she had been teaching for two decades by the time they wed in Boston in 1943. But there was an antiquated law on the books in Massachusetts forcing female teachers to resign when they got married. Long active in her union, Grace became the first teacher to openly challenge the regulation. The publicity jumpstarted a campaign for state legislation that eventually ended the prohibition on married school-teachers—but not before she was fired for "committing matrimony," says Lorch. (She died in 1974.)
Grace's spontaneous rescue of Eckford, captured on film, became an iconic image of the civil rights movement. But it also made the Lorches a target. Someone placed dynamite in their garage and then phoned the local newspaper in an attempt to frame them for having violent plans. Alice was bullied at school. Grace was subpoenaed by the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. When the funding of Philander Smith was put in jeopardy, Lorch resigned. By 1959, he found himself blacklisted at U.S. universities. "I didn't want to leave the States, but there was more than one black college that was visited by the FBI and told if they hired me there would be trouble," he says. Thus Lorch found freedom in Canada, spending nine years at the University of Alberta before arriving at York in 1968.
At least now Lorch was able to agitate for justice without fear of reprisal. He and a few others formed the Mathematicians Action Group in 1969 and convinced the American Mathematicians Society to move its spring meeting from Chicago to protest the brutal police response during the previous summer's Democratic National Convention. In the Seventies, Lorch organized protests against the political imprisonment of Uruguayan mathematician Jose Luis Massera. And in recent years, he has been so outspoken in his support for normalized relations with Cuba that he was named a corresponding member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences. "He is a man not afraid to put his conscience before his career," York president Mamdouh Shoukri said at the time, "a man who, in his fight for civil rights, put the well-being of others before his own." But don't call him a martyr. "No, I always had a job," says Lorch, who officially retired in 1985 but still stops by his York office once a week. "I just was unhappy about not being able to put my feet down long enough."
Over the years, Lorch's sacrifices have not gone unnoticed— at least in certain circles. He has been given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Association of Mathematicians (originally called Black and Third World Mathematicians). He has been honored by historically black institutions like Howard University and Spelman College. Three years ago, Toronto Mayor David Miller presented him with an award for "outstanding lifetime contribution to public education." It was promptly renamed the Lee Lorch Award. But perhaps his most poignant honor came back in 1990 when Lorch returned to New York. He was there to receive an honorary degree—from City College.
"Well," he says with a shrug, "they were reclaiming me anyway."
Contributing editor Brad Herzog '90 has been writing for CAM since 1992. His latest book is S Is for Save the Planet. For more about his work, go to www.bradherzog.com.