Lee Lorch

White civil rights activist Lee Lorch recently passed away in Toronto. A New Yorker, Lorch provided leadership in the battle to integrate Stuyvesant Town, a large housing development on the East Side of Manhattan. The case eventually helped to make housing discrimination illegal nationwide. But there was a cost. Lorch lost his job as a mathematics professor at City College because of his involvement. Later, Lorch was let go by Penn State and Fisk University for his steadfast and outspoken activism. Only Little Rock’s Philander Smith College would hire him. When Lee’s wife Grace Lorch helped Elizabeth Eckford to escape the mob at Central High in September 1957, Philander Smith let him go too. A pariah in the United States, he moved to Canada, and taught in universities there for the rest of his career. I’m John Kirk, of the UALR History Department, and this has been an Arkansas Moment.