A LIFELONG BATTLE
Mathematician Lee Lorch lobbied against racism with tireless campaigns that repeatedly cost him his home and eventually led him to Toronto,
Though he was a mathematician by profession, Lee Lorch made an enduring contribution to the civil rights cause with his tireless campaigns against racial discrimination which repeatedly cost him his job and forced him to make Toronto his home.
The lifelong activist, who was effectively barred from teaching mathematics in the United States for his battles against racism and segregation in the 1950s, died of natural causes in a Toronto hospital on Feb. 28. He was 98.
Born in New York City, Lorch’s sense of social justice was fostered by the anti-Semitism he experienced in the run-up to the Second World War.
“It wasn’t something that was just outside of his own personal experience, it was something that he experienced and could therefore see how horrible it was,” said Alice Lorch Bartels, his daughter.
Lorch studied mathematics at Cornell University at a time when American universities placed rigid quotas on the number of Jewish students admitted.
As a military cartographer in the South Pacific in the Second World War, Lorch was keenly aware of the army’s treatment of black soldiers.
“On the troop transport overseas, it was always the black company on board that had to clean the ship and do the dirty work, and I felt very uncomfortable with that,” Lorch told the Star in 2007.
When the war ended, Lorch’s lifelong fight against injustice began.
His first battle was against the “No Negroes” policy of Stuyvesant Town, the housing project in Manhattan where he moved after the war with his wife, Grace Lorch.
Lorch organized petitions pressuring the housing complex to allow black tenants. His campaign cost
“(Racism) was something that he experienced and could therefore see how horrible it was.” ALICE LORCH BARTELS LEE LORCH’S DAUGHTER
him his job at New York City College.
Rather than give up his New York apartment when he moved to take a new job at Penn State University, he invited a black family to live there as his permanent guests.
Lorch’s name was still on the lease, and he was still paying the rent, but the landlord moved to evict the family anyway. The community rallied, the landlord backed down, and the incident was eventually the catalyst for state legislation banning discriminatory housing policies. But the act of defiance cost Lorch his post at Penn State, so he moved his wife and daughter to Nashville, Tenn., to work at one of America’s few black universities. In 1954, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling declaring public school segregation unconstitutional, the Lorches took on the cause of racial segregation in the education system by fighting to send their 10year-old daughter to a nearby black public school. For his crusades, Lorch was hauled before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, which was ostensibly investigating communist activity. Citing his First Amendment right to his own opinions, Lorch refused to answer most of the committee’s questions and was indicted for contempt of Congress. “He was threatened with going to jail,” his daughter recalled. While the indictment was eventually thrown out, Lorch found himself unemployed once more, and moved to teach in Little Rock, Ark. In the fall of 1957, as southern school boards were ordered to allow black students to enrol, Lorch’s wife, Grace, stepped into the centre of a vivid scene in U.S. racial history. On the opening day of the newly desegregated Little Rock Central High School, when a hate-spewing mob surrounded one of the 15-year- old black students, Grace took the girl by the hand and led her to safety, even as the crowd jeered and blocked her path.
For her compassion, Grace, like her husband, was called before a U.S. Senate subcommittee. The family was harassed and threatened, a stick of dynamite left in their garage.
Effectively blacklisted from teaching anywhere in the U.S., Lorch and his family moved to Canada in 1959, where he was hired by the University of Alberta and then York University in 1968.
As a Canadian citizen, Lorch’s sense of social justice never wavered.
Martin Muldoon, one of Lorch’s graduate students in Edmonton in 1961 and later a colleague at York, remembers him marching against nuclear weapons in the 1960s.
“People thought of him loosely as a gadfly, or as a maverick. But he actually believed in working through the system,” Muldoon said.
For Lorch, this involved writing letters to friends, newspapers, and the countless organizations of which he was a member. Among his many causes, Lorch pushed for more blacks to become mathematicians, and mentored minority students, Muldoon said.
Though he officially retired in 1985, Lorch remained a diligent mathematician, publishing his final academic article in 2008.
“He kind of embodied the idea of no mandatory retirement,” said Dawn Bazely, a biology professor at York, who recalled Lorch urging faculty members to support activist causes well into his 90s.
His lifetime of lobbying earned Lorch awards from a number of mathematical associations, as well as an honorary doctorate of letters from the first university to fire him.
For Lorch, the honours were unnecessary.
As he told the Star in 1990: “I never felt the need for vindication.”
Lorch’s wife died in 1974. In addition to his daughter, he leaves two granddaughters and a sister, Judith Brooks.