Ishmael Flory (July 4, 1907 – February 4, 2004) was a civil rights activist, trade union organizer, and communist party (CPUSA) leader in Illinois.
Ishmael was the youngest of nine children born to Samuel and Leola Hancock Flory in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
In 1918, the Flory family moved to Los Angeles, where Ishmael graduated from Jefferson High School.
This episode was recounted in an essay written by Langston Hughes in 1934: I see in our papers where Fisk University, that great center of Negro Education and of Jubilee fame, has expelled Ishmael Flory, a graduate student from California on a special honor scholarship, because he dared organize a protest against the University singers appearing in a Nashville Jim Crow theater where colored people must go up a back alley to sit in the gallery.
[1] Commonly taking anti-U.S. stances, he and Gus Hall, General Secretary of the Communist Party, USA lambasted then current President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that they were "threatening World War in their attempts to salvage the sinking ship of the world and U.S.