Lee Lorch

He and his family then moved to the Southern United States where he and his wife, Grace Lorch, became involved in the civil rights movement there while also teaching at several Black colleges.

After moving to Canada as a result of McCarthyism, he ended his career as professor emeritus of mathematics at York University in Toronto, Ontario.

[4] Lorch obtained a teaching position at the City College of New York following the war but was soon fired because of his civil rights work on behalf of African-Americans.

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 an interviewer in 2007.

An editorial in the Times the following day (April 11) called on Penn State to reconsider, recalling the suspicious nature of his dismissal from City College the previous year, to no avail.

[5] After being fired by Penn State, Lorch obtained a teaching position at Fisk University, a black college located in Tennessee, in 1950.

[7][8][9] The citation delivered at the 2007 MAA awards presentation, where Lorch received a standing ovation, recorded that: In 1955, Lorch was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee after he and his wife, Grace, attempted to enroll their daughter, Alice, in an all-black elementary school after the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that school segregation was unconstitutional.

That year, he and his wife, Grace, helped escort the Little Rock Nine, nine high school students attempting to be the first black students to enroll at Little Rock Central High School[5] against white segregationist opposition that was so ferocious his wife helped protect a 15-year-old black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, from a mob.

Faced with threats and sticks of dynamite left in their garage [5] and with the school's funding at risk, Lorch resigned and was again forced to look for new employment.

[17] In 2003, the International Society for Analysis, its Applications and Computation presented him with an honorary life membership for distinguished mathematical contributions and for his struggles for the disadvantaged and world peace.