Early activism
Her activism began early. According to Jason Chambers in his book Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry, "After graduating high school, [Kennedy] organized a successful boycott against a Coca-Cola bottler who refused to hire black truck drivers."
"Kennedy recalled being arrested for the first time in 1965 when she attempted to reach her home on East 48th Street and police refused to believe she lived in the neighborhood. From that point on, she focused her attention on combatting racism and discrimination."
She worked as an activist for feminism and civil rights, and the cases she took on increasingly tended to be related to these causes. She was close friends with fellow Columbia law graduate Morton Birnbaum MD, whose concept of sanism she influenced during the 1960s.
Kennedy established the Media Workshop in 1966, "[using] these sessions to discuss strategies for challenging the media and to stress the importance of sharing tactical information across movement lines." She and others would picket and lobby the media over their representation of Black people. She stated that she would lead boycotts of major advertisers if they did not feature black people in their ads. She attended all three Black Power conferences and represented H. Rap Brown, Assata Shakur and the Black Panthers. Kennedy also represented prominent radical feminist Valerie Solanas, who was on trial for the 1968 attempted murder of Andy Warhol.
Kennedy played a significant role in formulating the Miss America protest of 1968. The Miss America protest was used as a tool to demonstrate the "exploitation of women". Randolph noted in her book, Florynce "Flo" Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical, that the responsibility lay with Kennedy to recruit other black feminists to this protest. During the protest multiple women were arrested and Kennedy took on their cases as their attorney.
In the 1970s, Kennedy traveled the lecture circuit with writer Gloria Steinem. If a man asked the pair if they were lesbians – a stereotype of feminists at the time – Kennedy would quote Ti-Grace Atkinson and answer: "Are you my alternative?" She was an early member of the National Organization for Women, but left them in 1970, dissatisfied with their approach to change. In 1971, she founded the Feminist Party, which nominated Shirley Chisholm for president. She also helped found the National Women's Political Caucus. Beginning in 1972 she served on the advisory board of the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective, a New York City theatre group that produced plays on feminist issues. Kennedy's "position on the role of black feminists was diplomatic without being evasive."
Kennedy supported abortion rights and co-authored the book Abortion Rap with Diane Schulder. The phrase "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament" is sometimes attributed to Kennedy, although Gloria Steinem attributed it to "an old Irish woman taxi driver in Boston" whom she said she and Kennedy met. In 1972, Kennedy filed tax evasion charges with the Internal Revenue Service against the Catholic Church, saying that their campaign against abortion rights violated the separation of church and state.
Sherie Randolph outlines in her article "Not to Rely Completely on the Courts" that Kennedy was one of the lawyers in the Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz case, the class action suit that wanted to repeal New York's strict abortion laws. Randolph stated: "This case was one of the first to use women who suffered from illegal abortions as expert witnesses instead of relying on physicians." "These tactics were eventually used in the Roe v. Wade case, in 1973, which overturned restrictive abortion laws." Kennedy was a lawyer for the Women's Health Collective and 350 plaintiffs in a similar lawsuit about abortion in New York.
