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Maria de los Angeles Montes
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The Boston Women’s Heritage Trail is a nonprofit organization founded in 1989 as a program of the Boston Public Schools.Through educational programs, publications, and outreach initiatives, the BWHT is dedicated to weaving the lives and work of women back into the story of the City of Boston. We are available for research assistance, speaking engagements, and to collaborate on programs and projects.
Editor: Mary Smoyer
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A new historical marker at the Charles Taylor School in Boston’s Mattapan section pays tribute to a woman who did much to change the teaching profession in the first half of the last century. The plaque honoring the late Grace Lonergan Lorch was dedicated at a ceremony outside the school on March 25. Among those on hand for the celebration was Lorch’s husband, Lee Lorch, who worked for many years for recognition for his wife for her successful campaign to end the prohibition on marriage for women teachers in Boston.
Lee Lorch was about to leave for military service in the Second World War, when he and Grace Lonergan married in 1943. Although Grace Lonergan Lorch had been teaching in Boston for some years, her marriage resulted in her being fired. Lorch, a union leader, fought the School Committee’s 1880’s ban on teachers marrying and, although the Boston School Committee upheld the rule in 1944, she began a campaign for state legislation to do away with the prohibition. At the same time, she won a legal battle for the right to continue to teach by working as a substitute – at about a third of a regular teacher’s pay – at the Taylor School. Lorch and others who worked with her saw victory in 1953 when the Legislature passed a law ending the prohibition on married women teachers.
It was not the only battle that Grace Lorch waged before her death in 1974. She was a longtime political activist and, with her husband, she joined early in the campaign for civil rights for African-Americans both in Boston and in other cities where the Lorches later lived. They were living in Little Rock, AK, in 1957 when Central High School was desegregated, and Grace Lorch helped extract Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, from an angry white mob that was threatening the black children trying to enter the school. Lorch’s spontaneous rescue of the young girl was captured by news cameras, and the week before the dedication of the historic marker at the Taylor School, she was honored by the national Black Herstory Task Force at an awards dinner in Atlanta.
At the dedication of the marker at the Taylor School, Kate True, daughter of poet Judith Yarnall, read Exodus, a poem written by her mother, describing and praising Lorch’s role in Little Rock. Yarnall wrote the poem after seeing Lorch in old news clips that became part of the television special on the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize.
Other speakers at the Taylor ceremony included: Elie Jean-Louis, principal of the Taylor School; Richard Wiggin, executive director of the Bostonian Society, sponsor of the historic marker program; state Sen. John A. Hart, Jr., DBoston; and Lorch’s husband, Lee Lorch, a retired mathematics professor at the University of Toronto. Marie Turley, executive director of the Boston Women’s Commission, introduced the speakers. Among others introduced were Sylvia McDowell, vice president of the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail; MFT President Kathleen Kelley; and Boston Teachers Union leaders Patricia Armstrong and Carol Pacheco.
Reprinted with permission from the MFT Federation Paper, April 2003, the newspaper of the Massachusetts Federation of Teachers, AFT, AFL-CIO.
 
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