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Florynce R. Kennedy called herself "radicalism's rudest mouth," a description that seemed justified nearly every time she made a public utterance.
She called military spending a new social disease-- "Pentagonorrhea." She said the best protest tactic was to "make white people nervous.' And she once silenced a male heckler who asked whether she was a lesbian by saying: "Are you my alternative?"
Kennedy, an irrepressible and irreverent veteran of battles for civil rights and women's equality, died in New York on Dec. 21. She was 84.
One of the first black women to graduate from Columbia University's law school, she was a flamboyant figure in cowboy hat and boots who became a political touchstone for many members of the peace, women's and black power movements.
She founded the Feminist Party, which in 1972 nominated Rep. Shirley Chisholm of New York as a candidate for president. In 1981, she wrote an influential handbook on sex harassment, "Sex Discrimination in Employment: An Analysis and Guide for Practitioner and Student." Her legal clients included the estates of jazz greats Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker, and civil rights leader H. Rap Brown.
Gloria Steinem, who joined Kennedy on the lecture circuit in the 1970s, once called her an "outrageous, imaginative, humorous and witty spokeswoman for social justice" with a pronounced talent for stirring things up.
"Five minutes with Flo," said Steinem, the founder of Ms. magazine, "will change your life."
Kennedy was born and raised in a mostly white neighborhood in Kansas City, Mo., in a shack that her father once protected from the Ku Klux Klan with a gun.
Her mother, Zella, worked mostly at home,...