Pauli Murray Kept Going and So Can We
Do you know about Pauli Murray?
I am thinking about Eleanor Roosevelt often these days,
mostly because she managed go not only get through chaotic and terrifying
times, but to make the world a better place. After all, chaos is where the
change happens. Thinking of Eleanor
leads me directly to remembering Pauli Murray.
You might have seen Reverend Murray depicted in On the
Basis of Sex, the film about Ruth Bader Ginsberg. In a scene about how
Justice Ginsberg (then a middle-aged
attorney) gathered a panel of colleagues to be a moot court as she practiced before
a court appearance, Pauli is there in the background. She wears a pink suit
with a skirt, which Reverend Murray would never have done. In fact, she wasn’t even
there at that time. (Cinematic/bio pic license.) Pauli Murray was important in Ginsberg’s work
and even more important in other ways.
Born in 1910, orphaned very young, adopted by her aunts,
raised in the Episcopal Church in Durham, North Carolina, bi-racial, lesbian,
brilliant, plagued by depression and medical mis-diagnoses, Pauli Murray
somehow managed to get a law degree and wrote a paper that changed the course
of legal strategies to attack segregation. Her very survival was a testament to faith and
dogged persistence. Her ordination into the Episcopal priesthood in her 60’s was
public evidence of her abiding search for deep truth and her need to be of
service. There is more.
She was a poet, memoirist, educator, labor organizer, and a
co-founder of the National Organization for Women. Over twenty years before the
1960’s civil rights movement, Rev. Murray refused to move to the back of a bus
in Richmond, Virginia and was arrested. There is more.
After attending Hunter College, Murray applied in 1938 for
graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but was
rejected because of her race. It was 13
years before the first Black student was admitted. In 1944, she applied
to Harvard Law School and was awarded a fellowship, but after the award was
announced, Harvard refused to admit her because of her gender. Intersectionality is not just a theory. Murray did graduate from The University of
California Boalt School of Law. There she wrote her master’s thesis, The
Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment. The faculty harshly criticized her proposed legal
solution to inequality in employment.
However, years later one of her
professors, Spottswood Robinson, retrieved the paper from his files and shared
it with Thurgood Marshall. When she met Marshall years later in her mid 1950’s,
he told her he and Spottswood had relied on her analyses in his successful case
Brown v. Board of Education.
A heart-breaking case caught Pauli Murray’s attention in
about 1940. In Virginia, the approaching execution of Odell Waller, a Black man
who was convicted of murder but who had shot a man in self-defense, was drawing
national attention. As she worked to
stop the killing of Mr. Waller, Murray turned to a new friend, Eleanor
Roosevelt. Two years earlier, Murray had written a furious letter to Franklin
Roosevelt, calling him out on a speech and accusing him of caring too little
about white supremacy in the U.S. She sent a copy of that letter, which was
long and detailed and, shall we say, less than tactful, to President Roosevelt’s
wife. Her understanding that Eleanor would read it when he might not and that
she would bring the matter to his attention was astute. Eleanor answered Pauli
Murray’s letter, reminding her that FDR had more factors to consider than Ms.
Murray had taken into account, and encouraging Pauli to write back. They
developed a friendship that lasted over 20 years and shared their grief at the
horrifying news that Odell Waller had been legally killed by the Virginia
government.
When the McCarthy hearings continued to attack the political
“enemies” of conservative politics in the 1950’s, Pauli Murray suffered from
blatant prejudice yet again. She lost a job at Cornell because Eleanor
Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall, and Philip Randolph had provided references for
her. They were considered too radical.
She never quit, never gave up, not entirely. Despite her
gender dysphoria and internalized homophobia (discovered only in her personal
papers after her death), her love of women, the never-ending refusal of
opportunities for education and employment based solely on her gender and race,
the constant struggle to survive financially, and her fiery outrage at rampant
injustice throughout the culture, she kept going. After hospitalizations for
mental illness, after a long overdue surgery resulting from bad medical care,
after the death of the woman she loved deeply, Paul Murray drew on her faith
and her remarkable strength and kept going.
The peace she had sought all her life came late, but it did
come during her years as a priest. She was one of the earliest women to be ordained
in the Episcopal Church and the first African-American woman. The first time she served Communion was at the
Chapel of the Cross, a little church in North Carolina where her grandmother,
Cornelia had been baptized as a slave. Rev. Murray was sainted by the Episcopal
Church in 2012.
There is much more to Paul Murray’s life – please read about
her, remember her, call upon her guidance in these perilous times. On the days
when I despair for our country, I thank her for being her self.
By Paul Murray:
Proud Shoes: The story of An American Family. Read the first chapters of this memoir for a
deeper understanding of a multi-racial family in the aftermath of the civil war
and beyond.
Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage. An
autobiography published posthumously in 1987.
Pauli Murray: The
Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet,
published in 1989.
Dark Testament and Other Poems Re-published in 2018 and rich with insight and
imagination.
About Pauli Murray, newer works:
Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady,
Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for
Social Justice
Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow: the Life of Pauli Murray
And this resource:
The Pauli Murray Project is located at the Duke Human Rights
Center Franklin Humanities Institute.
Some of the information above came from this Project.
THANK YOU !!!! xoxoxoxo
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