Murray, Pauli 1910–1985

views updated

Pauli Murray 1910–1985

Feminist, civil and political rights activist

Met with Resistance at Every Turn

Inherited and Worked for Freedom

A Rich Life, Fully Lived

Selected writings

Sources

During her lifetime, Pauli Murray was a poet, lawyer, writer, teacher, priest, and was a pioneer in all of these fields. She fought in the front lines of the civil rights and feminist movements before they had even become full-blown movements. In the introduction to Murray’s autobiography,Eleanor Holmes Norton put it succinctly: “Pauli never lived in the past. She lived on the edge of history, seeming to pull it along with her. She was a civil rights activist before there was activism, and a feminist when feminists could not be found. She practiced at a major law firm and earned a renowned professorship at a major university before blacks or women did either.” Murray refused to see differences of culture, race, religion, or circumstance as barriers, rather drawing on them as sources of enrichment. She herself came from a hodgepodge of African, European, and Native American stocks. Her grandmother had been a slave and her greatgrandfather was a slave owner. In the preface to her book of poems, Dark Testament, and Other Poems published in 1970, Murray wrote: “I speak for my race and my people—The human race and just people.”

Anna Pauline Murray was born on November 20, 1910, in Baltimore, Maryland, the fourth of six children of William H. (Will) Murray, a public school teacher, and Agnes Fitzgerald Murray. Among the only memories Murray had of her mother, who died of a cerebral hemorrhage when she was three, were of clinging to her legs as she did her cleaning work. Her father had once suffered from typhoid fever, which left him with a debilitating mental illness. He was committed to a mental institution for bouts of depression and violent mood swings, and was brutally beaten to death by an attendant there when she was 12. She later learned about her parents’ lives from the few books and letters they left, and the answers she gleaned from endless questions addressed to her relatives. She was adopted and raised in Durham, North Carolina, by her beloved maternal Aunt Pauline after her mother died. The tragic loss of her parents was Murray’s first lesson in adversity.

Met with Resistance at Every Turn

At every step Murray sought to take she met some barrier. She stayed with her cousins in New York to study at Columbia University, but was turned away

At a Glance…

Born on November 20, 1910, in Baltimore, MD, died on July 1, 1985, in Pittsburgh, PA; daughter of Agnes and William Murray. Education: Hunter College, New York, BA, 1933; Howard University, law degree, 1944; Univ of California, master’s degree, 1947; Yale Univ, PhD, 1965.

Career: Worked as a janitor, typist, elevator operator, waitress, and a reporter for the Carolina Times, for the Works Projects Administration (WPA), and as a teacher in the New York City Remedial Reading Project, also published articles and poems in magazines including a novel, Angel of the Desert, serialized in the Carolina Times, 1930s; wrote poem “Dark Testament” and published essay “Negroes are Fed Up” in Common Sense, 1943; dep attorney general of California, 1946; American Jewish Congress, New York City, attorney for commission on law and social action, 1946-47; published book, States’ Laws on Race and Color, 1951; published biography of her grandparents, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family, 1956; private practice of law; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, assoc attorney in litigation department, 1956-60; Univ of Ghana, near Accra, senior lecturer, 1960-61; appointed by President John F. Kennedy to his Comm on Civil and Political Rights; Benedict Coll, vice pres, prof of political science, 1967-68; Brande is Univ, prof of American studies (also, Louis Stulberg Professor of Law and Politics, 1972-73), 1968-73; Boston Univ, lecturer at school of law, 1972; ordained an Episcopal priest, 1977; autobiography Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage was published posthumously, 1987.

Selected memberships: Fellowship of Reconciliation; ACLU; NOW; fourth assembly of World Council of Churches, in Sweden, consultant, 1968; Commission on Ordained and Licensed Ministries, 1969-70; Beacon Press, dir, 1968-69. Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, 1962-63; EEOC, 1966-67; and MLK Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change, 1970-84.

Selected awards: Recipient of honorary degrees from Dartmouth Coll, 1976; Radcliffe Coll, 1978; Yale, 1979. Named Woman of the Year by National Council of Negro Women, 1946; Eleanor Roosevelt award, Professional Women’s Caucus, 1971; Whitney M. Young Jr. Memorial Award, 1972; Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and Christopher Award, for Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, 1988.

because the university did not admit women. She could not afford, nor was she qualified enough, to attend Barnard College. She was then denied entry to Hunter College for lack of education—despite graduating at the top of her class from Durham high school, her segregated Southern education was deficient in several areas. She returned to high school for a year in New York, and was the only black among the 4,000 graduating students. She earned money for her education by working as a janitor, typist, elevator operator, waitress, and a reporter for the Carolina Times. Once she became a student at Hunter, the Great Depression hit. She once found herself riding the rails from California to New York with a group of teenagers searching for work. She worked for the Works Projects Administration (WPA) and as a teacher in New York City’s Remedial Reading Project. She also had articles and poems published during this time, including her novel, Angel of the Desert (serialized in the Carolina Times). She skipped so many meals to meet her expenses before graduating from Hunter in 1933 that she was treated by a doctor for malnutrition. Physical frailty would plague her for the rest of her life—for, as much as she demanded of her small body, she chronically neglected her health.

Murray met with racist opposition throughout the late 1930s and the 1940s. The University of North Carolina rejected her on racial grounds in 1938, despite the fact that her case was publicized nationally by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), she and her friend Adelene Mc-Bean were arrested in 1940 for refusing to sit at the back of a bus in Virginia. These events cemented her determination to become a civil rights lawyer, and she earned her law degree on a fellowship at Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1944. While a student at Howard, she formed the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which had its roots in the teachings of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi. She believed their pacifist ideals could be applied to the fight for civil rights in the United States. She published two important essays on civil rights in 1943: “Negroes are Fed Up” for Common Sense, and an article about the Harlem race riot for a socialist newspaper, the New York Call. She also published her most famous poem on race relations, “Dark Testament,” that year. She suffered sexual discrimination at Howard, and claimed to have emerged from the university a feminist as well as a racial activist.

After Harvard’s law school rejected her application for admission on gender grounds (despite the fact that she had been awarded the prestigious Julius Rosenwald Fellowship for graduate work) in 1945, she earned a master’s degree from the University of California’s law school at Berkeley. Her master’s thesis was The Right to Equal Opportunity Employment. She passed the California bar exam after just three weeks of study—after her graduate law advisor had insisted shortcomings in her background would prevent her from passing. In 1965 she became the first African American to earn a Doctor of Juridical Science from Yale University Law School. She was driven, she claimed in her autobiography, by the need to prove herself.

Inherited and Worked for Freedom

Early in her career, Murray was fully aware of both her work towards civil rights, and the progress that had come before her. “Nobody gave me my freedom,” she wrote in Common Ground in 1945, according to Spartacus Educational. “I inherited it.” She cited her ancestors, who fought in the Civil War and toiled as slaves in the Carolina tobacco fields, as inspirations. She credited those who had risked and lost their lives on the Underground Railroad. She felt it was her charge, to continue the progress of those who came before her. She concluded in Common Ground, “They have left for me and my contemporaries of the 20th century the task of destroying the incidents of slavery, segregation, discrimination, and prejudice.”

After her graduation from Berkeley, Murray expanded her vision of civil rights to include Asian Americans after a year spent working for the district attorney’s office in Los Angeles. She had a successful career as a civil rights lawyer, professor, college vice president, and deputy attorney general of California. She fought and argued in countless cases for the rights of blacks and women. She was named Woman of the Year by Mademoiselle magazine in 1947 and in 1951 she published the book States’ Laws on Race and Color, which Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP called the Bible for civil rights lawyers. She ran unsuccessfully for the New York City council on the Liberal Party ticket, and was a victim of McCarthyism in 1952—she lost a post at Cornell University because her letters of reference had been written by people who were considered too radical: Eleanor Roosevelt, future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and labor leader Philip Randolph. She worked for a time in a New York law firm’s litigation department.

Murray interrupted her law practice for four years to research and write Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family. The biography of her grandparents, which also retraced the history of the Underground Railroad, consumed her. Upon its publication in 1956, a reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune wrote, “Proud Shoes is a book of such variety of incident and such depths and changes of tone as to astonish one who mistakes it simply for a family chronicle. It is history, it is biography, and it is also a story that, at its best, is dramatic enough to satisfy the demands of fiction….” In 1960 she accepted an appointment as senior lecturer at the Ghana School of Law in Accra, and was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to his Committee on Civil and Political Rights. For her work on the committee, she compiled a long list of laws that discriminated against women in the areas of divorce, child custody, immigration, naturalization, tax, eligibility for credit, choice of domicile, access to unemployment, and jury service, among others. After earning her Ph.D. from Yale in 1965, Murray was appointed to the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), became a founding member of the National Organization for Women, and taught for five years at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

A Rich Life, Fully Lived

As the civil rights movement grew in force in the early 1960s, Murray worked closely with Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr. She quickly became disenchanted with the lack of a female presence in the leadership among civil rights groups. According to a biography that appears online at the Spartacus Educational web site, she wrote to Randolph in 1963: “I have been increasingly perturbed over the blatant disparity between the major role which Negro women have played and are playing in the crucial grassroots levels of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions. It is indefensible to call a national march on Washington and send out a call which contains the name of not a single woman leader.”

Murray was as accomplished in her personal life as she was in her professional life. She had passionate and loyal relationships with her family and friends, who came from every race and economic standing. She possessed an extraordinary love for her father, and had friends and extended family members who were as close to her as immediate family. She was married briefly, but ended the sad relationship amicably, both she and her husband agreeing they had been too young and hasty. She developed a fascinating friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt that began in 1938, after Murray wrote her a letter, and lasted most of her adult life. Their friendship, borne out in years of letters, was as rooted in the often-prickly debates they had on national issues, especially race, as it was in the deep affection the two women felt for each other, and the many happy social occasions they shared.

At age 62, when many people consider retirement, Murray entered the seminary to begin a new career. On January 8, 1977, she became the first African-American woman in the United States to become a priest in the Episcopalian church. She performed her first Holy Eucharist at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where her grandmother, a slave, had been baptized. It was there, she later wrote, that she felt that “All of the strands of my life had come together.”

In the years after her ordination, Murray served her own parish in Baltimore and was in demand as a pastor and preacher at churches in Washington, D.C. and Pittsburgh. She continued to write in her later years—she contributed articles to theological publications, and carried on a campaign of “confrontation by typewriter,” as she called it, by writing challenging letters to newspapers and politicians on issues she felt passionately about. In her spare time she worked on her memoir, poring through decades of records and memories and writing and rewriting to put together as truthful and accurate an autobiography as she could. She died before finishing the work, on July 1, 1985, but it earned both the Christopher Award and Robert Kennedy Award when it was published posthumously in 1987. Her story “almost defies brief summation,” wrote Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley. “It is in every respect a remarkable document, not merely the story of a life that can truly be called extraordinary but also a splendid book in its own right: smoothly written, good-humored, passionate, thoughtful. One comes to its powerfully moving final pages utterly convinced that Murray was one of the greatest Americans of her time. To call her story inspiring is somehow inadequate, but true.”

Selected writings

(Editor) States’ Laws on Race and Color, and Appendices Containing International Documents, Federal Laws and Regulations, Local Ordinances and Charts, Woman’s Division of Christian Service, Board of Missions and Church Extension, Methodist Church (Cincinnati), 1951, supplement (with Verge Lake), 1955.

Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family, (biography), 1956, reprinted, The Reprint (Spartanburg, SC), 1973, new edition, Harper, 1978.

(With Leslie Rubin) The Constitution and Government of Ghana, Sweet & Maxwell (London), 1961.

Human Rights U.S.A., 1948-1966, Service Center, Board of Missions, Methodist Church, 1967.

Dark Testament, and Other Poems (collection), Sil-vermine (Norwalk, CT), 1970.

(Contributor) Voices of the New Feminism, edited by Mary Lou Thompson, Beacon Press, 1970.

Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage (autobiography), Harper, 1987.

Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet, 1987, University of Tennessee Press (Knoxville), 1989.

States’ Laws on Race and Color, University of Georgia Press (Athens), 1997.

Also author of speeches and addresses, including The Negro Woman in the Quest for Equality, 1964. Poetry represented in anthologies, including American Negro Poetry, edited by Arna Bontemps, Hill and Wang (New York City), 1963; The Poetry of Black America, edited by Arnold Adoff, Macmillan (New York City), 1968; The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1970, edited by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1970; and A Rock against the Wind: Black Love Poems, edited by Lindsay Patterson, Dodd (New York City), 1973. Contributor to journals and other publications, including Crisis and Color.

Sources

Books

Murray, Pauli, Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet, Harper & Row, 1989 (originally published as Songs in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, 1987).

O’Dell, Darlene, Sites of Southern Memory: The Autobiographies of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray, University Press of Virginia, 2001.