Pauli Murray

"In the fall of 1942 a young black law student at Howard University visited a class in constitutional law taught by one of the nation's leading historians: so began the decades-long friendship between Pauli Murray, the student, and Caroline Ware, the historian. This collection of their letters begins in 1943 and continues (with few interruptions) until Murray's death in 1985. The correspondence illuminates a significant period in what is now labeled the "long civil rights movement" as well as the early days of second wave feminism." "Ware (1899-1990) was a Boston Brahmin, an accomplished social historian, a consumer advocate, and a community development specialist who worked in Asia and virtually every Latin American country. Among Ware's other activities, she edited the final volume of UNESCO's History of Mankind. Murray (1910-1985), raised in North Carolina, became a labor lawyer, a teacher, and a lifelong political and social activist. As a writer, she is best known for her family memoir Proud Shoes and her epic poem Dark Testament. Murray also was the first African American woman ordained an Episcopal priest." "The wide-ranging topics of their correspondence include civil rights, electoral politics, the labor movement, the debate about the Fair Employment Practices Committee, McCarthyism, feminism, and the National Organization for Women (of which both were founding members), as well as personal and private concerns. Their words capture the unguarded thoughts and reactions of two highly intelligent women - one white, one black: one a northerner, one a southerner - both dedicated to the cause of human rights. In the process, the letters paint compelling self-portraits."--Jacket.

Autobiography of an American woman, a pioneer civil rights activist and feminist. Granddaughter of a slave and great-granddaughter of a slave owner, growing up in the "colored" section of Durham, North Carolina in the early 20th century, she rebelled against the segregation that was an accepted fact of life in the South.

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Pauli Murray was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1910. A few years thereafter, her mother died, and she went to live with her Aunt Pauline in Durham, North Carolina. Murray begins the interview with a discussion of her early memories of her family before shifting the focus to her childhood and adolescent years in Durham. Murray offers a vivid comparison of race relations in that area over the span of three generations, noting important class distinctions, hierarchies related to skin tone, and the evolution of racial violence. Murray recalls her early school years with fondness and argues that she was imbued with a strong sense of racial identity both at home and in school. Shortly following her graduation from high school, Murray turned down a full scholarship to Wilberforce University in Ohio because she had already determined that she no longer wanted to have a segregated education. During the late 1920s, Murray established residency in New York so she could attend Hunter College, a women's school where she was one of a handful of African American students. Murray describes some of her experiences at Hunter College (she graduated in 1933) and her decision to stay in New York for a few years while working on her poetry. During the late 1930s, Murray returned to North Carolina, partly at the behest of her Aunt Pauline, with the intention of pursuing graduate work at the University of North Carolina. In 1938, Murray was declined admittance to UNC because of her race. Her unsuccessful effort to challenge the decision was the first of three pivotal experiences in her journey towards pursuing a career in law. The second occurred shortly thereafter, in 1940, when Murray and a friend were arrested for violating segregation statutes and for creating a public disturbance when riding a Greyhound bus through Petersburg, Virginia. On the coattails of her arrest and short prison term, Murray began to work for the Workers Defense League, specifically with the legal defense effort for Odell Waller, an African American sharecropper sentenced to death for the murder of his white landlord. Her work on this case was the third pivotal incident, and it led her to meet Leon Ransom, who arranged for her to attend Howard University on a full scholarship. During her years in law school at Howard University, Murray continued to pursue her interests in matters of racial justice; however, it was also during those years that she became acutely aware of gender discrimination. After her graduation, Murray pursued further education at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked briefly as the Deputy Attorney General of California before accepting a position with a law firm in New York. During the early 1960s, Murray traveled to Ghana where she helped set up a law school. In addition to describing her work there, she also offers a unique perspective on African politics during the early 1960s. After her return to the United States, Murray worked as a law professor at Brandeis University and continued her political involvement on the Civil and Political Rights committee of the President's Commission on the Status of Women and with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In 1973, she left her position at Brandeis in order to enter the seminary, in part because she believed that the civil rights and women's liberation movements had become too militant and that an emphasis on reconciliation would better result in equality. The remainder of the interview is devoted to a discussion of Murray's poetry, her book Proud Shoes, and her views on racial and class differences within the women's movement.

History of a family blended from slaves, free blacks, white slaveowners, Cherokee Indians, and others.

For readers discovering the great civil rights activist Pauli Murray, here, at last returned to print, is Dark Testament and Other Poems, Murray's sole poetry collection and a revelatory work crucial to her identity as "rebel, instigator, survivor...opener-of-doors, and always a devout child of God and friend to mankind" (Patricia Bell-Scott). Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Alexander illuminated in her introduction how Murray's poems lay bare the brutal history of slavery and Jim Crow while holding up the dream of racial justice and human connection. "Poetry," she says, "was where [Murray] could imagine herself into other identities and experiences...Murray used poetry as a tool to slow down and experience, deeply, what is means to be among the most vulnerable and the most resilient...It seemed she understood poetry as a space for exploration and self-knowing, for crystallizing perception and disturbance into form, and thus, for a moment, subduing the roiling seas"--back cover.