Pauli Murray

From Philosopedia

Pauli Murray (20 November 1910 - 1 July 1985)

Murray, a lawyer and educator, was born in Baltimore Maryland. She was the daughter of Agnes Georgianna (Fitzgerald), who died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1914); and William Henry Murray, a graduate of Howard University. Her father, a high school teacher, suffered from effects of typhoid fever when young and was confined to Crownsville State Hospital, dying there in 1923.

Biography

Spartacus Educational has written of Murray:

Anna and her five brothers and sisters were raised by relatives in Baltimore. Eventually she went to live with her aunt, Pauline Fitzgerald, a school teacher. After graduating from Hillside High School at the head of her class, she moved to New York City. Murray attended Hunter College and financed her studies with various jobs. However, after the Wall Street Crash, unable to find work, Murray was forced to abandon her studies.

In the 1930s Murray worked for the Works Projects Administration (WPA) and as a teacher in the New York City Remedial Reading Project. She also had articles and poems published in various magazines. This included her novel, Angel of the Desert, that was serialized in the Carolina Times.

Murray also became involved in the civil rights movement. In 1938 she began a campaign to enter the all-white University of North Carolina. With the support of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) Murray's case received national publicity. However, it was not until 1951 that Floyd McKissick became the first African American to be accepted by the University of North Carolina. During this campaign she developed a life-long friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt.

A member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Murray also became involved in attempts to end segregation on public transport and this resulted in her arrest and imprisonment in March 1940 for refusing to sit at the back of a bus in Virginia.

In 1941 Murray enrolled at the Howard University law school with the intention of becoming a civil rights lawyer. The following year she joined with George Houser, James Farmer and Bayard Rustin, to form the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Members of CORE were mainly pacifists who had been deeply influenced by Henry David Thoreau and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that he used successfully against British rule in India. The students became convinced that the same methods could be employed by blacks to obtain civil rights in America.

In 1943 Murray published two important essays on civil rights, "Negroes Are Fed Up in Common Sense" and an article about the Harlem race riot in the socialist newspaper, New York Call. Her most famous poem on race relations, "Dark Testament," was also written in that year.

After Murray graduated from Howard University in 1944 she went to Harvard University on a Rosenwald Fellowship. However, after the award had been announced, Harvard Law School rejected her because of her gender. Murray went to the University of California where she received a degree in law. Her master's thesis was The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment.

Murray moved to New York City and provided support to the growing civil rights movement. Her book, States' Laws on Race and Color, was published in 1951. Thurgood Marshall, head of the legal department at the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), described the book as the Bible for civil rights lawyers.

In the early 1950s Murray, like many African Americans involved in the civil rights movement, suffered from McCarthyism. In 1952 she lost a post at Cornell University because the people who had supplied her references - Eleanor Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall and Philip Randolph - were considered to be too radical. She was told in a letter that they decided to give "one hundred per cent protection" to the university "in view of the troublous times in which we live."

In 1956 Murray published Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family, a biography of her grandparents, and their struggle with racial prejudice. In 1960 Murray travelled to Ghana to explore her African cultural roots. When she returned President John F. Kennedy appointed her to his Committee on Civil and Political Rights.

In the early 1960s Murray worked closely with Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King but was critical of the way that men dominated the leadership of these civil rights organizations. In August, 1963, she wrote to Randolph and pointed out that she had "been increasingly perturbed over the blatant disparity between the major role which Negro women have played and are playing in the crucial grass-roots levels of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions."

According to Who's Who, 1976-1977,

In 1945 she was admitted to the California bar; in 1948 to the New York State bar; in 1960 to the U.S. Supreme Court bar. She was associate attorney for the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison, New York City, 1956-1960; a senior lecturer at Ghana Law School, Accra, West Africa, 1960-1961; a consultant of Equal Employment Opportunity Community, 1966-1967; was Vice President of Benedict College, Columbia, South Carolina, 1967-1968); professor of American studies at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, 1967 - 1973; a seminarian at General Theological Seminary, New York City, 1973; Deputy Attorney General, Department of Justice, Sacramento, California 1946; attorney, Community Law and Social Action, American Jewish Congress, 1946-1947; and consultant World Council of Churches, 1968.

Murray was a member of the Advisory Council, Martin Luther King Jr. Institute for Non-Violent Social Change, 1971; Ford Foundation Study Law and Justice, 1972-1975, N.O.W.; Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College 1969-1973; the National Coalition for Research on Women's Education and Development 1971-1973, O.E.O. 1967-1968, member of the Massachusetts Governor's Council on Security and Privacy, 1971-1973; the Joint Commission.

She was ordained and a licensed minister in the Protestant Episcopal Church, USA.

From 1969 to 1970, Commission of Women in Today's World; was chairman, Women United; a member of Committee on Civil Rights, President Kennedy Commission, Status of Women, 1962-1963; was on the Board of Directors of the Beacon Press, 1968-1969; N.O.W. Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc., 1970-1973; A.C.L.U., 1965-1973; recipient Whitney M. Young Jr. Award of the N.E.A. 1972; the Eleanor Roosevelt Award, Professional Women's Caucus, 1971; Homecoming Award of Howard University, 1971; Alumni Award for distinguished postgraduate achievement in law and public service, 1970; award of Exemplary Christian Ministry, Boston Theological Institute 1970; named Woman of the Year by Madamoiselle 1947; National Council of Negro Women; 1946; member of Hunter College Alumni Association (named to Hall of Fame in 1972; Outstanding Professional Achievement Award 1974). National Association (Vice Chairman Committee on Women's Rights 1971-1973; N.Y. County Bar Associations; National Association Women Lawyers; N.A.A.C.P. National Council of Negro Women.

Author: Dark Testament and Other Poems (1970); The Constitution and Government of Ghana (1961). Proud Shoes (1956). States' Laws on Race and Color (1951).

In 1977 Murray became the first African American woman to become an Episcopal priest. She died of cancer in Pittsburgh. Her autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, was published posthumously in 1987.

Impact

In 1976, Murray was interviewed by the Southern Oral History Program Collection. The interview can be listened to and downloaded.

In 2001, Darlene O'Dell wrote Sites of Southern Memory: The Autobiographies of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray.

Anne Firor Scott in 2006 wrote Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware: Forty Years of Letters in Black and White (Gender and American Culture).

Anthony B. Pinn in 2006 wrote Pauli Murray: Selected Sermons and Writings. In 2008, he wrote Becoming "America's Problem Child": An Outline of Pauli Murray's Life and Theology. Of Murray, Anthony B. Pinn, a Unitarian who is professor of religious studies at Rice University, has written:

Murray's personal history and theological perspective allow her to maintain a commitment to progress without sacrificing the importance of individual choices and goals. Her theological writings teach an appreciation for the tensions between individual objectives and communal commitments. Hence, relationship, for her, entails an embracing of both difference and similarity because Murray does not require African Americans to choose individual goals and objectives at the expense of communal identity. Her sense of identity entails a full range of possibilities allowing for the integration of subjective and communal concerns. By giving attention to complex relationships and human dignity. Murray's work foreshadows recent reflections on African American identity.

With her theological and hermeneutical principles in place, Murray strove to make sense of the social dynamics, most notably human suffering, that she had encountered as an attorney, professor, priest, and black woman. Extending this analysis to a larger community of the oppressed, Murray sought to problematize existing conditions and thereby highlight the necessity of justice. She spent her life attempting to correct flaws and, through religious and social agitation, humanize life. Could any less be expected of "America's problem child?"