If Pauli Murray were alive today, she would be celebrating her 105th birthday. She was born Nov. 20, 1910, in Baltimore. OK, I know, “who’s Pauli Murray?” Well, she was a woman of great distinction, and among her many achievements was the honor of being the first African-American woman to become an Episcopal priest.
“Pauli” (she was named Pauline) was 4 years of age when her mother, Agnes, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Her father, William, was a high school teacher and a graduate of Howard University. For many years he was confined to Crownsville State Hospital in Maryland, suffering from the effects of typhoid fever. In 1923, he was murdered there by a guard.
Now orphaned, Murray went to live with her aunt, Pauline Fitzgerald, an elementary school teacher, and her grandparents in Durham, N.C. Murray graduated from Hillside High School in 1926 with honors. She moved to New York City in order to study at Hunter College, working to pay her tuition.
But her dream of higher education was disrupted by the Great Depression. Unable to find gainful employment, she dropped out of college, and by the early 1930s she was hired by the Works Projects Administration. She taught in the New York City Remedial Reading Project. When not overburdened by classroom duties, she began submitting poems and articles to various magazines. Her novel, “Angel of the Desert,” was serialized in the Carolina Times.
Highly motivated and concerned about the developing Civil Rights Movement, Murray began a campaign to integrate the University of North Carolina. Backed by the NAACP, she soon received national attention. Despite her determination, she was not successful, and it was not until 1951 that civil rights legend Floyd McKissick became the school’s first African-American student. However, she did earn one victory from her struggle—a lifelong relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt, who championed her cause.
During an interview with historian Genna Rae McNeil in 1976 as part of the Southern Oral History Project, Murray was asked who her heroines were. “I suppose that my great heroine of this century was Eleanor Roosevelt, but my great heroine of the 19th century, and you will see that her picture is hanging over my bed, is Sojourner Truth. Sojourner Truth was a slave and, eventually, an emancipated slave, but she had a tremendous insight and appreciation into the women’s movement and was one of the foremost spokesmen for the women’s movement as well as the abolition movement in the 19th century.”
Among her many affiliations was the Fellowship of Reconciliation. As a member of FOR, she was one of several protesters arrested in March 1940 for refusing to move to the back of the bus in Virginia. The integrated group’s mission was to end segregation on public transport. A year later, she became a student at Howard University with an aim of becoming a civil rights attorney. She made a decisive move in 1942 when she joined George Houser, James Farmer and Bayard Rustin in the founding of the Congress of Racial Equality.
Murray and many of the other members of CORE were guided by the ideas and actions of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi. From these two pacifists they embodied the lessons of civil disobedience. In 1943, she published two important essays on civil rights: “Negroes Are Fed Up” and “Common Sense.” She also wrote a lengthy article on the race riot in Harlem that year that was published in the New York Call.
One of her most enduring poems was “Dark Testament,” which dealt with race relations. Later it was published in her collection by Silvermine Press in 1970. One verse of the poem reads:
Give me a song of hope
And a world where I can sing it.
Give me a song of faith
And a people to believe in it.
Give me a song of kindliness
And a country where I can live it.
Give me a song of hope and love And a brown girl’s heart.
Murray graduated from Howard in 1944, then set her sights on Harvard to continue her study of law. She had listed Harvard as her first choice on an application for a Rosenwald Fellowship, which at first she received and was then rejected when they learned she was a woman.
She later received her law degree from the University of California Boalt School of Law. “The Right to Equal Opportunity Employment” was her master’s thesis. Aware of the developing Civil Rights Movement, she moved back to New York City and became a fervent participant. In 1951, she published “States’ Laws on Race and Color,” a veritable bible for civil rights lawyers, said Thurgood Marshall. As an outspoken and highly visible activist, Murray came into the crosshairs of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the scourge of McCarthyism.
She was forced from her job at Cornell University when the school checked her references—Eleanor Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall and A. Philip Randolph, all of them too radical and thus a liability to the school.
Her most important book, “Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family,” essentially the story of her grandparents’ struggle against racism in Durham, was published in 1956. Portions of the book have been anthologized in numerous collections. Four years later she travelled to Ghana seeking her cultural roots. Upon her return, President John F. Kennedy appointed her to his Committee on Civil and Political Rights. Throughout this turbulent period she retained her association with Randolph, Rustin and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Even so, she was not satisfied with the fact that males dominated most of the organizations. She voiced these concerns in a sharp rebuke to Randolph.
Murray was still on the ramparts against injustices when she became the first African-American woman to become a priest in the Episcopal Church. She held this esteemed position until her death on July 1, 1985. Two years later, her autobiography, “Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage,” was published. It was re-released as “Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest and Poet.”
Along with McNeil’s extensive interview, there are books on her life and work by Anne Firor Scott and Anthony Pinn.