The Reverend Dr. Pauli Murray
Notes on an "Imp, Crusader, Dude, Priest," and Genius
by Chitown Kev
I’ve never pretended to have much comprehensive knowledge of the centuries-long civil rights movement(s). But when I came upon Dr. Brittney Cooper’s Black, Queer, Feminist, Erased From History: Meet the most important legal scholar you’ve likely never heard of at Salon; a synopsis of the career of the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, I felt a deep sense of shame to not have heard of this civil rights icon.
Pauli Murray is one of the most pivotal figures in 20th century African-American civil rights history, but beyond academic circles, she is not very well known. In 1944, she graduated as the valedictorian of her Howard University law class, producing a senior thesis titled “Should the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy Be Overruled?” Trained by William Howard Hastie and Leon Ransom at Howard, Pauli Murray had been witness to their early legal strategy of combating separate but equal doctrine by forcing states to either make black institutions equal to their white counterparts or integrate white institutions, if they failed to do so. However, she argued that Plessy v. Ferguson was inherently immoral and discriminatory and should be overturned. When she brought up this argument to her classmates, she noted that her suggestion was received with “hoots of derisive laughter.” Murray coined the term “Jane Crow” to name the forms of sexist derision she frequently encountered during her time at Howard.
The "bible" of the movement to overturn Jim Crow.
NAACP Chief Counsel and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall described Murray's 1950 examination of segregation laws,
States' Laws on Race and Color,as the "bible" of the movement to overturn Jim Crow laws nationwide. Current Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg named Dr. Murray (along with Dorothy Kenyon) an honorary co-author of her brief in
Reed v. Reed in recognition of her contributions.
Murray was a friend and confidant of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for more than 20 years; a friendship that began through Murray's and Mrs. Roosevelt's correspondence about the Odell Waller case. Murray's correspondence with Mrs. Roosevelt indicates that, at times, she was a scathing critic of the racial (and racist) policies of the Roosevelt administration.
Dr. Murray was also the first African-American woman to be ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church and, in 2012, was sainted by the Episcopal Church.
And I haven't even scratched the surface of Dr. Murray's achievements.
Yet, until two weeks ago, I'd never heard of her. Why?
To be sure, the technical nature of legal scholarship is one factor.
However, I agree with Dr. Brittney Cooper that the nexus of race/sex/sexual orientation/gender identity is the major factor in the minimization and, at times, outright erasure of Dr. Murray's achievements as a civil rights advocate.
As this page of the Duke University John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute's online exhibit dedicated to the legacy of Dr. Murray titled Imp, Crusader, Dude, Priest attests, Dr. Murray's gender appearance and performance as well as her activism hardly conformed to notions of black (or female) respectability politics. For example, when Murray was arrested in 1940 in Virginia for refusing to give up her seat on a bus, she was dressed as a young man. True enough, as Dr. Murray indicated in a set of interviews with the University of North Carolina Southern Oral History Program, the Virginia authorities dropped the charge of violating the segregation laws to prevent a legal challenge by the NAACP. I also suspect that Murray's gender presentation may have had something to do with the NAACP's decision not to take that case.
[Interestingly, according to Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore's Defying Dixie: the Radical Roots of Civil Rights 1919-1950, renowed UCLA sociology professor Harold Garfinkel, then getting his master's degree at the University of North Carolina, seems to have been a sympathetic witness to Murray's arrest and wrote a story called "Color Trouble" the was published in the May 1940 issue of a black periodical, Opportunity. In the story, Garfinkel describes the couple as male/female couple. The editors of Best Short Stories of 1941 included "Color Trouble" in it's anthology, assuming that the story was fiction (Gilmore 322-25).]
Nor were the black respectability politics of the time limited to issues related to gender identity/performance in Dr. Murray's case. For example, when she was denied admission to The University of North Carolina in 1938 on account of her race, Murray herself stated that her involvement in "radical activities" may have had something to do with the NAACP refusing to take a case that was celebrated in it's time.
UNC Oral History Project Interview- Refused Admittance to University of North Carolina on the Basis of Race
PAULI MURRAY:
And it suddenly burst out over the radio, you know, and came to be sort of national news. But it was this "unidentified Negress." [laughter] It's in the headlines, an "unidentified Negress makes application to the University of North Carolina." This correspondence went back and forth for awhile and then I put the whole stuff together in an envelope and sent it down to the NAACP, namely to Thurgood Marshall...nobody can say anything about the standing and status of Hunter College nor of me in terms of academic standing, and isn't this an answer?" I then got the shock of my life. I learned that the NAACP very carefully picks its cases in these days, they had to win every case, it goes carefully into the background of the person who is going to be the bearer of the case, and all of this being said to a proud Fitzgerald Murray, you know What does he mean by going carefully into the background of it?" But there was a certain kind of the way that I read this was, "We have to be very careful of the people that we select. They have to be Simon-pure and you are not quite Simon-pure enough." I was too maverick.
I plan to write about black respectability politics in a future post; it's an issue that affects me deeply and personally in many ways.
I will simply say that I found reading Dr. Cooper's Salon post to be exhilarating. Yet, at the same time, it is maddening and frustrating that such a preternaturally gifted woman as the Reverend Dr. Pauli Murray continues to marginalized in the popular histories of multiple 20th century civil rights movements.
I am currently reading through Dr. Murray's 1987 (posthumous) autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrammage (reissued in paperback as Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet by University of Tennessee Press). It is simply one the finest autobiographies that I have ever read. This book should be a primer in any number of college courses ranging from Black Studies to Women's Studies to LGBT Studies and even Legal Studies. Most importantly, Song in a Weary Throat is simply a testament of what one person can do in the face of of overwhelming odds; a message that, in the wake of recent news headlines, needs to be heard now more than ever.
Book cover for Murray's posthumous autobiography Song in a Weary Throat
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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On this 50th anniversary of Selma's Bloody Sunday, President Obama stood in the shadow of the Edmund Pettus Bridge and delivered a history lesson for the ages. The Root: Obama in Selma: The Passion of a President.
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On Bloody Sunday’s 50th anniversary President Barack Obama delivered a rousing speech before 40,000 on the Edmund Pettus Bridge that placed honoring Selma’s legacy at the cornerstone of his remaining presidency.
Obama’s strong speech came on a day of commemoration, which featured a host of visiting political dignitaries and cultural celebrities including Congressman John Lewis, former President George W. Bush, Attorney General Eric Holder, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and actor Danny Glover.
Introduced by civil rights leader John Lewis who received a brutal beating in Selma fifty years earlier, Obama began his speech by recognizing the former SNCC chairman and last living March On Washington speaker as one of his personal heroes.
Obama proceeded to recount Selma’s importance as one of the enduring markers of American democracy. “All that history met on this bridge,” explained Obama. “A contest to determine the true meaning of America.” Announcing a roll call of civil rights activists whomade Selma’s victory possible, Obama placed “the courage of ordinary Americans willing to endure billy-clubs"who “marched toward justice” in the face of unspeakable violence.
The early parts of the speech found Obama playing historian in chief, linking the protests in Selma to President Lyndon Johnson’s successful passage of the Voting Rights Act. “As we commemorate their achievement we are well served to remember that at the time of the marches, many in power condemned rather than praised them,” noted Obama. “Back then they were called communists or half breeds or outside agitators, sexual and moral degenerates and worse.”
President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga), Marian Robinson, Malia and Sasha Obama with the crowd in Selma, March 7, 2015.
THE WHITE HOUSE
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In 1919, white Americans visited awful violence on black Americans. So black Americans decided to fight back. Slate: Red Summer
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~In Longview, Texas, in July 1919, S.L. Jones, who was a teacher and a local distributor of the black newspaper the Chicago Defender, investigated the suspicious death of Lemuel Walters. Walters was a black man who was accused of raping a white woman, jailed, and ultimately found dead under “mysterious” circumstances. When the Defender published a story about Walters’ death, asserting that the alleged rape had been a love affair and Walters’ death the result of a lynching, Jones came under attack, beaten by the woman’s brothers.
Hearing a rumor that Jones was in trouble, Dr. C.P. Davis, a black physician and friend of the teacher, tried to get law enforcement to protect him from further violence. When it became clear that this help was not forthcoming, Davis organized two-dozen black volunteers to guard Jones’ house. That same night, a mob surrounded the dwelling. Four armed white men knocked on the door, then tried to ram it down. The black defenders, who were arranged around Jones’ property, opened fire. A half-hour gun battle ensued, in which several attackers were wounded; the posse retreated.
Hearing the town’s fire bell ringing to summon reinforcements, Jones and Davis went into hiding, knowing that they wouldn’t be able to defend themselves against a larger mob. Davis borrowed a soldier’s uniform, put it on, and took the first of several trains out of the area. At one point, he asked a group of black soldiers he found in a train car to conceal him in their ranks, which they did, contributing to his disguise by giving him an overseas cap and a gas mask. Later that day, Jones also managed to escape. But their successful resistance and flight were bittersweet victories: Before the episode was over, Davis’ and Jones’ homes were burned, along with Davis’ medical practice and the meeting place of the town’s Negro Business Men’s League. Davis’ father-in-law was killed in the violence.
In his new book, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back, David F. Krugler, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Platteville, looks at the actions of people like Jones and Davis, who resisted white incursions against the black community through the press, the courts, and armed defensive action. The year 1919 was a notable one for racial violence, with major episodes of unrest in Chicago; Washington; and Elaine, Arkansas, and many smaller clashes in both the North and the South. (James Weldon Johnson, then the field secretary of the NAACP, called this time of violence the “Red Summer.”) White mobs killed 77 black Americans, including 11 demobilized servicemen (according to the NAACP’s magazine, the Crisis). The property damage to black businesses and homes—attacks on which betrayed white anxiety over new levels of black prosperity and social power—was immense.
Men outside of the office of black Chicago businessman Jesse Binga, summer of 1919. “During Chicago’s riot,” writes David Krugler, “African-Americans gathered on street corners in the riot zone to share news and to form self-defense forces.”
Photo by Jun Fujita. Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum (ICHi-65481).
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West African forces may at last be gaining ground on Boko Haram.Economist: On the back foot.
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Almost two months ago, Abubakar Mohammed fled from Boko Haram as it overran his home town in north-eastern Nigeria. Since then he has been among the wandering ranks of 1m-plus displaced people. But a glimmer of hope now shines on the horizon. Monguno, the fishing village on the edge of Lake Chad that he calls home, was liberated by Nigeria’s army last month. Mr Mohammed is now planning to return.
Monguno is one of about 30 villages reportedly reclaimed from Boko Haram since February 7th. That was the day Nigeria announced a delay of the presidential election until the end of March to give the army time to quell the insurgency, which would have prevented a vote in large parts of three north-eastern states. After years of rampaging almost without opposition, Boko Haram now faces a fight. This change is well timed for the government, since it faced the prospect of electoral defeat before the poll was postponed, not least because of its failure to provide better security.
Locals wonder why it has taken so long. Army spokesmen say better arms have arrived. Many are said to have come from Russia after America blocked the sale of sophisticated weapons, such as attack helicopters, because of human-rights abuses by Nigerian soldiers.
New tactics are helping. Demoralised battalions have been replaced and new generals have taken command on the front line, says Mike Omeri, an army spokesman. British-trained units have been praised for advances in Adamawa, one of the three most afflicted states.
The army also cites better co-operation with neighbouring countries, which are gathering an 8,700-strong force to fight the rebels. Troops stationed along the borders with Cameroon and Niger are trying to block escape routes. Chadian forces, which entered Nigeria in January, have reclaimed territory. (They helped defeat fighters linked to al-Qaeda in Mali in 2013, and reckon they could end this insurgency on their own.)
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The unfairness in Ferguson’s court system that is highlighted by a Justice Department report is not limited to it or even to Missouri. Across the country, a mounting number of investigations have focused on the justice system’s burdens on the poor. New York: Ferguson Became Symbol, but Bias Knows No Border.
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If the shooting of Michael Brown had taken place about 500 yards to the southeast, he would have died not in Ferguson, Mo., but in the neighboring city of Jennings. The court system there, which is overseen by a white judge but has almost exclusively black defendants, routinely sends people to jail for failure to pay minor traffic fines, a new lawsuit alleges.
Had the shooting occurred three and a half miles to the north, the world’s attention might have turned to the city of Florissant, where in 2013, the police stopped black motorists at a rate nearly three times their share of the population. Less than four miles to the northwest, in Calverton Park, court fines and fees accounted for over 40 percent of the city’s general operating revenue last year.
But it was Ferguson and its government that came under federal scrutiny almost unprecedented for a city of its size, culminating in a Justice Department report last week that described explicit racism among city officials, abusive policing and a system that seemed to view people “less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.” And it is Ferguson that will almost certainly be forced to make wholesale changes.
Ferguson, a city of 21,000, is unusual in some respects — it has issued the most warrants of any city in the state relative to its size, for example — but the unfairness in its court system that the Justice Department highlighted is not limited to it, to St. Louis County or even to Missouri. In one meeting of federal investigators, a Missouri F.B.I. agent told colleagues that if he had been asked to predict which cities were most likely to erupt over racially charged policing, Ferguson would have been low on his list. Yet Ferguson’s neighbors are not under the same pressure to change.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Two plus two equals four. One Apple plus two Oranges equals three pieces of fruit.
But what happens, when no matter how we try, things just don't add up?
The Book of Equality
Here the readers gather to watch the books die. They die suddenly, as if thrown from an airplane, or from spontaneous cardiac arrest. They live, and then suddenly they die, and the reader who watches this is at the moment of the books' death bombarded with images documented through the smiling lipstick face of a journalist who has shown up to report on the death of the books. The milk was poisoned and forty-two babies died, she laughs, as she fondles the ashes of the dead books. And the death of forty-two babies is equal in value to the death of this book which is equal in value to the ninety-year old woman who shot herself while the sheriff waited at her door with an eviction notice which is equal in value to the collapsing of the global economy which is equal to the military in country XYZ seizing the land of the semi-nomadic hunters and cultivators of crops who have lived in the local rain forest for thousands of years. The reader opens a dead book and finds an infinite amount of burnt ash between the bindings, and when the ash blows in the wind the lipstick says that every death in the world is equal to every other death in the world which is equal to every birth in the world which is equal to every act of dismemberment which is equal to the death of a jungle which is equal to the collapse of the global economy; and hey look there’s another lady falling out of a window; she looks about equal to the poet hurled out of his country for words he wrote but which did not belong to him and whose death is about equal to the girl who was shot on the bus on her way to school this morning which is just about the same as the bearded man whose head was shoved into a sac while water was dumped over it and he died for an instant and came back to life and talked and talked and that’s about equal to the steroid illegally injected into the arm of a beautiful man who makes forty million dollars a year for injecting his arms with steroids so he can more skillfully wave a wooden stick at a ball, and in the ash we see the truest democracy there ever was: hey look it’s a little baby found in a dumpster how equal you are says the smiling lipstick to the civilized nation whose citizens walk the flooded streets looking for their homes, and in the ashes of the dead book the dead streets are equal to the eating disorders of movie stars which are equal to the dead soldiers who are equal to the homeruns which are equal to the bomb dropped by country ABC over weddings in the village of country XYZ which is equal to the earth swallowing up and devouring all of its foreigners which is just about equal to the decline in literacy in the most educated nation in the planet. There is no end to this book. There are no paragraph breaks to interrupt the smiling lipstick that goes on and on in one string of ashy words about how the declaration of peace is equal to the resumption of war and how the bodies that fall are equal to the birds that ascend and how the bomb in the Eiffel Tower is equal to the rising cost of natural gas, and the murmurs of the voices in the mud are equal to the murmurs of the expensive suits falling out of buildings and these are equal to the silence that kills with one breath and coddles life with another.
-- Daniel Borzutzky
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