I admit that I did not until I glanced at the editorial page of today’s New York Times and encountered an op ed written by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, professor of history, African-American studies and American studies at Yale. The piece is titled At Yale, a Right That Doesn’t Outweigh a Wrong and I would like to suggest that there is nothing of greater importance you could read today.
Yale has been under pressure for a long time from students and alumni to remove the name of John C. Calhoun from one of its residential colleges. The column will provide ample reasons, given all of Calhoun’s history, that his name should not be held in honor, at Yale or elsewhere, even as we must acknowledge his influence on the history of this nation, some of which is still unfortunately reflected in the reemergence of the states’ rights movement.
Instead the university decided to name two colleges for Benjamin Franklin and Anna Pauline Murray. Calhoun had a connection with Yale, having attended before embarking on his long public career. Franklin had a personal connection with Ezra Stiles, the 7th President of Yale, on whose behalf he obtained scholarly books for Yale’s library from Britain, and for whom he managed to get an honorary degree from the University of Edinburgh. Franklin himself received an honorary MA from Yale in 1753, and the University obtained his papers I believe in the 1930s. There is no doubt that Franklin is worthy of being honored by naming a residential college after him.
But who was Pauli Murray?
She was born in 1910, the granddaughter of a slave.
In 1938, she applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, in her home state, only to be rejected because “members of your race are not admitted to the university.” In 1940, she went to jail in Virginia after she refused to move to the back of a Greyhound bus. During World War II, she served as head of the nonviolent protest committee in A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement. In 1943, she organized sit-ins to desegregate restaurants in Washington. A year later, as valedictorian of Howard Law School, she applied to Harvard Law School to do graduate work. It was customary for Harvard to accept the Howard valedictorian, but Harvard told Murray, “You are not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School.”
That paragraph already contains enough material to draw one’s attention. The next continues to do so:
Instead, after three decades of civil rights leadership, Anna Pauline Murray earned the degree of doctor of juridical science from Yale Law School in 1965. While at Yale, Murray was an author of the pioneering article “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII,” which argued that sex discrimination resembled race discrimination and may be prohibited by the 14th Amendment.
Later in life she went to General Theological Seminary (Episcopal) in NYC at a time when women were still not ordained in the Episcopal Church. In 1977 she became the first African American woman ordained, and in 2012 she was canonized a Saint by the Episcopal Church.
If one follows the link provided about her canonization, one comes to this article in Duke Today in which we learn that she celebrated Holy Communion for the first time in the same church in NC where her grandmother had been baptized, the grandmother who was a slave.
I’d like to share a few paragraphs of her bio from the Duke article:
The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray (1910 – 1985) was a nationally and internationally known advocate for human rights and social justice who grew up with her grandparents Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald on Carroll Street in Durham. In 1977 at age 66, she was the first African American woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest, offering communion for the first time at Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill where her grandmother had been baptized as a slave.
Prior to answering this calling, Murray worked to address injustice and promote reconciliation between races, sexes, and economic classes through her work as an attorney, writer, feminist, poet, and educator.
In the 1930s and 40s, she fought against racial segregation in education and public transit. In the 1950s and 1960s, she challenged the Civil Rights Movement to recognize the leadership of women and the double discrimination that minority women face.
As a lawyer, policy analyst and legal scholar she defied convention by stubbornly carving out her place in a male-dominated profession. She advised First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on civil rights and co-founded the National Organization for Women. As a same-gender-loving woman she struggled to live her life fully in a world not ready for her inclusive vision of freedom.
As I reflect back on my own participation in civil rights as a teenager just graduating from high school in 1963, I remember few woman that I experienced as leaders, although in my later reading I learned about some. I have in the past referred to another woman of whom we should know more, Diane Nash of Fisk University, about whom you can learn here. Thinking back, I’m not even sure I knew Pauli Murray’s name before I began teaching in the 1990s, and then to my shame I did not learn more.
One advantage of living an extended life is that one can if one chooses continue to expand one’s knowledge and understanding.
For me, one value of my visibility here at Daily Kos is that I can use that to share things I learn about which others might not be aware.
I was not aware of the magnificent legacy of Pauli Murray.
I read an op ed. I read some more. I decided to share.
I hope you find this of value.
Peace.