She Didn't Wait for Justice
Pauli Murray cut through racial, gender and religious barriers so others could follow
When I first subscribed to the New York Review of Books. I read it from cover to cover. This included the classified ads, those tiny bursts of literature.
Another thing I want to tell you is that I inherited from my mother the habit of clipping articles to read later. Her files were the manilla folder kind, not digital.
The other day I came across a NYRB article that I had saved (in a manilla folder). “Catching Up to Pauli Murray” is about the 2018 re-issue of Murray’s book, Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage.
The book was first published in 1987, two years after Murray’s death.
In the 2018 article the reviewer says,
Now it’s more than thirty years later, and changing realities — a black president, a woman presidential candidate, the Charlottesville violence, young black men’s deaths, the transgender struggle — have challenged us to look anew at the issues of race, gender and sexuality that defined Pauli Murray’s life.
Today in 2023 it’s five years after that review, and changing realities — a misogynist President, January 6th, young black men’s deaths, the rise of politicized hate groups, mass shootings, the Supreme Court’s attack on Roe v. Wade and on other human rights — have challenged us to look anew at the issues of race, gender and sexuality that defined Pauli Murray’s life.
So I ordered Song from the library, as well as another of Murray’s books, Proud Shoes: the Story of an American Family.
Murray’s family reflected the American story that continues even to this day. The Civil War, the mid-20th century fight for civil rights, and even today’s 2023 Supreme Court affirmative-action case involving the University of North Carolina — all these relate to the pressures she and her family had to dodge and grapple with every day.
One of Murray’s first points in Proud Shoes is that rankings of racial superiority dominated her family’s daily lives, as it did many others’. In the mid-19th century plantation and servant culture, there were alarming degrees of personal status.
The United States Census enumerators were directed to distinguish ‘blacks’ from ‘mulattos', ‘quadroons’ and ‘octoroons’. In the search for whiteness, mixed bloods reversed the definitions. Consequently, an octoroon felt superior to a quadroon… and on down the line.
A person’s complexion had the greatest single value. Family discussions about variations in complexions and in facial features could upset the precarious balance in a mixed-racial household and set off quarrels full of recriminations and stinging insults.
This value system was at the heart of Pauli Murray’s family. The father of her grandmother’s family was a white slave owner with mixed-race children, and her grandfather was a free-born black man. I can’t imagine their conflicts and anguish.
Pauli was born in Baltimore in 1910. When she was four her mother died and Pauli was sent to Durham, NC, to live with her grandparents. This is where her story begins. Murray writes in Proud Shoes,
One couldn’t be around Grandmother for very long without hearing all about the Chapel Hill Smiths and the University of North Carolina. It was an obsession with her.
‘Child, hold your head high,’ she told me. ‘You got good blood in you. Aristocrats, that’s what they were, going back seven generations right in this state.’
Grandmother Cornelia never forgot that an earlier Smith in her family had offered 500 acres of land to the University; her father and brother attended the University; her grandfather, Dr. James Smith, had been a UNC Trustee; and her aunt established a scholarship fund there.
Despite her family’s history of support for the University, in 1938 when Pauli applied for a PhD sociology program there, she was turned down. The Dean’s rejection letter read,
Under the laws of North Carolina and under the resolutions of the Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina, members of your race are not admitted to the University.
It so happened that the United States Supreme Court had just decided the Gaines v. Canada case. States that provided a school to white students were now required to provide in-state education to blacks as well. Because of this ruling, the Dean’s letter continued,
It is expected that the Legislature of the State will make provision for graduate instruction for Negroes.
The Gaines decision looked like a win for racial equality, but a “separate but equal” ruling like this could easily be ignored. The NC General Assembly made gestures to provide equal graduate school opportunities for black students, while in reality they cut funds for the project. Then they adjourned for two years.
In 1941 Pauli began classes at Howard Law School in Washington, DC. On her first day, a professor said he didn’t know why women attended law school. Pauli wasn’t discouraged'; she was furious.
In 1944 she received a fellowship for graduate work at Harvard University, but Harvard Law didn’t accept women at that time. Even a letter of support from President Franklin Roosevelt failed to gain her admittance.
Instead, she got her master’s degree at the University of California School of Law, Berkeley.
Meanwhile, in 1951 the University of North Carolina yielded to a federal court order and finally admitted four African-American students.
In the early 1960’s Pauli Murray went to Africa to serve on the faculty of the Ghana School of Law. She writes in Song in a Weary Throat,
My greatest reward came on the last day of the term. Joseph Musah, the youngest member of the class, spoke of the poverty of his people and how little chance for education they had been given. If he were admitted to the bar, he would be the first lawyer from his district.
He added that Ghanaian students had been told that American education was inferior, but after my constitutional law class, the first class taught there by an American, he and his classmates changed their views.
‘We used to accept without questioning whatever the lecturer told us,’ he said. ‘Through your class we have now learned to inquire.’
There is much more to Pauli Murray’s life, too much to tell you about here. I’m struck by how generous her persistence was. She worked through traditional power structures in ways that changed them for others who followed.
She didn’t waste energy agonizing over the fits and starts of progress. She even seems to have been amused at times.
Consider this story she tells in Song in a Weary Throat. In 1978 the University of North Carolina notified Murray she would receive an honorary degree at commencement. After forty years, an honorary degree!
But, “to my dismay,” she writes,
several weeks later the federal government threatened to cut off funds to the University of North Carolina for failing to fully carry out the desegregation provisions of the civil rights law on its sixteen campuses.
I suggested mediation, but without success.
So, since the challenge I had raised forty years earlier was still not fully resolved, I had to withdraw my acceptance of the honorary degree.
And now, coming back to the present, the U. S. Supreme Court is expected by June of 2023 to decide whether race-conscious admissions programs at the University of North Carolina and Harvard are lawful.
This Court seems poised to drag us back to the America of 1938, when Pauli Murray and her people had to struggle to claim the little chance for education they had been given, just as Joseph Musah and his people did in Ghana in the 1960’s.
But I suppose something has changed over the past 85 years. This time, a rejection letter from the University of North Carolina Law School won’t have to give any reason at all for its denial of application.
Impressive courage and persistence!
Once again, Deda, you have enlightened us. Many thanks and deep appreciation for bringing these valuable observations to us.