"Song in a Weary Throat" A Tribute to Pauli Murray
Episcopal News Service. November 12, 1987 [87231]
Nancy S. Montgomery
WASHINGTON (DPS, Nov. 12) -- She was small but she was mighty. Whip thin, ruler straight, her body was that of a delicate woman. But the powerful words that issued from her "weary throat" rang through the history of this country for a great part of the twentieth century.
For those who knew Dr. Pauli Murray, the recently published autobiography reaffirms this remarkable woman in our memories. For less fortunate readers this posthumous volume will introduce them to a rare and exciting person.
Pauline Fitzgerald Murray was born in Baltimore, Md., in 1910. She was the daughter of middle-class parents, her mother a nurse, her father a school teacher. Her antecedents were African, Irish, American Indian and Carolina planter. She described herself as "one hundred percent American" and spoke with great pride of placing an American flag on her grandfather's grave each Memorial Day, the only stars and stripes in a sea of Confederate flags in that North Carolina cemetery. Her grandfather Fitzgerald had served in the Union Army during the Civil War.
When she was three years old her mother died and her father, suffering from acute depression, was placed in a mental hospital. The child Pauli went to live in Durham, N.C., with her Aunt Pauline Dame, an indomitable woman whose intellect, strength and deep religious belief were to shape and form Pauli's character as she matured.
There were filaments of steel and skeins of silk that wound together to form that indomitable person we knew as Pauli Murray. When she died in 1985 she had successfully pursued careers as scholar, lawyer, poet, civil rights activist, feminist, teacher and Episcopal priest -- this last achieved when she had passed a normal "retirement" age.
Somewhere along the road she decided that education would prove to be her way out of the world of bigotry and Jim Crow-ism; she created her motto, "Don't get mad, get smart."
Murray's journey to "smart" began with an extra year of high school in New York City. She was graduated from Hunter College in the darkest days of the Depression and found herself fortunate to have a job with the Works Progress Administration as a writer, for this was what the young Pauli thought would be her career. Her writing skill was to serve her well; her published works include a law textbook, biography and poetry. After four years working for the WPA and for political, labor and civil rights organizations in New York, she attempted to enter the University of North Carolina to study law and was refused because of race. It was during this time when, her anger roused by a speech given by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, she wrote the first of her blazing letters, sent a copy to Eleanor Roosevelt and began a friendship that was to last until the great lady's death. In the book there is a charming picture of the two together at Hyde Park. Murray believed in the value of protest letters. "One writer, one typewriter can equal a revolution," she said.
Not to be rebuffed by North Carolina, Murray entered Howard University Law School where she graduated at the head of her class, the only woman. During those wartime Washington years the students at Howard began a serious, nonviolent attempt to desegregate the restaurants and theaters of the then strictly segregated capital city. They were lead by Pauli Murray. Because of her excellent record at Howard she was granted a fellowship for a year's graduate study and applied to Harvard Law School where she was turned down because of her sex! Thus Jane Crow came into her life, sister to the demeaning Jim Crow she had fought against so fiercely. Her graduate work took her West instead, where she spent a year at the University of California at Berkeley. (This was not her first trip to the west coast; as a young student she had ridden the rails with hoboes and other folk looking for jobs and adventure. Hunger, hilarity and terror formed her memories of that experience.)
Even with an advanced degree in law, she still found jobs hard to come by and the next few years were spent in scrambling between practice with law firms and on her own. Her determination to handle cases of the poor and abused kept her close to poverty level income in the tough city of New York. During this time she wrote her first book of family history, "Proud Shoes," a remarkable tribute to her forebears. Her stubborn search for documentation and her true storyteller's gift make this recently republished book a fascinating introduction to her own autobiography.
The desire to understand her roots -- long before other black people were to begin such genealogical efforts -- was a contributing reason for her acceptance of a teaching post at the University of Ghana's law school. Her confrontation with the historic realities of the slave trade and her feelings of frustration over the working conditions at the university make this a most poignant chapter.
During all this time, both at home and abroad, Murray clung to her beloved Episcopal Church -- beloved even though she was kept from a major role in the church hierarchy because of her sex. Few people remember what a short time ago it was that the church finally removed the last barriers to women's full participation in the government of the denomination and an even shorter time since women were first ordained priests. At the same time she was giving no quarter in the struggle for civil rights, continuing her work for the NAACP and ACLU. Her description of her earliest arrest in Virginia for "refusing to move to the back of the bus" is searing and a sharp jolt to our memories of history; it happened some twenty years before Rosa Parks.
Murray admitted to some anxiety about being an older student when she entered Yale Law School following her return from Ghana. But she held her own with such young activists as Eleanor Holmes Norton, Marion Wright Edelman and Inez Smith Reid. Scholastically her intellectual brilliance still shown through and, even though she admitted the work was a bit harder than it had been in the past, she was awarded the degree of Doctor of Juridical Science at commencement in 1965. She was the first Negro either male or female to achieve that distinction. (By way of explanation: Murray did not consent to the word "black." She said that people of color had struggled too long to be called uppercase "Negroes" ever to change that for lowercase "black."
Along the way she attended as a delegate the historic World Council of Churches meeting in Uppsala, Sweden, participated actively in the formative meetings which produced the National Organization for Women, returned to the South for a year at Benedict College and cared for her friends with a deepening sense of her own call to the pastoral ministry of the church.
While she was in Uppsala she received an offer from Brandeis University to come for a year as a professor of American Studies and to establish a new Afro-American department. One of the chapters about her experienced at Brandeis is titled "My World Turned Upside Down." All of us remember the upsurge in black militancy, the riots, forced takeover of campus buildings and other violent acts which arose from the anger of young black people following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but for Murray whose whole life had been patterned after Ghandi's principles of non-violence such behavior was emotionally searing. "Of all the crosses I had to bear -- labeled 'the race problem' -- this was the heaviest," she said. She was to spend five years at Brandeis, occasionally feeling under attack by both whites and blacks.
Where did she go from Brandeis? Why to the Church, of course. All of her life she had been called to service of her fellow human beings; all of her life she had used her formidable intellect, her charm, her humor to better the lot of people in her own country and abroad. Even though the Episcopal Church was still some years away from ordaining women priests, Murray entered General Theological Seminary in 1972 and began the five-year spiritual climb that would culminate in her ordination to the priesthood at Washington Cathedral on Jan. 8, 1977.
It was bitter cold that day but the brilliant winter sun, shining through the stained glass windows, was creating magical patterns of color throughout the cathedral. At the moment when Bishop William F. Crieghton placed his hands on Murray's head she was enveloped in beams of brilliant color turning her white vestments to red and purple. Cheers and shouts of joy rose from three thousand throats as the historic ordination service for three women and three men, three black and three white ended.
Murray, at the invitation of the Rev. Peter Leerector of the Chapel of the Cross at Chapel Hill, N.C., celebrated her first holy eucharist in that church where her grandmother Cornelia, "one of five servant children belonging to Miss Mary Ruffin Smith," had been baptized over a century before. Murray walked in "proud shoes" that day as she remembered the long, weary road she had traveled.
"Song in a Weary Throat -- An American Pilgrimage" by Pauli Murray, published by Harper & Row 1987.
"Proud Shoes: An American Family" by Pauli Murray, published by Harper & Row 1956.