Pauli Murray and the Indivisibility of Human Rights

Pauli Murray was a friend of Mary Daly's, mentioned several times in Daly's intellectual autobiography, Outercourse. They seem to have met during the time when Murray was teaching at Brandeis University, and Daly was less radical than she was to become later. As time went on, their approaches diverged. Daly left the Catholic Church and became an advocate for woman-only theorizing and activism. Murray, emphasized reconciliation among warring groups, and in 1977 became the first African American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest. I'm not sure if these two women remained friends as their opinions diverged, but I would love to have been able to listen to a conversation between the two of them.

With that in mind, here is a term paper that I wrote about Pauli Murray for my US Women's Movements class:

Pauli Murray and the Indivisibility of Human Rights

At the close of the Civil War, the movement that had worked to gain freedom for enslaved African Americans and rights for all women was split by the controversy over passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the US Constitution. These amendments sacrificed the goal of universal human rights in order to achieve a needed, but much more limited objective: political and voting rights for African American men. However necessary this compromise might have been, it had the tragic result of setting up antagonism between activists for the rights of African Americans and activists for the rights of women.

Nearly one hundred years later, this tragedy nearly repeated itself in the controversy over Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed job discrimination by private employers on the basis of race and other categories. As a joke, or perhaps as an act of sabotage, Rep. Howard Smith of Virginia added “sex” as a protected class under Title VII. Supporters of civil rights for African Americans worked to defeat this amendment. But then Pauli Murray, an African American lawyer and activist, wrote a powerful memo supporting the inclusion of sex as a protected class.

“The human rights `revolution’ transcends the issue of discrimination on basis of race or color,” she began. “Women’s rights are a part of human rights.” (MacLean, 70). Murray’s memo played an important role in helping this provision pass the US Senate (Murray 1987, 358). In this situation, she acted as a reformer. In other situations, she acted as a radical activist, such as when she was arrested and jailed in 1940 for violating a bus segregation law in Virginia, or when she helped lead nonviolent direct action to desegregate Washington DC restaurants in the 1940s. But whether her tactics were reformist or radical, her goal was always the same. Pauli Murray believed that human rights were indivisible, and that unity and reconciliation were the path to liberation.

 

Over the course of her lifetime, Murray made a wide variety of contributions to what she called the “unending struggle for human dignity the world over” (Murray 1987, 107). She was an activist, journalist, professor, lawyer, the recipient of advanced degrees from Howard, Berkeley, Yale, and General Theological Seminary, the author of two critically acclaimed memoirs and one book of poetry, a founder of the National Organization for Women, and the first African American woman Episcopal priest. Eventually, she came to believe that oppression could only be ended by confronting what she called the “`interstructuring’ of racism, sexism, and economic exploitation” (Murray 1978, 3).

But her first understanding of oppression came from her personal experience of racism and segregation growing up in the southern United States. Born in Baltimore in 1910, she was adopted at the age of three by her mother’s oldest sister, Pauline Dame, and moved to Durham, North Carolina (Murray 1987 14).  In North Carolina, her household also included another aunt, her grandfather, and grandmother. Grandfather Robert G. Fitzgerald was a northern freeborn veteran of the Union Army and Navy who had moved south after the Civil War to teach freed slaves to read and write. When Pauli knew him, he was blind as the result of a war wound. Grandmother Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald was born a slave, the daughter of a slave woman who had become pregnant as the result of rape by one of the master’s sons. (Murray 1956 41-54). Pauli’s childhood was marked partly by the pride and strength of growing up in the midst of this strong and loving family, and partly by the humiliation that resulted from surviving the indignities of segregation.

Murray described the situation eloquently in Chapter 20 of Proud Shoes, a family memoir published in 1956. Streets, drinking fountains, and restrooms were all labeled as “white” or “colored.” She wrote that “If I missed the signs I had only to follow my nose to the dirtiest, smelliest, most neglected accommodations.” The school building for white children was a beautiful brick building in a nice part of town. The “colored” school was a ramshackle wooden building with peeling paint and broken plumbing. “It was never the hardship which hurt so much as the contrast  between what we had and what the white children had” (Murray 1956, 269). These early humiliating experiences, which in one form or another continued well into Murray’s adulthood, made her an unwavering opponent of racial separation in any form, whether it was segregation imposed by white oppressors, or separatism advocated by Black Power activists (Murray 1987, 397-417).

Murray’s understanding of the nature of oppression broadened during the Great Depression. After working her way through Hunter College in New York City, she graduated in 1933 during the “worst possible time to try to come out of school and try to begin one’s career. An estimated sixteen million people were out of work” (Murray 1987 92). She became a teacher with the Workers’ Education Program of the Works Progress Administration. The Roosevelt Administration and the Congress were sympathetic to workers’ rights, and hundreds of thousands of workers were joining unions in the wake of the passage of the National Labor Relations Act. 

The Workers’ Education Project was designed to help these newly unionized workers understand collective bargaining and the practical details of union operation. This took place in a highly politicized atmosphere, as Communists and non-Communist socialists vied for influence within the new unions. Murray had already rejected Communism, because of the Party’s support of  an all-black state in the South, which she saw as just another form of segregation. But as she was trying to teach workers, she keenly felt her own lack of knowledge of the labor movement. She took a leave of absence from the WPA to attend Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York, operated by the AFL and several large unions. This was a life-changing experience for her. For the first time, Murray learned to understand her own oppression as being linked to a larger cause that included people quite unlike herself:

I had never thought of white people as victims of oppression, but now I heard echoes of the black experience when I listened to white workers tell their personal stories of being evicted, starved out, beaten, and jailed when they tried to organize a union to raise their miserably low wages. Reading the history of employers’ use of violence…and other repressive devices to prevent the unionization of workers, I could not fail to see that lynching reached a historical  peak during the same period…The study of economic oppression led me to realize that Negroes were not alone but were part of an unending struggle for human dignity the world over (Murray  1987  106-107).

 Murray had grown up with “Jim Crow” racist segregation. She had learned about the indignities and oppression attached to economic exploitation in the late thirties at the Brookwood Labor College. It would be a few more years until she learned about the system of discrimination that she would label “Jane Crow” (Rosenberg, 68-70). At the end of her stint with the WPA, Murray had unsuccessfully tried to break the color barrier at the University of North Carolina Graduate School (Gilmore, 62-64). About a year later, on an Easter trip to visit relatives, she and her friend Adelene MacBean were jailed in Virginia for violating a bus desegregation law. The women, with the help of the NAACP, unsuccessfully challenged  that law. (Murray 1987 138-149). Despite her reluctance to return to Virginia after that experience, she did just that a few months later, in the summer of 1940. This time, Murray threw herself into an unsuccessful legal battle to save the life of black sharecropper Odell Waller, who had been sentenced to death by an all-white jury for a shooting that was probably self-defense (Murray 1987 150-176). During this campaign, Professor Leon A. Ransom encouraged her to apply for admission to the predominately African-American Howard Law School. She entered Howard in the fall of 1941.

The discovery of sexism at Howard came as a rude shock. She had been surrounded by strong women growing up in North Carolina, and in her experiences at Hunter College and the WPA, she’d seen many women in leadership roles (Murray 1987 183). At Howard, law students and their professors collaborated in helping lawyers who were challenging discriminatory laws to develop their legal briefs. She was stunned to discover that men who she admired treated her presence in the law school like a bad joke. The derogatory remarks were bad enough, but she also found that she was excluded from a legal fraternity that was limited to male students, and during her senior year she was denied for a time the chief justiceship of the student Court of Peers that she was overwhelmingly qualified for. 

During the summer of 1943, just prior to this final year at Howard, Murray discovered a feminist context for these troubling experiences when she met the portrait painter Betsy Graves Reyneau. Reyneau was a white woman who was painting portraits of African Americans in an effort to combat racism. She was also a veteran of the National Women’s Party pro-suffrage picketing at the White House in 1917, and she told Murray about the historic links between the woman suffrage movement and the abolitionists. “I now realized there was a history of women’s efforts to achieve equality, that I was not alone, and that I was not especially excessive in the ways I went about working for change,” Murray wrote (Murray 1987, 214-217). 

Murray graduated number one in the Howard Law School Class of 1944 and won a prestigious Rosenwald scholarship for graduate study. Many of Howard’s best graduates had pursued advanced degrees at Harvard, but when Murray applied to do likewise, she was informed that “you are not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School (Murray 1987, 239). Perhaps her new understanding of the history of the feminist movement gave her strength as she mounted an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to change the Harvard policy.

Murray was always one to value principle over expediency. Describing her first presidential vote, cast in 1932, she wrote “I would not vote Republican and, having lived under the apartheid of Democratic rule in the “solid South,” could not bring myself to vote for a Democrat. I…voted for the socialist candidate, Norman Thomas.” (Murray 1987, 93). As a law student at Howard, she argued “a radical approach…that the time had come to make a frontal assault on segregation per se instead of continuing to acquiesce in the [doctrine of “separate but equal”] while nibbling away at its underpinnings on a case-by-case basis and having to show in each case that the facility in question was in fact unequal” (Murray 1987, 221). 

The cautious approach seemed politically expedient. Challenging discrimination head on risked catastrophic failure. But Murray knew in her heart the segregation was wrong and should be opposed categorically. Eventually, she learned that the senior paper she had written advancing this idea had been used by the legal team that argued the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education (Murray 1987, 255). Murray applied this same principled approach to her developing understanding of the interconnections between racism, sexism, and economic exploitation. Her memo on behalf of outlawing sex discrimination as part of Title VII is one example of that. As another example, although Murray eventually came to favor the Equal Rights Amendment, at one point she resigned from NOW because she thought their strategy in favor of the ERA discriminated against working women and women of color (Rosenberg, 70). In the universal cause of human rights, Murray believed that no one’s rights should be sacrificed to achieve an expedient end.

While Murray often grew bitterly angry at the evils of oppression, she was also strongly committed to nonviolence and reconciliation. For instance, when African Americans rioted in 1943 in Beaumont, Texas, Los Angeles, and Detroit, Murray predicted, accurately, that intolerable conditions would soon result in more rioting. Murray felt great pain and anger at the conditions that had caused the rioting, and the rioting itself also horrified her. She understood that she herself shared the urge that the rioters had to strike back against humiliation and injustice. She poured her feelings into a long poem. (Murray 1987, 214). Later, in the 1970s, Murray clung to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and her friend Eleanor Roosevelt. She felt that each, “had emphasized the moral and spiritual imperatives of the ongoing struggle for human dignity and had demonstrated the power of love to transcend divisions of race, sex, or class” (Murray 1987, 417). In the long run, the desire to work for reconciliation of a nation torn apart by conflict moved her to seek ordination as an Episcopal priest.

There was one interesting area of silence in Murray’s support for universal human rights, and that was in the area of sexual orientation. Certainly Murray, who died in 1985, could be forgiven for not being ahead of her time in one area. Ironically, this was an issue that touched her personally. According to, Anne Firor Scott “In adolescence Murray had begun to worry about her sexual nature. She later said that she was probably meant to be a man, but had by accident turned up in a woman’s body. She began to keep clippings about various experiments with hormones as a way of changing sexual identity” (Scott, 14). According to Rosalind Rosenberg, “Ashamed to be thought a lesbian, (Murray) reasoned that her attraction to `very feminine and heterosexual women’ was an indication that she was biologically male. To be classified as a Negro, a woman, and a homosexual was to be triply despised in American culture. But it also gave her an unusually broad sense of the arbitrariness of classification…” (Rosenberg, 70). Whatever hidden effect her struggles with sexual orientation and gender identity had on her psyche, this author found no evidence that Murray herself understood this part of her nature as being related to her struggle for equal rights for all. 

In conclusion, through her life experience and education, Pauli Murray identified three main sources of oppression: racism, sexism, and economic exploitation. She decided that “the universal cause of human rights” required recognizing the “intersectionality” of all of these, and combating them in a unified way. She didn’t believe in any form of segregation or separatism. She was a radical in that she wanted to attack oppression at its roots. Her ultimate goal was, in her own words, “universal liberation and reconciliation which lies at the heart of the Christian gospel.”

Works Cited

Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. “Admitting Pauli Murray.“ Journal of Women’s History Summer 2002,

62-67.

MacLean, Nancy. American Women’s Movement, 1945-2000: A Brief History with Documents.

            Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009.

Murray, Pauli. Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956.

Murray, Pauli “Black Theology and Feminist Theology: A Comparative View.”

Anglican Theological Review January 1, 1978: 3-24.

Murray, Pauli. Voice in a Weary Throat. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.

Rosenberg, Rosalind. “The Conjunction of Race and Gender.”

Journal of Women’s History Summer 2002, 68-73.

Scott, Anne Firor. Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware: Forty Years of Letters in Black and White.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006.