Pauli Murray -From the Back of the Bus to the Episcopal Priesthood

Our Topic for Today:

• A look at Pauli Murray, who lived out her committment to service as an activist, an organizer, a poetess, a writer and an Episcopal priest.

Rosa Parks is now a familiar name in America.  Her act of defiance has stood as a milepost in the civil rights movement and has served as inspiration to many Americans.  But Ms. Parks was far from the first person to refuse to sit at the back of the bus.  There were many others who came before her. Pauli Murray is one of the unsung champions of civil rights and women's rights who needs to become just as familiar to America as Rosa Parks.

Pauli Murray was a champion for civil and human rights who grew up in Durham North Carolina. Her insights and vision continue to resonate powerfully in our times.  As a historian, attorney, poet, activist, teacher and Episcopal priest, she worked throughout her life to address injustice, to give voice to the unheard, to educate, and to promote reconciliation between races and economic classes.  She spent a lifetime breaking barriers from being arrested in Virginia in 1940 for refusing to sit at the back of the bus to becoming the first African-American woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest.

Murray became involved in the civil rights movement. In 1938 she began a campaign to enter the all-white University of North Carolina. With the support of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Murray’s case received national publicity. However, it was not until 1951 that Floyd McKissick became the first African American to be accepted by the University of North Carolina. 

During this campaign she developed a life-long friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. 
A member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Murray also became involved in attempts to end segregation on public transport and this resulted in her arrest and imprisonment in March 1940 for refusing to sit on broken seats at the back of a bus in Virginia.  She had been traveling to try to raise money to pay for legal fees for Odell Waller, a black sharecropper who was accused of murder.

“Seeing the relationship between my personal cause and the universal cause of freedom released me from a sense of isolation, helped me to rid myself of vestiges of shame over my racial history, and gave me an unequivocal understanding that equality of treatment was my birthright and not something to be earned. I would be no less afraid to challenge the system of racial segregation, but the heightened significance of my cause would impel me to act in spite of my fears”  

----Pauli Murray, 

a descendant of a North Carolina slave and slave owner, 

was an early and committed civil rights activist 

and the first African American female priest 

ordained by the Episcopal Church


In 1941 Murray enrolled at the Howard University law school with the intention of becoming a civil rights lawyer. The following year she joined with George Houser, James Farmer and Bayard Rustin, to form the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Members of CORE were mainly pacifists who had been deeply influenced by Henry David Thoreau and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that he used successfully against British rule in India. The students became convinced that the same methods could be employed by blacks to obtain civil rights in America. 

in 1942, Pauli Murray wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on behalf of outraged leaders.  She criticized the presidents’ failure to improve conditions for black southerners.



In 1943 Murray published two important essays on civil rights, Negroes Are Fed Up in Common Sense and an article about the Harlem race riot in the socialist newspaper, New York Call. Her most famous poem on race relations, Dark Testament, was also written in that year. The poem was published as a part of a larger collection of her work in 1970 by Silvermine Press.

After Murray graduated from Howard University in 1944 she went to Harvard University on a Rosenwald Fellowship. However, after the award had been announced, Harvard Law School rejected her because of her gender. Murray went to the University of California where she received a degree in law. Her master’s thesis was The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment. 



Murray moved to New York City and provided support to the growing civil rights movement. Her book, States’ Laws on Race and Color, was published in 1951. Thurgood Marshall, head of the legal department at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), described the book as the Bible for civil rights lawyers. 

        

In the early 1950s Murray, like many African Americans involved in the civil rights movement, suffered from McCarthyism. In 1952 she lost a post at Cornell University because the people who had supplied her references: Eleanor Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall and Philip Randolph, were considered to be too radical. She was told in a letter that they decided to give “one hundred per cent protection” to the university “in view of the troublous times in which we live”.

In 1956 Murray published Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family, biography of her grandparents, and their struggle with racial prejudice and a poignant portrayal of her hometown of Durham.

 In 1960 Murray travelled to Ghana to explore her African cultural roots. When she returned President John F. Kennedy appointed her to his Committee on Civil and Political Rights. In the early 1960s Murray worked closely with Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King but was critical of the way that men dominated the leadership of these civil rights organizations.

 In August, 1963, she wrote to Randolph and pointed out that she had: “been increasingly perturbed over the blatant disparity between the major role which Negro women have played and are playing in the crucial grass-roots levels of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions.”

At age sixty-two, when many people are planning retirement, Pauli Murray entered seminary and embarked upon a new career.  In 1977, she was the first black woman in the U.S. to become an Episcopalian priest.  In performing her first Holy Eucharist at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill North Carolian, where her grandmother, a slave, had been baptized, Murray finally believed that "All the strands of my life had come together."

Pauli Murray died of cancer in Pittsburgh on 1st July, 1985.

Sample of her poetry:

I sing of a new American


Separate from all others,


Yet enlarged and diminished by all others.


I am the child of kings and serfs, freemen and slaves,


Having neither superiors nor inferiors,


Progeny of all colors, all cultures, all systems, all beliefs.


I have been enslaved, yet my spirit is unbound.


I have been cast aside, but I sparkle in the darkness.


I have been slain but live on in the river of history.


I seek no conquest, no wealth, no power, no revenge:


I seek only discovery


Of the illimitable heights and depths of my own being.

--Pauli Murray, Cambridge, 1969

Sample of her prose:

Once the family patriarch was lowered into his grave, however, and the long black funeral veils were laid away for the future, his mantle of authority fell naturally and wordlessly upon that next member of the clan, man or woman, who had been emerging through the years. Every family must have such a head, it seemed; otherwise it became rudderless and scattered, losing its strength and identity. For the Fitzgerald clan of Fitzgeralds and Cleggs, that day it became Great-Aunt Mary, the oldest survivor of those who had come south in 1869. In our immediate family it was Aunt Pauline.

Grandfather was buried in the Fitzgerald family graveyard where Great-Grandfather Thomas, Great-Grandmother Sarah Ann, Uncle Richard and other relatives already rested. It was on the west side of Chapel Hill Road next to the old section of Maplewood Cemetery. Only an iron picket fence separated the Fitzgeralds from their white contemporaries who had been early settlers in Durham, but a far wider gulf separated the living descendants. And it was in Grandfather’s death that I found a symbol which would somehow sustain me until I grew older and found other ways of balancing loyalty with revolt.

Grandfather died in 1919 and it would be a number of years before the graves of World War I veterans appeared. Meanwhile the white cemetery from our back door to Chapel Hill Road and beyond was filled with Confederate dead. Every Memorial Day or Decoration Day, the cemetery hillside was dotted with crossbarred Confederate flags. As a Union veteran, Grandfather was entitled to a United States flag for his grave, so every May I walked proudly through a field of Confederate flags hugging my gold-pointed replica of Old Glory. I crossed Chapel Hill Road to the Fitzgerald family burial ground and planted it at the head of Grandfather’s grave.

This solitary American flag just outside the iron fence which separated it from the Confederate banners waving on the other side was an act of hunger and defiance. It tied me and my family to something bigger than the Rebel atmosphere in which we found ourselves. In time Grandfather would be joined by Grandmother here and we would sell Grandmother’s farm and the family homeplace. We would scatter and there would not be one Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald descendant left in the South. We would become city folk in stifling little apartments in northern cities, far from the land and rootless, and the Fitzgerald name would die out leaving only the Fitzgerald mark here and there. We younger ones would search for something we had lost or perhaps had never had.

But for that moment upon this lone flag I hung my nativity and the right to claim my heritage.

-----Pauli Murray

Excerpt from Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (Harper & Row, 1956)