Pauli Murray and Yale
… paean to a stunning human being and the act of naming
On April 27, Yale announced that one of its new residential colleges will be named after mid-20th century activist, lawyer, poet, and priest Pauli Murray — a stunning and energetic human being who was, among other things, cofounder of NOW, correspondent to Eleanor Roosevelt, and prolific writer.
She is the late, great, awe-inspiring and often-unknown figure you probably didn’t learn about in U.S. history class. So when elite institutions like Yale send out a naming announcement, people pay attention. Here, naming is an ethical act: It describes reality in ways that set parameters of public discourse and perception.
Yale University, where I earned graduate degrees, historically has not been at the vanguard of liberal progressivism on matters of gender or race. Still, in 2007, thanks to justice- and historiography-minded professor Emilie Townes (now a Dean at Vanderbilt) I was introduced to the writings of Pauli Murray — autobiography, family biography, legal writing, op-eds, poetry. It was love. Not just the love of great prose but the power of true ideas pithily formed at the intersection of lived experience and ethical analysis. To this day, at conferences or gatherings, when Murray-acolytes discover our shared passion for her work, there is an instantaneous bond.
Obviously, for me, the legacy of Pauli Murray is inextricable from my experience of intellectually-scintillating, soul-inspiring, visionary-crush love of discovery and delight — the kind that deliciously wraps you up in the dialectic of the unexpectedly familiar and yet previously unseen. Murray showed me, across the years and our different experiences of race and privilege, that scholarship, activism, creativity and passion can be potent partners.
The process of ideas coming to life through the page, through the decades, across the distance, is one of the true gifts of liberal education. In 2007 — like legions of Murray scholars before and since — I went to Schlesinger Library, where Murray’s papers are held, and spent several days poring through her draft essays on “Jane Crow” (intersection of race and sex), her copious mimeographed letters, scribbles of poems on half-torn sheets of paper, medical records and private musings on gender, masculinity, same-sex attraction.
Murray was prolific in genre and quantity, writing poetry and prose, op-eds and scholarly works amidst the legal training and activism (“I am really a submerged writer,” she mused, “but the exigences of the period have driven me into social action”). Thank goodness she kept writing, and that her archives are available, because they are revelatory. As the Indigo Girls sang of Virginia Woolf: “They published your diary / And that’s how I got to know you / The key to the room of your own / And a mind without end….”
Prominent behind the scenes — Thurgood Marshall called her book, States’ Laws on Race and Color, “the Bible of the civil rights movement”— Murray was also a deeply private person. Thus, to see Murray’s handwriting and to imagine the lived interstices in her multitudes of papers is to be reminded of how scholarship and the telling of history are themselves sensuous and tactile and ethical acts that can, at best, create connections among minds and lives that span wide swaths of time and place.
In 2008, when Yale Alumni Magazine issued a call to suggest names for anticipated new residential colleges, I nominated Pauli Murray. Thus the announcement that there would in fact be a residential college named after this hero/ine came as something of a delightful shock, a confirmation that the arc of the universe may, sometimes, bend towards justice. (The full story of how the new college actually came to be named in the machinations of institutional procedures— benevolent forward-thinking donor? Yale’s newly attentive approach to issues of race? — is one that deserves investigation.)
A room of one’s own. When she first arrived in New Haven to study at Yale Law School, landlords reputedly wouldn’t house Murray — who had, of course, been a housing-access activist in prior incarnations. Now, Murray’s name and legacy have much more than temporary lodging in Yale’s physical structures.
Granted, it shouldn’t take Yale’s baptism of a building in Murray’s honor to validate her life, work, and legacy. But still: it does matter. To choose Pauli Murray is also to choose to make visible all that she strove to articulate about intersectionality, gender nonconformity, same sex attraction, human rights, civil rights, and economic rights. It is to admit into historically white, elite male halls of power the epistemology of black women’s vast experiences of love and fury — these crucial, alternate accounts of normative history that have for so long been marginalized or ignored.
As Ijeoma Oluo put it in her powerful reflection on Beyonce’s “Lemonade”: black women’s survival across generations and continents is a story of “deep, heartbreaking love” that births “a strength that we shouldn’t have to have.”
Or as Murray herself wrote in her epic poem and eponymous poetry volume, Dark Testament:
This is our portion, this is our testament
This is America, dual-brained creature
One hand thrusting us out to the stars,
One hand shoving us down in the gutter.
Murray mused in another poem (“Harlem Riot, 1943”): “… I am a prophet without eyes to see;/ I do not know how we will gain the gates of the city.”
There is, then, some poetic justice in Yale’s throwing open of the gates to name a new college after this remarkable human being. And perhaps, when elite institutions prominently name figures who have previously gone unhoused, there is cause for fledgling hope that powerful women of color can in fact have rooms to tell, and shape, this nation’s collective social and ethical becomings.
FURTHER RESOURCES
Pauli Murray Project: houses (literally and electronically) stupendous materials on Pauli Murray, including bio, bibliographies, and ongoing activisms, art, and resources.
Pauli Murray became an Episcopal priest later in life (she was the first African-American and woman to be ordained as such) and in 2012 was named a saint in that tradition. Zing. Anthony Pinn’s 2006 book, Pauli Murray: Selected Sermons and Writings, presents and discusses theological/ethical textures of Murray’s later phase.
Yale’s press-release citation from April 27, 2016 has solid primary and secondary literature references regarding Murray and her significance. Especially noteworthy are Sarah Azaransky’s 2011 book, The Dream is Freedom, and Patricia Bell-Scott’s 2016 book, The Firebrand and the First Lady (reviewed in the New York Times by Irin Carmon). Glenda Gilmore’s 2008 book, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950, features Murray’s writing and activism across several chapters.
Several peer-reviewed, roundtable-format colloquia on Pauli Murray have been published in scholarly journals and are extremely important resources for reading and thinking about Murray’s multidimensional writings and activisms, her gender identity, her unpublished archival materials, and her significance in the present day. These are:
- Journal of Women’s History (2002), vol. 14, no. 2, with articles by Bell-Scott, Gilmore, Hartmann, Ronseberg, Antler, and Rupp and Taylor;
- Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (2013), vol. 29, no. 1, with articles by Azaransky, Pinn, Drury, and Peppard.
My peer-reviewed article, “Poetry, Ethics, and the Legacy of Pauli Murray” (2011) can be found here.
