July 1st, 2020
/Wednesday Words 7-1-20
Psalm 119: 145 – 176 Numbers 22: 21 – 38 Romans 7: 1 – 12
Psalm 124, 125, 126 &127 Matthew 21: 33 - 46
Anna Pauline (Pauli) Murray
Civil Rights Activist, Women’s Rights Activist, Labor Activist, Lawyer
1st African American Woman ordained as Episcopal Priest
Author and Poet
November 20, 1910 - July 1, 1985
There are so many treasures to be found when we read about men and women that our church has designated as Holy Women and Holy Men. Treasures and surprises! Saints are not “ancient” history – saints are present in our lifetimes and our modern world.
For example, consider Pauli Murray. Born in 1910 in Baltimore, Maryland, Anna Pauline Murray lived in turbulent times, faced big obstacles and became a force for change in America. She used the name Pauli for most of her life. Pauli was small in size, but huge in her heart and her intellect.
Pauli’s family was mixed race on both sides – black slaves, white slave owners, Native American, Irish, and free black people. Her cousins ranged from blonde and blue-eyed to dark and black-eyed. As an adult, she would describe her family as a small United Nations. Her mother was a nurse and died when Pauli was 3. Her father was a schoolteacher and was killed when she was 13. When her mother died, the family sent her to Durham, North Carolina, where she was raised by her maternal grandmother and aunts. By the time Pauli was 16, she had graduated from high school in Durham and moved to New York City to live with a cousin and go to college. Her presence with her cousin’s family caused problems because that family had chosen to pass as white and lived in a white neighborhood.
Finding that her North Carolina High School diploma was not sufficient – North Carolina only allowed blacks 11 years of school – Pauli went back to high school in New York, graduating with honors and a second diploma in 1927. She applied to Columbia but at that time women were not accepted. She could not afford Barnard – the women’s partner school – and was admitted to Hunter College. She graduated in 1933 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English.
By this time, the Great Depression was in full swing and jobs were very scarce. She went to work with the “She-She-She” conservation camp which was the female equivalent of the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC). During her time there, she met First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and they began a correspondence that lasted until Mrs. Roosevelt died.
The director of the camp discovered a Marxist book among her textbooks from Hunter, and he was not pleased with what he saw as Pauli’s attitude during Mrs. Roosevelt’s visit to the camp. Does not seem that Mrs. Roosevelt had a problem with Pauli’s attitude, however. And the camp director did not approve of the romantic relationship that was developing between Pauli and a white female camp counselor, Peg Holmes. Pauli and Peg chose to leave the group and began traveling around the country.
In 1938, Pauli applied to the University of North Carolina but was turned down because they did not accept African Americans in any degree program. By early 1940, Pauli was arrested because she and a girlfriend were riding a bus from Rhode Island to North Carolina to visit Pauli’s family and the 2 women refused to sit in the back of the bus on broken seats. They were convicted of disorderly conduct, and the Worker’s Defense League paid Pauli’s fine. Within a short time, the WDL had hired Pauli as an administrator. During this time, Pauli renewed her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt while working on a murder case, and she decided to go to law school.
Pauli began attending law classes at Howard University, the only woman in her class. She was elected the chief justice of the Howard Court of Peers – the highest honor that a Howard law student could achieve. She graduated first in her class in 1944. She wanted to do graduate work at Harvard, but they would not accept a woman, so she went to University of California Berkeley, graduating in 1945 and becoming the first black woman to be hired as deputy attorney general.
Pauli’s accomplishments only grew more stellar from there. In 1950, Pauli published a book titled States’ Laws on Race and Color, a dissection of discriminatory laws in every state – the first book on this subject. Thurgood Marshall, then chief counsel for the NAACP, called this landmark book “the bible of the civil rights movement.” The NAACP used her text as a part of their arguments in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
You will have to study Pauli Murray for yourself to even begin to understand her influence on the struggle for civil rights and women’s rights in America. President John Kennedy appointed her to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women in 1961. In 1971, when Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote her brief for Reed v. Reed, a case which for the first time expanded the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to include women, Ginsberg added Pauli Murray as one of 2 co-writers.
In 1973, Pauli left Brandeis University where she was a professor of law, African American Studies and Women’s Studies to enter seminary on the path to being an Episcopal priest. She was ordained a deacon in 1976 and a priest in 1977 – the first African American woman to become a priest in the Episcopal church. Later that year, the Rev. Pauli Murray celebrated Eucharist and preached in a North Carolina parish – again the first African American woman allowed to do these things in North Carolina.
Rev. Murray spent the rest of her live serving a parish in Washington, D.C., working mostly in a ministry for the sick. She died on July 1, 1985, of pancreatic cancer. How fitting it is that we remember Pauli Murray today in the midst of our continuing struggles for the rights and dignity of our brothers and sisters of color.
