Pauli Murray (midweek message)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

July 1, 2020

Pauli Murray

“Liberating God, we thank you for the steadfast courage of your servant Pauli Murray, who fought long and well. Unshackle us from the chains of prejudice and fear, so that we may show forth your reconciling love and true freedom, which you revealed through your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.” 

Today is the feast day of The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray (November 20, 1910 – July 1, 1985).  An American civil rights activist, women’s rights activist, lawyer, and author, she was called to ministry and in 1977 became the first black woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest.  General Convention had approved the ordination of women only 4 months before. 

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Murray grew up with her maternal grandparents in Durham, North Carolina.  Her grandmother had been born into slavery, the product of rape between her enslaved mother and her owner. Murray’s mother died when Murray was just three years old; her father, committed to an asylum “for the Negro insane” for his symptoms of long-term typhoid fever, also died during Murray’s childhood, beaten to death by a guard.

At the age of sixteen, she moved to New York to attend Hunter College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1933. In 1940, Murray sat in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus with a friend, and they were arrested for violating state segregation laws. This incident, and her subsequent involvement with the socialist Workers’ Defense League, led to a career goal as a civil rights lawyer. She enrolled in Howard University Law School, where she graduated first in her class, but was denied the chance to do post-graduate work at Harvard University because of her gender. She earned a master’s in law at UC Berkeley, and in 1965 she became the first African American to receive a J.D. from Yale Law School.
As a lawyer, Murray argued for civil rights and women’s rights. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Chief Counsel (and later Supreme Court Justice) Thurgood Marshall called Murray’s 1950 book States’ Laws on Race and Color the “Bible” of the civil rights movement. Murray served on the 1961 Presidential Commission on the Status of Women and in 1966 was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women.

She later earned a master’s in divinity from the General Theological Seminary.

Murray was a friend of Harlem Renaissance writers, including Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, and wrote poetry as well as books, articles, and novels. 

Murray was gender nonconforming, describing herself as “a girl who should have been a boy” and trying without success to obtain hormone therapy. Though she didn’t like to characterize herself as a lesbian, she nevertheless had serious relationships with women, including a decades-long partnership with a woman named Irene Barlow.

Murray died on July 1, 1985, of pancreatic cancer.  Included in the Saints’ Calendar of the Episcopal Church, she also had a residential college at Yale University named for her.  Her childhood home in North Carolina was named a National Treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Here is an example of her poetry:  

To the Oppressors (1939)

Now you are strong

And we are but grapes aching with ripeness.

Crush us!

Squeeze from us all the brave life

Contained in these full skins.

But ours is a subtle strength

Potent with centuries of yearning,

Of being kegged and shut away

In dark forgotten places.

We shall endure

To steal your senses

In that lonely twilight

Of your winter’s grief. 

Grace and Peace. 

(This message combines and adapts the Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2018 commemoration and the Poetry Foundation’s article on Murray.)