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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview G-0044, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Pauli Murray was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1910. A few years thereafter, her mother died, and she went to live with her Aunt Pauline in Durham, North Carolina. Murray begins the interview with a discussion of her early memories of her family before shifting the focus to her childhood and adolescent years in Durham. Murray offers a vivid comparison of race relations in that area over the span of three generations, noting important class distinctions, hierarchies related to skin tone, and the evolution of racial violence. Murray recalls her early school years with fondness and argues that she was imbued with a strong sense of racial identity both at home and in school. Shortly following her graduation from high school, Murray turned down a full scholarship to Wilberforce University in Ohio because she had already determined that she no longer wanted to have a segregated education. During the late 1920s, Murray established residency in New York so she could attend Hunter College, a women's school where she was one of a handful of African American students. Murray describes some of her experiences at Hunter College (she graduated in 1933) and her decision to stay in New York for a few years while working on her poetry.
During the late 1930s, Murray returned to North Carolina, partly at the behest of
her Aunt Pauline, with the intention of pursuing graduate work at the University
of North Carolina. In 1938, Murray was declined admittance to UNC because of her
race. Her unsuccessful effort to challenge the decision was the first of three
pivotal experiences in her journey towards pursuing a career in law. The second
occurred shortly thereafter, in 1940, when Murray and a friend were arrested for
violating segregation statutes and for creating a public disturbance when riding
a Greyhound bus through Petersburg, Virginia. On the coattails of her arrest and
short prison term, Murray began to work for the Workers Defense League,
specifically with the legal defense effort for Odell Waller, an African American
sharecropper sentenced to death for the murder of his white landlord. Her work
on this case was the third pivotal incident, and it led her to meet Leon Ransom,
who arranged for her to attend Howard University on a full scholarship. During
her years in law school at Howard University, Murray continued to pursue her
interests in matters of racial justice; however, it was also during those years
that she became acutely aware of gender discrimination. After her graduation,
Murray pursued further education at the University of California, Berkeley, and
worked briefly as the Deputy Attorney General of California before accepting a
position with a law firm in New York. During the early 1960s, Murray traveled to
Ghana where she helped set up a law school. In addition to describing her work
there, she also offers a unique perspective on African politics during the early
1960s. After her return to the United States, Murray worked as a law professor
at Brandeis University and continued her political involvement on the Civil and
Political Rights committee of the President's Commission on the
Status of Women and with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In 1973,
she left her position at Brandeis in order to enter the seminary, in part
because she believed that the civil rights and women's liberation
movements had become too militant and that an emphasis on reconciliation would
better result in equality. The remainder of the interview is devoted to a
discussion of Murray's poetry, her book Proud
Shoes, and her views on racial and class differences within the
women's movement.
Pauli Murray was a prominent legal activist within the civil rights and women's liberation movements. In this interview, she discusses her childhood and her education, the events leading up to her decision to pursue a career in law, the evolution of her career, her decision to enter the seminary, and her thoughts on civil rights and women's liberation.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
In connection with the goal of the Southern Oral History Program, namely
studying individuals in the South who have made significant
contributions to various fields of human endeavor, the following is an
interview conducted by Genna Rae McNeil, assistant professor of history
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, February 13, 1976
with Pauline, better known as "Pauli," Murray. Pauli Murray is a
distinguished American Negro [her preference] who has been involved in
the struggle for civil rights for blacks, women's rights, equal rights,
in other words, the struggle for human rights, qua: writer and poet,
activist, lawyer and professor since the 1930s.1 Dr. Murray comes from a family of educators. Her
maternal grandfather, who was one of the first students of Asmun
Institute, later renamed Lincoln University, helped to establish schools
for freed blacks in Virginia and North Carolina following his military
service for the Union forces in the Civil War. Her father was a
principal in the Baltimore public schools and her aunt and namesake,
Pauline Fitzgerald Dame, taught many years in the city school system of
Durham, North Carolina. Although Dr. Murray was born in Baltimore,
Maryland, shortly after the sudden death of her mother, she moved to
Durham, North Carolina to live with her Aunt Pauline's family headed by
her maternal grandparents, Robert G. and Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald.
There she was raised to be a strong individual and an independent
thinker. There she was nourished with stories about her family, her
heritage, and taught to have pride in her racial identity, which
necessitated walking straight and tall in "proud shoes" despite feelings
and obstacles. Therefore, after attending segregated cum laude at Howard University in 1944, an LL.M. at
the University of California, Berkeley in 1945, and an S.J.D at Yale
University School of Law in 1965.2 She
has published numerous books and articles on a variety of subjects, States Laws on Race and Color, compiled and edited by
Ms. Murray in 1951, Proud Shoes: The Story of An American
Family, published in 1956, The Constitution and
Government of Ghana, 1961, co-authored with Leslie Rubin, and a
book of poetry, Dark Testament And Other Poems in
1970, although most of these poems were written between 1933 and 1941.
Articles include, "The Negro Woman's Stake in the Equal Rights
Amendment," which appeared in the Harvard Civil Rights and
Civil Liberties Law Review, 1971 and "The Liberation of Black
Women," which appeared in Joe Freeman's Women: A Feminist
Perspective, 1975, and other feminist anthologies. She is
presently working on a new book under the working title, The Fourth Generation of Proud Shoes. As an American Civil
Liberties Union lawyer and member of the board of directors, whe has
contributed to federal court decisions recognized as precedent-making
with regard to sex discrimination, namely, the litigation White vs. Crook in 1966 and Reed vs. Reed in
1971. Her honors and awards include the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship,
1944-45. She was named Woman of the Year by the National Council of
Negro Women and Mademoiselle Magazine in 1946 and
1947, respectively. She was awarded an LL.D. degree by Stonehill College
in 1967, Northeastern Massachusetts. In 1970, Howard University bestowed
her with the Alumni World's Who's Who of Women, named to the Hall of
Fame of Hunter College Alumni Association and recepient of the degree of
Doctor of Science from Lowell Technological Institute in 1973. Moreover,
a biographical sketch of Dr. Murray will appear in the 1976-77 Who's Who in America. Finally, I would be remiss if I
did not mention that the various positions held by Dr. Murray include
Deputy Attorney General, Department of Justice, California; Associate
Attorney at the renowned Paul, Wise, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison firm
of New York City; Senior Lecturer at the Ghana Law School, Accra, Ghana;
member of the President's Commission on the Status of Women;
Vice-President of Benedict College; and Professor of Law and Politics at
Brandeis University. Dr. Murray, I would like to begin with your family
background and a quotation by someone very dear to you: "The past is the
key of the present and the mirror of the future. Therefore let us adopt
as a rule to judge the future by the history of the past, and having the
key of past experience that has opened the door to present success and
future happiness."
That was in my Grandfather Fitzgerald's diary.
Yes, 1867. July, 1867. I have several questions about your family
background. First of all, although you were born in Baltimore, Maryland,
during your childhood, in a real sense you became a North Carolinian. I
would like to know something about your ties to Chapel Hill and Durham,
North Carolina. Specifically, I have questions, although you have gotten
much into Proud Shoes: The Story of An American
Family, I would like to know first of all, something about your
parents, who they were, and although we know that your mother died at an
early
[Showing a picture] Well, those are my parents. That picture was taken
the year that I was born, 1910. I think that it was taken very shortly
after my birth. My mother was Agnes Georgiana Fitzgerald Murray and my
father was William H. Murray. He was a teacher in the Baltimore city
public schools and was also a principal. She was one of the early
graduates of Hampton School of Nurses …or Hampton Training School for
Nurses. She graduated in the class of 1902. My mother died when I was a
little over three and there were six of us, four girls and two boys. I'm
number four down. The oldest girl was about nine when my mother died and
the baby was about six months, a baby brother. The ages were spaced so
that the three of us were really babies at the time of my mother's
death. I was three, my younger sister was about twenty months, my baby
brother was about six months, and something had to be decided about the
three babies of the family. The three older children stayed with my
father and my mother's oldest sister, Pauline …who you recognize in Proud Shoes as Mary Pauline Fitzgerald Dame, was both
my namesake and my godmother. She had kept me for periods of time before
my mother's death and my father, in a sense, gave me to Aunt Pauline;
but I understand that I was allowed to make the choice. I was asked, the
day after my mother's funeral, if I would like to go with Aunt Pauline
or if I would like to stay with the other children, which meant staying
with my father, brother and two sisters. I am told that I said, "I want
to go with Aunt Pauline," and that I broke into tears. In adult
reflection, I would say that this shows the child that was pulled
between wanting to identify with family and at the same time, this sense
of loyalty and clinging to this aunt
There was nothing about the experiences of the family in Baltimore that made you want to leave that particular town, was there?
Well, I was so young that it would be hard to say. I would not remember anything. I think that perhaps I may have experienced and understood more than I remembered. My mother died suddenly with a cerebral hemorrhage and this must have been a very painful and traumatic experience within the family. I may have blotted out the memories of it. My guess is that in that kind of tragedy, the mother just dying suddenly, that I reached out to the one person that I felt secure with.
Had you seen your Aunt Pauline often?
She had kept me for about six months when I was about eighteen months old.
Now, she was in …
She was in Durham, teaching.
She didn't come to Baltimore, your parents brought you to Durham?
Yes, well, during the period …during my parent's married life, the ten years of their married life, there was a great deal of visiting back and forth. My mother would come home with the children, Aunt Pauline would go up and spend summers with her after school was over. Aunt Pauline had introduced my parents and she felt a strong responsibility for them. They both loved her dearly.
She was a matchmaker for them?
Well, she was a kind of matchmaker, confessor, older sister, Rock of
Gibralter. She was with them in all kinds of family
Childbirth or …
Her little girl lived for about a week, and I don't know what that might have been. The little boy died of meningitis at nine months, so you can see that …
So you certainly met needs for each other.
Right.
Can you tell us what it was like growing up in the Durham-Chapel Hill area. Did you move around or were you in one place most of the time?
No, I grew up in Grandfather's house. Grandfather Fitzgerald's house,
which again you will recognize in Proud Shoes. There's
a whole chapter talking about Grandfather's house and it's still there,
by the way, on Carroll Street. I lived in Grandfather's house which
meant, more or less, that I was a very small child with four to five
very settled adults. Living in Grandfather's house and being a part of a
larger family, an extended family …in those days, the Fitzgeralds and
their kin were legion …gave me a sense of real roots and security. On
the other hand, I had a different name, I had my own family, of which I
was very conscious, and in some ways, I was alien. I felt very much a
part of the house, I was made to feel a part of the family, I knew that
I was a Fitzgerald descendent and yet,
Did you visit your own family very often?
Not until five years later and I only visited them, I think, once during
my childhood. I was not very congenial with my Murray elders.
Before I ask any more questions specifically about the important members
of your family, I would like to get something about what it was like to
be in Durham. You describe it in Proud Shoes as a
village something like a frontier town and you said that while there was
considerable prejudice, "that there was recognition of individual worth
and bridges of natural respect between older white and colored families
of the town." Now, was this something that only hindsight made you
No. The quotation that you are giving there was my characterization of post-Civil War Durham in the latter part of the nineteenth century. I am really there talking about the climate in which my parent's generation, my mother and her sisters and brother grew up in and the time in which my grandparents and their generation were in their prime. Durham being this really post-Civil War town, it did not exist before the Civil War, so it had no background tradition of slavery and the Confederacy and all this sort of thing, and it being this kind of frontier town, it meant that people like my grandfather and his brother, my great uncle, Richard Burton Fitzgerald, coming into the town and being resourceful businessmen, had a rough respect of their white counterparts. And this would be true of families. One would recognize the Fitzgeralds, along with maybe the Hills and the Carrs and the Dukes, not necessarily …when I use these terms, not suggesting that there were any social contacts between them, but simply a recognition that these were hard working, respectable families, good solid citizens of the community. And there was this rough respect.
Now, do you say that this continued?
I suspect that by the time I came along it was not the same. You know
…oh, I am trying to think of our historian who wrote The
Nadir …
Rayford Logan.
Rayford Logan, he talks about the nadir of Negro life and around 1900 to
1915 was simply the lowest, the very lowest ebb, and I think that I came
along in Durham, and I came to Durham around 1914
At what point in your life did you become sensitive to these kinds of racial distinctions, primarily the restrictions and the terrorization of this violence that was a part of being an Afro-American or a Negro or a black in the town? And then also, were you aware of color distinctions, that is, between mulattos and the darker and did this make any difference at all in terms of the Durham community?
Let me see, let me answer these one by one. I suppose this awareness to a
child of my generation grows with you just like almost a part of your
body and your being. It is hard to say when you become aware because you
take it in all of the time. I don't remember, for example, lynchings
being prominently portrayed in the newspapers, but we would hear about
them by word of mouth. You know, [whispering] "Somebody got lynched over
in So-and-So County last night." I think
So therefore, you had no particular experiences such as Benjamin Mays or Malcom X., who might have had a Ku Klux Klan experience, that kind of violence perpetrated upon the family immediately or directly?
No, only my grandmother's and my grandfather's memories, my grandmother would tell me about the Ku Klux Klan riding around her little cabin up in Chapel Hill and how sometimes she would get up at midnight and walk the twelve miles to Durham because she was afraid to stay there. This was during Reconstruction times when apparently the Ku Klux Klan was not very happy to have a person of color owning property. But for myself, not probably until I was about eight or nine did I have any experience that dramatized it for me. As a girl, obviously there would be a certain kind of protected life, I would not be as much …I wouldn't be as free to roam or to go around by myself, let us say, as probably the males were. Also, I would be probably less the target of male aggression, white male aggression, as a girl.
Well, I wonder, your mixed heritage and the whole issue of
Oh, yes.
Problems that were not the same kinds of problems of someone who came from a strictly black heritage and would not have this experience?
Well, one of the ways that it showed itself …
I think of Harriet, you know.
Yes. One of the ways that it showed itself was that I was one of three
…the term that they used to use in those days was "light skinned
children." Christine Taylor, whom you know as Christine Morris, Lucille
Johnson, whom you know as Lucille Johnson Hancock. She is a retired
school teacher in Durham. Now, if you recall those types, you know
Christine, here were children of …I was much less so, but here were
children who were almost indistinguishable from Caucasian children and
wherever you are a minority, you know, whether you are a fair skinned
minority or even if you are a white minority, a Caucasian minority among
black kids … and this is now being spelled out in studies here in the
District where there are white kids who are a distinct minority in
predominantly black schools, wherever you are a minority you are apt to
run into the normal kinds of being the butt of children's cruelty. So, I
was very aware of being a minority, a light skinned minority among the
kids in school. One of the ways that the other kids in school would
enforce this kind of pecking order, they would say, "Black is honest and
yellow is dishonest." You know, meaning that you are illegitimate and
Now, the fact that the Fitzgeralds were a prominent family and that perhaps you could say that economically their class was somewhat above the average Afro-American, did this make any considerable difference in your life in Durham, interrelations with black people and the kinds of business associations that the family might have with white persons?
By the time that I came along, there was a fairly good nucleus of a
Negro, or in those days they called it "colored," a colored middle class
business and professional community. By the time that I came along, the
North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company was well established. As a
matter of fact, as a junior and senior in high school, during my summers
I worked as a typist in North Carolina Mutual and many of the kids in
high school worked in the summer in the North Carolina Mutual Company.
The Mechanics and Farmers Bank was established, we had Negro doctors,
lawyers, an editor of a newspaper, there was the Bankers Fire Insurance
Company, Durham was then called "the Mecca of Negro business." So that
what I am really saying is, that there was a middle class to which my
family belonged, more or less. Within that middle class, however, the
Robert Fitzgerald family, of which I was the grandchild, might be called
"the respectable poor." We were not business people. My aunts were
widows, my grandmother and grandfather were very frail and elderly and
lived on his tiny Civil War pension, which was about twenty-five dollars
a month. So, money was hard to come by, we didn't have a car, we didn't
have a cow, we didn't have a horse or
Yes. One thing that interested me about Durham and segregation was a comment that you made about schools and you said, regarding the textbooks and materials, that "it wasn't so much the hardships that hurt, but the contrast between what we had and white children."
Well, this was true. I'll never forget West End School. It was a rickety old wooden built building with the paint peeling; I can see those scales now. You know how wood or shingles or paint blisters and I can see it. When there was a wind in a storm, you could just hear the wind blowing through that old building. I think that it was a two storey building, it might have been a three storey building, but anyway … And of course, the white kids school, a nice brick school sitting in a lawn surrounded by a fence. West End was up on a sort of clay, barren ground. There was no lawn whatsoever. It just sat on clay. The fact that I can remember this today and I can see that old school building there, no swings, nothing to play with when you went out …
And I imagine that there was quite a walk to school for you?
Well, let's see …I guess that it was about a half a mile, maybe more than
half a mile. You know where West Main Street is and you know where West
Chapel Hill Street is and you know where Morehead Proud Shoes and I said
how if they were going to talk about Field Day or any citywide
activities of the school children, most of the space would be given to
what goes on with the white kids and then down at the bottom there might
be a little paragraph on what happened in the colored school. You sense
those things, you feel them.
As an adolescent, despite these experiences, did you still feel that you wanted to be an individual, just a child who could enjoy growing up and doing the things that children or teenagers did, or did you become so disturbed by these contrasts that even in high school itself you felt that perhaps in your later life you might want to do something about segregation or about racism?
I think that I operated on two levels. I was an all round athlete, I was
the editor in chief of the high school newspaper, I was a member of the
debating club, I was involved in most of the things that kids are
involved in. I enjoyed doing these things, but underneath I hated
segregation so that all I wanted to do was to get away from segregation.
When I graduated from high school, my teachers …let me back up and say
that my generation of high school kids were the beneficiaries of
probably the post-First World War college trained colored teachers. So,
while I was in high school, we began to
So, we had a large contingent of Wilberforce graduates there. When I graduated from high school with honors, the Wilberforce Club got together and bestowed a scholarship upon me to go to Wilberforce and I turned it down.
I see.
No more segregation for me. I was fifteen, but that I knew.
Turning it down, did it have anything to do with persons in your family or other persons in that school that influenced you during your youth? I recall the remark that you made about the family and that was that there was pride on both sides of the Fitzgerald family, "but my greatest inheritance perhaps was a dogged persistence and a granite quality of endurance in the face of calamity." Now, these kinds of strengths that you felt from the Fitzgerald part of your family, I mean, were there particular persons that had such enormous influence on you within the family that they would make you feel some inner compulsion to move towards something that was not segregated also, or were they more the teachers who had been in separate institutions?
I suspect that it must have been kind of a painful decision for me to
make, to turn down a scholarship to Wilberforce, because so many of the
teachers of the Wilberforce Club, who were my teachers, were my favorite
teachers. I loved these people and they had been ' Proud Shoes that I talked about families being split,
some families disappearing into the white race. So, this whole business
of separation was something that was deeply personal to me because it
split my own family. You asked me about color differences. Color
differences operated not only between an individual and the local
community, but they also operated within a family. I recall, for
example, that I told you there were six of us, six little Murrays. On
the one visit that I made back to Baltimore, when I was about nine, it
was very clear that at least four of us could go downtown to the movies
on Saturdays, the white movie houses.
And sit wherever you wanted to.
Yes, and two of us couldn't. I happened to be one of the two and that
says something to you about why I would become a crusader for civil
rights. I don't think that I thought that in those days, but I'm sure
that these experiences coming to me out from the intimacy of the family
made an even greater impact than they would had per se.
Did any members of your family, the family with which you lived, or the teachers who had come from Wilberforce, understand this need to at least attempt to have broader opportunities or more choices, the search for options, the move away from segregation? Were they hurt, did they try to get you to accept the Wilberforce scholarship?
I imagine that my teachers from Wilberforce were temporarily
disappointed, but my recollection is that they followed with interest my
career wherever I was and if they were disappointed, this was only a
temporary kind of thing. As for my family, Aunt Pauline, and I bless her
memory for this, from the time that I was very, very small, allowed me
to make my own choices and suffer the consequences. I remember that this
first visit to Baltimore that I told you about, she wanted to get me a
winter outfit and she was now in Baltimore where there were more styles,
a big kind of Middle-Atlantic city, and Hub in Baltimore was the store
where she took me to buy my winter outfit. What did I want? A chinchilla
coat with a red flannel lining and a funny little Tyrolean hat, it was
probably from the boys department. She let me buy this conglomeration.
I can imagine you in that outfit.
After World War I, somebody gave me a GI's overseas hat. Did you ever see these big World War I hats, big, broad brimmed with a tall stovepipe?
Yes.
Somebody gave me one of those hats and I loved it. It had something like a cord or elastic that you could put under your chin, with the braid and so forth. I'm sure that I looked just like Little Abie because the things would come down right over my ears, you know. I wore it everywhere except to church. That was the one place that Aunt Pauline drew the line. So, there was a certain comical quality about this child and a certain determination to do certain things and Aunt Pauline tended to let me make my own choice. So, she let me make the choice of what college. And she would support me.
Now, what made you have a broader conception of your possibilities …
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
I was asking you about what made you have this broader conception of the possibilities for you socially or economically. Most people tended to assume that it was a great opportunity if they could go to any college, even if it were segregated. Did it have something to do with the fact that you had a very mixed heritage, or did it have something to do with the character of your grandfather, the character of Aunt Pauline?
I think that it had a lot to do with all of these things. I think …and
I'm not even sure that this was conscious at the time, I think that my
grandfather played …well, obviously, a person who would wait until she
had more or less made her own name and then sit down and write a book
about her grandfather, says something about the impact on her life. He
was kind of an enigma to me. That is, I was
Now, had she been one of your favorite teachers?
Yes, she had been one of my favorite teachers and I admired her tremendously.
I see.
Now, are there any other matters that you think are significant about your childhood experiences and your ancestry that we ought to talk about before we move on to New York?
Yes, I want to, particularly in light of some of the experiences of young blacks today, I want to make one or two comments about identity. I am not aware of the kind of identity crisis for many of us in my generation as has been suggested about young blacks of the present generation. I think that we had a very strong sense, and Ralph Ellison says the same thing and he's my contemporary, he grew up in Oklahoma where there were segregated schools. We had a very stong sense of our identity. Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, these were very significant people in our lives. We had no self-consciousness about reciting Paul Laurence Dunbar in dialect and as a matter of fact, the person who could really recite Paul Lawrence Dunbar with all the flair of his dialect, was considered a very talented, gifted person. I remember my classmate, Betty Hicks, I don't know whether she's retired now, but Betty Hicks worked for North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company and Betty was really a genius at reciting Paul Laurence Dunbar. I've often thought that if someone could have discovered her when she was young, she would have made a great dramatic actress. But what am I saying? We did have this sense of racial identity. I remember in our family, finding these little pamphlets, "Thirty Years of Freedom," and then a second little pamphlet, "Fifty Years of Freedom," and these were little playlets that had been written up for community groups to dramatize. One must have referred to about 1890, or maybe 1895 and the other one must have been 1910 or '15.
Are you saying that despite the problem and the harm of
I am sure that there were many positives about it, as I think, for example, of the social life and the community life, I think of White Rock Baptist Church, St. Joseph Baptist Church …
A.M.E., the A.M.E. Church?
Yes, the St. Joseph A.M.E. Church, Mother Zion A.M.E. Church. I think of
many kinds of community activities that took place in these community
centers, so to speak. And these were comfortable. The point at which
life became unbearable was in the contact with the white world, in the
sense of business contacts, or going into the community and being made
to feel inferior by all the signs and symbols and the etiquette, the
racial etiquette in terms of being called by your first name or people
addressing adult Negroes as "Auntie" or "Uncle" and maybe "boy" and this
kind of thing. In the relationships between the superiors, the school
official superiors and the teachers, and since I had so many relatives
who were teachers, I was very aware of the hierarchy of the
relationships and the interracial relationships in the school system,
the superintendent or supervisor who comes in and calls your teacher by
her first name. This, I think I talk about in Proud
Shoes. So, the hatred of segregation was not hatred of community
life among Negroes, it was finding barriers that hemmed you in, that you
were not free to go and come as you chose. Does that make sense to
you?
Yes. And in fact, would I be taking liberties if I said
Now, I must say this. In my house, I always heard about the race, "You can't keep this race down. This race is going to show the world yet." The race, the race. So, I called my aunts "race women." There was that sense of loyalty and dedication to the advancement of the race. So, there wasn't a negative feeling about my racial identity in my house and yet, this strange tension between acute awareness of a mixed ancestry and this devotion to "the race."
But since the race was so much of everything …
Right.
…and you have always lived with this complexity and these paradoxes, it was something that I guess we all learned, to not only live with but to enjoy and grow from that experience. Now, tell me about going to New York. You were on your way to Columbia but you ended up at Hunter.
Right. Well, I said that I wanted to go to Columbia. So, Aunt Pauline
took me to New York and she carried me to Columbia and I am sure that
the Columbia registrar snickered and sent me over to Barnard. Aunt
Pauline trotted with me down the street and over to Barnard. I'm sure
that they asked Aunt Pauline a few well directed questions and knew
clearly that we were not of the financial means to afford an education
at Barnard and so, they said to her …and I'm sure with great desire to
be helpful, they said, "Well, where you
So, in one year then, you finished your requirements?
I finished all these requirements in one year, did about a year and a half in one year and entered Hunter not the next year, but there was a year in between. That year in between, I came back to Durham in order to work to save money and help Aunt Pauline with the expenses of the house and to save money to go back to Hunter. That was the year that I worked at what was then called Bankers Fire Insurance Company. I don't know what it is called now, but it is the leading Negro fire insurance company in Durham that is now housed in the North Carolina Mutual building.
You were typing there?
I was a typist, I was a junior secretary-stenographer.
Now, you attended Hunter College and were there any particular people at Hunter College that influenced you in regard to your major, or did you just decide that you wanted to write and were interested in journalism? How did you move to that point?
I had always had an interest in writing. I had been writing on tablets
from the time that I was a little tot. I even wrote a novel by the time
that I was thirteen or fourteen. A horrible thing.
What happened to the novel? You've hidden it in your files?
Yes. Times. What is it, "The Truth Unbridled."
Everyone talks about Louis Austin.
Yes, well, it was one of my first thoughts …I worked for the Carolina Times for awhile as "office boy," custodian, sweeper,
cleaner, editor, and during that period, he published and ran in serial
form this lurid little novel that I wrote.
What was the name of it?
The Angel of the Desert, I think it was and it was the
most stereotyped thing. The heroine, wouldn't you know, was blonde with
blue eyes, golden hair, you know, a real little sort of Evangeline or
whatever you want to call her, a Little Eva. The wicked sister was a
brunette with dark hair.
Now, when did you write this?
Oh, when I was about fifteen.
As you spoke about this awareness, something else came to my mind. This is certainly the period in which there is a possibility for hostility. During this period in New York City, of course, and what was happening in the United States, was economic depression, really, the New Deal had not come to the forefront and you are at a city college where you are not with the elite, certainly, who are not affected by this. Did you find a great deal of hostility from classmates, from white classmates? Did you find them simply not associating with you or did you find teachers who were hostile towards you, or anything such as that? If for no other reason than the simple economic competition.
Yes. The first thing that I want to say is that Hunter College was a
girl's school, a woman's college. In those days, it was called "the poor
girl's Radcliffe." Out of 7,000 women …Hunter College was known to be
the largest women's college in the world, out of 7,000 women, only about
45 of us were colored. So that we were not …there were not enough of us,
we stuck out, we were not quite a novelty, but we were not in any
competitive sense, so to speak. My memories of Hunter are very pleasant.
There were people who sought me out, and I am looking for one of them
now, who made me feel like a person. Also, don't forget that it was a
day school, a commuter school. It was not a campus and therefore, one
probably would miss many of the
Let the record tell that Dr. Murray has a copy of her annual yearbook from Hunter College, 1933, that includes pictures of her classmates and herself and indicates that she was in an honorary society.
Ruth Goldstein …note the caliber. Ruth M. Goldstein. She was honorary
society, Phi Beta Kappa, editor of Echo, which was the
school literary magazine, vice-president of the Makeup Box, which was
the school theatrical group, and you can just see this long list of
credentials. She graduated summa cum laude. Ruth just
retired from teaching high school two or three years ago and we are
still in contact. She was one of my favorite people in college. She is a
great editor now, today, but she gave me my first break. She published
my poetry and she published an article that I wrote.
Now, she published this in school papers?
In school papers, yes and I will always remember her with just great love and affection and admiration. I was looking for her picture, a big picture of her, but it is the same picture as this, the one that I showed you.
Well, the honorary society that you mentioned that both you and Ruth belonged to, now this had to do with your gradepoint average or what?
It was the national English honorary fraternity.
Oh, English.
Yes. I presume that it might have had to do with your gradepoint average and the fact that you were an English major and you couldn't get to be an English major at Hunter without making a certain minimum average. The first two years, you were not allowed to even declare as an English major until your junior year. You had to take a backup major. My backup major was history and if you made the grade and were admitted to the English department, then your backup major became your minor.
Now, the name of this society was?
Sigma Tau Delta. I think that's the sequence. Sigma Tau Delta. There were several teachers who inspired me at Hunter. And these were white teachers, now. One was Catherine Riegart, who is now retired and living, I think, in Florida.
And how would you spell that?
R-I-E-G-A-R-T. Catherine M. Riegart. She was a young teacher, a comparatively young Ph.D., when I met her. I met her in my freshmen class and she gave us weekly themes, essays. You know what I mean, what freshman composition is. And every week, they came back, "D", "D,", "D."
And I assume that "D" is the same as "D" for us now? That's poor.
Very poor. And evidently, she must have seen something in me, so for
Christmas vacation, she invited me and Lulu Burton to her apartment for
a tea, in the Village [Greenwich Village]. I had never seen anything
like this before. I had never seen a modern …what do you call it, Proud Shoes.
Now, I don't want to be a cynic, but I do feel like I have to ask if you think there was something that she sensed, even though she was giving you "D's", prior to this period of time in which you had tea and talked and were in her apartment, or was it something that she sensed after that afternoon together?
I think that she saw in my work, she probably saw in my work, flashes of ability, but abominable mechanics. It was my grammar and probably my spelling and my punctuation that was so poor. I think that she was probably intrigued by this youngster, that was such a complex of …
Communicating a lot but not having the skill to do it in an effective way.
Right.
I see. Did she make copious comments on your themes?
She must have, and I must have …I mean, the fact that there was this steady development must have meant that I was responding to her encouragement, you see. Remember that this is many years ago, but the two things that stand out in my mind, are this being invited to tea and this steady progress from "D's" up to the "A", and the fact that this essay was about my grandfather, and probably the first time that I felt free enough to talk about something that was meaningful to me and this in turn, evoked her recognition that maybe there was something creative in this child.
That's beautiful.
One other experience I had in college I think is worth recording. We had a marvelous young teacher in anthropology by the name of Dorothy Keur. I could have completely missed up on anthropology but I had a very dear friend who was a science major and loved anthropology and she recommended that I take it and so, I took it as an elective and Dr. Keur, for our field work, had us go once a week over to the Hall of Man at the Museum of Natural History over on 87th Street across the park. It was a marvelous hike because Hunter was at 68th and Park Avenue.
Across the park?
Across the park. In those days, there was no problem whatsoever. You
could sleep in the park. I have slept in the park. We would hike down to
the park and sleep over night, but remember, I am talking about over
forty years ago, pre-World War II. We would spend once a week in the
Hall of Man, particularly with African
That's interesting. This Professor Keur, do you have any idea with whom she studied or what …not all anthropologists took that kind of approach at that period.
She was a marvelous person. She's still alive and just recently …oh, she retired, I guess, a number of years ago, but I think that she may have studied with Ruth Benedict, I don't know. She studied at Columbia, I'm fairly sure. Her husband was an archeologist, they spent a lot of time in the West …
On what they called digs?
Right.
And field trips.
Yes. And she had a sense and she transmitted to me a sense of the unity of mankind and I've never lost that. This may make me a loss to militant racial identification, but this sense of unity within mankind, this sense of seeing mankind as mankind …
Now, it is not always the case that college students take all of their courses seriously. Did you take all of your courses seriously, or were there a few that you decided to really study and others that you just kind of let slip by or something like that, was it the interest in your background that made you work hard on this anthropology or did you approach all of your subjects in that manner?
I'm sure that I did not because I have a college record that ranges from "A" to "C". Part of this was because I was a working student and …
Where were you working?
Oh, I worked at the Alice Foote McDougal Coffee Shops, I was a dinner waitress and then …I was a freshman, my freshman year was the year of the stock crash, October, 1929. I bounced around from job to job, waiting tables here, washing dishes here and running elevators here …
You were lucky to find any job.
Right. Yes, I was always working.
You don't know how lucky that was.
No, I had moved to the YWCA in Harlem by that time and for a lot of my college career, I lived at the YWCA, West 137th Street, Emma Ransom House, it was called in those days. I'm trying to think of the question that you asked me …
I was asking you whether you approached all your studies in a serious manner.
Yes. As I said, they went from "A" to "C". If a
Because you made it through.
That's right. Now, when it came to educational psychology, I couldn't have cared less. There were just certain courses that I wasn't interested in. History, I liked.
You said that was your "just-in-case-major."
Right. So that turned out to be my minor. I loved classics, which would be really the history of culture. Apparently, I guess that one might say that I had a pull toward the humanities, although I would not have known how to define them in those ways. I certainly had no interest in math, possibly less in economics, but I was a good political science student. So, it would range between the social sciences and the humanities.
Now, you attended Hunter College and then after being graduated in 1933
as an English major, nearly a decade elapsed before you made your
decision to go to law school. During that period, you
And Countee Cullen. And what's the West Indian … Claude McKay.
Yes, Claude McKay. I take it that you knew some of these people.
Yes, I knew Langston and I knew Countee.
Now, your poetry was of a varied character, such that one might infer …and this is, I repeat, inference, moments of dissatisfaction, disappointment, doubt, but also a fierce determination and insistance upon some sort of action, demand for solutions or some resolution to problems that you saw within not only your own society, but perhaps even in a sense of the world as you knew it within the anthropological sense. In 1933, you wrote a poem …
Me?
Yes. I'm not going to read the whole poem, but …
It's come back to haunt me.
I'll read just a few excerpts. "Youth, 1933". "I sing of youth,
imperious, glorious, dissatisfied, unslaked, untaught, unkempt youth.
Youth who admits neither God nor country, youth proud and eager, proud
of its broken heads, eager to martyr itself for any and all causes. On
they go, this youth, the world over, headed for chaos, with wrangling
and smiling, bursting all bonds, junking all ideals, shouting in chorus,
‘We protest. We demand,’ Having one weapon, they wield it unsparingly.
Youth, hotheadedness, energy, passion. Make way, you slackards, money
hounds, party guns. We are
That's one of the biggest pieces of schizophrenia I think I've ever
heard.
Now, I also want to read part of another poem written in the same year, you might be able to guess this one, too, "The Newer Cry."
Oh, yes.
And then I would like you to just simply talk about these two poems and …
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
In my paperback, "The Newer Cry" is on page 55.
Do you know that the editor died last week …I mean the publisher. My agent for this died in November and the publisher died last week, Bill Atkin, President of Silvermine Publishers.
Now, I'm going to read another excerpt from a 1933 poem, from "The Newer
Cry," and then I was asking you to simply comment on these two poems.
You've already begun to comment on how "Youth" represented your standing
back and looking at yourself and you call it, in a sense, schizophrenia,
but I would like to juxtapose an aspect of "The Newer Cry." "Let us grow
strong, but never in our strength forget the weaker brother. Let us
fight, but only when we must fight. Let us work, for therein lies our
salvation. Let us conquer the soil, for therein lies our sustenance. Let
us conquer the soul, for therein lies our power. Let us march in steady
unbroken beat, for therein lies
I'm sure that both of these poems were probably written at the switchboard of Hunter College after I graduated. I had the rather dubious distinction of being the first Negro to have been employed in anything but a broom and mop job. It was quite a step forward for Hunter College to employ me as the evening switchboard operator. I sat there at the evening switchboard and wrote poetry between calls. "Youth, 1933" is one and I think "The Newer Cry" is probably the second. "Youth" was expressing my sense of identification with the whole class of youth, the world of black, white, international Communist youth, European, wherever. "The Newer Cry" was expressing my racial identity. You will note that in both of these poems, I am troubled by a sense of the violence of revolution, the destructiveness, and I don't know whether you've noticed this, but it runs all through my poetry of this period. I don't know whether you've read "To Poets Who Have Rebelled."
Yes.
It's the same thing, "protest if you must, but at the same time, let your
throat ache double with the cry of beauty here and now." Here is a child
that was brought up essentially close to nature and essentially, I
think, with great freedom and a sense of love, being surrounded by
loving people in one's environment. And never really relinquishing this
longing for love in however a way you wished to describe it. Love as the
great instrument of change and whatnot. I think that it comes out
perhaps more in "The Newer Cry" than it does in "Youth, 1933." Because
show you I can even if I die
trying. This was my attitude toward America and so was it Claude
McKay's. You know, "I must confess I loved this cultured hell which
tests my youth, although she feeds me bread of bitterness and sticks her
tiger's tooth into my …", whatever, "I must confess I love this cultured
hell." Well, this has been my attitude toward America. I love America
and whatever she hands me, I'm handing her back with, I hope, a
championship quality. So, so many of my heroes, my racial heroes, have
been the champions, the Jackie Robinsons, the people who climbed over
and said, "I'll show you."
For the sake of all those who may in the future listen to this and not be able to understand, perhaps because of the circumstances under which they listen to it, let's go into a little bit more about "I love America." You are saying, "I love America" for a particular kind of reason. Was it really America as it was actually, with violence and with all the problems of society, all the injustices, but can you explain more about what it was?
Well, I mean by saying that "I love America," that first, it is home. No
one can be more native to America than America's black population,
because America's black population biologically
Yes, even though it was involuntary, it was something that left an indelible imprint upon America.
Right.
And of course, as you said, that as much as we are built into it, we