Refused admittance to University of North Carolina on basis of race
Murray discusses her efforts to gain admittance to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1938. After spending several years living in New York and working on her poetry, Murray returned to North Carolina, partly at the behest of her Aunt Pauline. Murray decided to apply to the law school at UNC, in part because the Thomas Hocutt case was currently in the headlines and she did not think she would be barred from admittance on the basis of race. Nevertheless, Murray was denied entrance for that very reason. She describes her reaction to this event and her efforts to get the NAACP to intervene on her behalf. In so doing, she discusses the role of the NAACP in civil rights legal cases during those years, explaining that they could not help her because various aspects of her case did not ensure its victory.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Pauli Murray, February 13, 1976. Interview G-0044. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
I think the key fact, the thing that made me really apply to the
University of North Carolina …well, here again was a
convergence of factors, my ostensible reason, and it always seemed to be
this way, that I had some family problem, some personal problem that I
was trying to work out and what seemed very logical to me, I then began
to follow up on. Of course, the minute that I began to follow up on what
was very logical to me, I began to run into road blocks. My aunt really
wanted me to come home.
- GENNA RAE MCNEIL:
-
This is Aunt Pauline?
- PAULI MURRAY:
-
Aunt Pauline and Aunt Sally, Now, they were getting older and my problem
was that I wanted to get some more education. I wanted to do some
graduate work. Well, wouldn't it make great sense to come
home and commute to the University of North Carolina and get a graduate
degree at the University of North Carolina, either in social science or
in law and that would allow me to fulfil my family responsibilities in
Durham.
- GENNA RAE MCNEIL:
-
We find that after the futile attempt of Thomas Hocutt under the auspices
of the NAACP to enter UNC School of Pharmacy, Pauli Murray, because of a
number of reasons, which you stated, some having
to do with family, sees it as a logical thing to do to enter UNC in
social science or law school. So, in November of 1938, you apply for a
catalog and an application and thereafter, what occurs?
- PAULI MURRAY:
-
They sent me an application blank and they had written into the printed
application blank, race and religion. This has been typed in so that it
stands out apart from a normal form. I think I answered it but may have
said, "But what difference does it make?"
Obviously tongue in cheek. In due course, I got back a letter from Dr.
Frank Graham, who was the then president of the University of North
Carolina, saying, "I'm sorry, but the constitution
and the laws of the state of North Carolina prohibit me from admitting
one of your race to the law school." 3
* The first letter of rejection dated Dec. 14, 1938, was signed
by W. W. Pierson, Dean of the Graduate School. Correspondence
with Dr. Graham came later. The Gaines
decision was announced Dec. 12, 1938.
Either the day after or two days after I received this letter,
down came the Supreme Court decision in the Lloyd Gaines case. Now, the
Lloyd Gaines case decided in December of 1938 was the beginning of the
long read back from Plessy vs. Ferguson, the "separate but equal" decision.
Lloyd Gaines, in the educational field, was the start of the long road
back to the 1954 decision and what it said was: A state has a
responsibility to educate its residents. It cannot shift responsibility
to other states by giving out-of-state scholarships. It must give
substantially equal facilities to its colored citizens as well as the
white or must admit them to the existing institutions. It went on to say
that this is a "personal right" and in a sense it does
not matter if only one person is seeking it. This, of course, you can
imagine …I immediately wrote back to the University of North
Carolina and said, "Ah, but here is the Lloyd Gaines
case." The story is that, the legend is that Dr. Frank Graham
sent my application down to the legislature.
Remember that this is now December. The legislature meets around January
5, 1939 something of the sort and says, "Look, what are we
going to do with this? Here's the Lloyd Gaines
case and here's this application." Presumably, it
was the bouncing of the application down to the legislature and the
problems that this raised for the legislature, "Look, we
can't fool around with this, the issue is upon us,"
that made it newsworthy and it must have leaked up in that way, because
I knew nothing about it and my family knew nothing. I don't
even know if I had …maybe I had told my family. I guess that
I had.
- GENNA RAE MCNEIL:
-
Since their house was about to be burned, perhaps, you probably mentioned
to them.
[laughter]
- PAULI MURRAY:
-
And it suddenly burst out over the radio, you know, and came to be sort
of national news. But it was this "unidentified
Negress."
[laughter]
It's in the headlines, an "unidentified
Negress makes application to the University of North Carolina."
This correspondence went back and forth for awhile and then I put the
whole stuff together in an envelope and sent it down to the NAACP,
namely to Thurgood Marshall, maybe I sent it to Walter White and he
referred it to Marshall. Well then to take the cake, I thought,
"All right, they couldn't win on Hocutt because of
complications and whatnot, but nobody can say anything about the
standing and status of Hunter College nor of me in terms of academic
standing, and isn't this an answer?" I
then got the shock of my life. I learned that the NAACP very carefully
picks its cases in these days, they had to win every case, it goes
carefully into the background of the person who is going to be the bearer of the case, and all of this being said to
a proud Fitzgerald Murray, you know …"What does he
mean by ‘going carefully into the background of
it?"’ But there was a certain kind of
…the way that I read this was, "We have to be very
careful of the people that we select. They have to be Simon-pure and you
are not quite Simon-pure enough." I was too maverick.
- GENNA RAE MCNEIL:
-
Now, they had special qualifications for test litigants which were
designed by Charles Houston when he came as special counsel. Now, by the
end of '38, he was moving back to Washington, D.C. and more
and more things were coming to Thurgood Marshall's desk. Now,
in his letter to you, did he indicate …
- PAULI MURRAY:
-
I think that this was not a letter, I think this was a personal
interview.
- GENNA RAE MCNEIL:
-
In this interview, he indicated that your radical activities had
adversely affected their …
- PAULI MURRAY:
-
Might well have been. He might have implied this, you see.
- GENNA RAE MCNEIL:
-
I see.
- PAULI MURRAY:
-
Now, Conrad Pearson, whom you know …
- GENNA RAE MCNEIL:
-
Yes, the Assistant Attorney General …
- PAULI MURRAY:
-
Yes, but he used to be the local NAACP …
- GENNA RAE MCNEIL:
-
That's right.
- PAULI MURRAY:
-
Conrad was very anxious to go forward with it and to try it anyway, but I
had …here is a part of the contradictions in my personality
where I am extremely individualistic, but at the same time have a very
strong sense of team play and you know, if the National NAACP did not feel that they could take the case, I would
hesitate and think a long time before I would sort of "go off
the reservation," so to speak. The other legal problem which
Thurgood raised was that the Lloyd Gaines case had to do with a state
resident and I really was no longer resident of the state of North
Carolina. I argued that my ancestral home was there, we have property
there, I even owned property there in terms of being part of an heirship
of my grandmother's farm, this kind of thing, and besides, if
the Fourteenth Amendment, under the Fourteenth Amendment they let in
white nonresidents, that same Fourteenth Amendment requires them to let
me in. But this did not …
- GENNA RAE MCNEIL:
-
Certainly, it's legally arguable, but it did not seem politic,
in other words?
- PAULI MURRAY:
-
But note who is making the argument. What I'm really trying to
show you is how the logic of the situations in which I found myself and
my reaction to them was driving me in a sense, toward a legal
career.
- GENNA RAE MCNEIL:
-
So it seems that despite the sensibleness and the possibility certainly,
the legal feasibility of it being argued, it simply did not seem the
reasonable thing to do at the time, to go on with that.
- PAULI MURRAY:
-
Right. You see, I was a victim of a policy which obviously the NAACP felt
that it must carry out in those early days and that is, it could not
afford to lose a case and therefore, it built very carefully every
single case that it took up before the Supreme Court so as to almost
insure victory. This is understandable. I might as an individual
involved, feel terribly disappointed, but if you stand off historically
and look at it and see where the NAACP was in those days, fighting a long battle …