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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 built it.
Yes. All of this, then, plus America's dreams. Some people might call it
her pretensions. I want to see America be what she says she is and I
consider it part of my responsibility to do that. It's a kind of
patriotism …well, let me give you a symbol of it. When I went down to
look at the archives, to look at the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution of the United States for the first time, enshrined in the
Archives, behind those glass cases, with its honor guard, just as I
entered, here was a uniformed black American standing as the guard of
honor to protect these two hallowed documents, from the point of view of
our history. To me, there was such great symbolism in that, that it was
black America who was safeguarding the
Symbolism and perhaps irony, also.
Yes.
For the most part, we have been the ones who have always most greatly and most fervently …
Well, it is that kind of patriotism that I'm talking about, America being what she proclaims herself to be. Be what you are supposed to be.
Now, in the context of that, before you went to law school, what kinds of activities were you participating in? These are the years after the summer of '33.
Well, first I worked for the National Urban League as a special field
secretary for its house organ, which was then called Opportunity Magazine. Then …
Was Elmer Carter still …
Elmer Carter, I think by that time, I think that he was then editor of
the magazine, but the late Mr. Lester B. Granger, who just died several
weeks ago, became the business manager of Opportunity
Magazine and I worked immediately under him for that year that
I worked with them. Now, this is about '33, '34 and by this time, we are
really in the middle of the Depression. I got …ultimately, I got a job
on WPA, first working in remedial reading and then switching over to the
Workers Education Project. The Workers Education Project was a
tremendous intellectual experience for me, because it brought me into
Now, while you were doing all these things and meeting with radical intellectuals, did you maintain close contact with your relatives, with your family, your extended family, and your friends in North Carolina and your friends at Hunter? How did this affect those relationships?
I would come back and forth, but obviously, I suppose my ideas would tend
to be more radical than those of the community that I left. So much so,
that when I, in 1938 when I applied to the University of North Carolina,
this was met with consternation by my family, my immediate family,
primarily because they were afraid that they would be lynched, or that
the house would burn down, I think it was real fear,
Now, there is another aspect of Pauli Murray, the former English major
now, that would seem to foretell, or from which one might infer a
special direction and character of activism, certainly these activities
in which you were involved before entering law school did that, a Pauli
Murray as a mature adult that I think tends to be revealed in two very
short poems, which I'll just read because they are very brief. One
called "Quarrel." "Two ants at bay on the curved stem of an apple are
insufficient cause to fell the tree." And "Color Trouble." "If you
dislike me just because my face has more sun than your has, then when
you see me, turn and run, but do not try to buy the sun." These are
written in 1937 and 1938. Now, there are three major incidents prior to
your entering Howard University Law School in 1941 that come to mind in
connection with these poems and in connection with the work that you did
after you left Hunter. Although documentation is available on these, I
would like you to discuss briefly for the sake of the record, what you
consider the salient issues involved in the following three activities
between 1938 and 1941. First of all, one that you mentioned already, in
1938, your attempt to enter the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, unsuccessfully challenging the exclusion of blacks from graduate
school and professional schools at
What was the first one that you mentioned?
The first one is UNC and not being admitted.
Well, all of this, these activities, took place, I think, in a highly
politicized climate. Remember that I am being influenced by the whole
radical intellectual climate of those days. The organization of labor
and the struggle, and I participated in those struggles as a volunteer
labor organizer and on the picket lines. I even picketed the Amsterdam
News with my dear friend, Ted Posten, because
there was a lockout …now this is a black newspaper locking out black
editorial writers. Well, I was on the mass picket line and got my first
arrest, got arrested in 1935, I think it was. Well, what I am trying to
suggest was that out of this atmosphere of struggle, curiously enough,
my militance on race growing out of my exposure to labor struggles and
my becoming interested in this. Remember that I talked about labor
education and I got interested in the whole background of labor and took
off for about six months and went to Brookwood Labor College.
Now, where is Brookwood Labor College?
Well, it is no more …whenever I had a concern, I always had to go to school over my concern. I couldn't just read books, I had to find a school and go to school. Brookwood Labor College was in Katona, New York, and it was set up by the American Federation of Labor way back in the first or second decade of the twentieth century, in 1936 it was being supported in part by the AFL and maybe the Committee for Industrial Organization which later became the CIO. This was where members of trade unions, who couldn't afford to go to college, but who represented leadership potential and ability, would go and get courses in labor journalism, courses in labor economics, in history, you know, this kind of thing. Well, I took myself up there and went to labor college. That was the year, I believe, that Earl Robinson composed "Ballad for Americans," which you recognize in terms of Paul Robeson singing "Ballad for Americans …"
Yes, Paul Robeson.
I heard one of the first performances of "Ballad for Americans." That was
the same year in which the general strike of the United Automobile
Workers broke out, 1936-37, I'm not sure, but right in that period and
they had the first sit-ins in Detroit and we labor students at Brookwood
Labor College became volunteer helpers for the strike in plants at
Tarrytown, New York and we would put out strike newspapers and do things
of that sort. That was the same year in which the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade was organized to fight, American volunteers, to fight for the
Loyalist government in Spain, and almost the whole class I was in at
Brookwood Labor College, almost en masse volunteered
and went to Spain. Very, very few of them returned. You
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.
This is Aunt Pauline?
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.
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
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 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
Since their house was about to be burned, perhaps, you probably mentioned
to them.
And it suddenly burst out over the radio, you know, and came to be sort
of national news. But it was this "unidentified Negress."
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 …
I think that this was not a letter, I think this was a personal interview.
In this interview, he indicated that your radical activities had adversely affected their …
Might well have been. He might have implied this, you see.
I see.
Now, Conrad Pearson, whom you know …
Yes, the Assistant Attorney General …
Yes, but he used to be the local NAACP …
That's right.
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
Certainly, it's legally arguable, but it did not seem politic, in other words?
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.
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.
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
Yes, and if one looks at the judicial system and the manner in which we ultimately achieved favorable constitutional decisions, which come very fast along down the road, the precedents have to be very firmly established. So, the point of view of the NAACP is understandable. Now, this obviously was a disappointment, but you do not cease to engage in activities that have to do with racial protest.
The second incident, for example, in 1940, having to do with interstate travel and public accommodation, the Petersburg, Virginia bus incident. I believe this was a Greyhound bus that you were riding on?
Right.
And you were arrested and convicted for resisting segregation on this bus, despite the fact that it was interstate travel, meaning that this was basically under federal jurisdiction. Would you like to tell us what to your mind were the most important issues involved in this case, why at this particular point in your life you decided to defy the statute, why you went on with the case, and what the eventual result was?
Well, first I ought to say that I and my school friend who was arrested
with me did not start out deliberately to protest the Virginia
segregation statutes. As so often happened in those early days, an
incident would arise out of almost intolerable situations. I mean, a
person could be pushed into a position where there was just nothing you
could do almost but fight back. In this particular situation, my friend
and I were traveling from New York down to Durham to visit
They just put up with it.
Right.
And her name was?
Her name was Adelene McBean. Knowing that Mac, as we used to call her,
knowing that Mac was volatile, I did everything I could to try to borrow
a car to make this trip and with no success whatsoever. By this time, I
no longer had my little car. It wound up that on Easter evening, we were
headed from Washington to Durham on a Greyhound Bus. The bus that we
started out on was a long, very nice bus, plenty of room. We probably
sat somewhat to the rear of the center of the bus, having plenty of room
for whites and plenty of room for Negroes. We stopped at Richmond, I
guess, for a rest stop and lunch stop or whatnot and somehow, we were
late getting back to the original bus, which rapidly filled up with
people who were …this was, you know, beginning to be the real Easter
weekend rush for local people. The long bus left us and we had to take
the auxillary bus, which was a much smaller and much less comfortable
bus. So, we got in and sat, again, slightly rear of center, or maybe
even a little bit more than that. The way in which the people filled up
made it clear that Negroes would fill the back of the bus, that there
were plenty of Negroes. But somehow, the way in which the population,
but population, shifted, brought on a considerable number of white
people, more than had been on in the past.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
… and the driver goes out and I suppose goes through all of the necessary
business about drawing up a warrant or a warrant of arrest, or
whatnot…still not quite ready to arrest us, you know, and finally
bringing on the police and trying to make a deal. And it appears, since
I want to get home for Easter, I don't want to be arrested, why am I
making all this effort? To get home to my folks for Easter, apparently
they are prepared to make a compromise, that we move back to this seat
and they check the seat and find that it isn't really broken, that the
cushion is out of place. But in the process, apparently the driver
thinks that there might be a court case and so he goes up and gets a
batch of volunteer name and address witness cards and routinely hands
out all of these witness cards to every white person in the front of the
bus and when he gets to the last white person, he then turns, you see.
At which point, I say, "Driver, how about giving us some of those cards?
We are also witnesses." At this point, they go out and get the cops and
arrest us. So, it really has nothing to do with breaking the segregation
law. It really has nothing to do with creating a disburbance, because if
there were a disturbance, apparently the disturbance had subsided and so
it was simply the whole southern custom that
And they charged you with what?
They charged us with creating a disturbance, breaking the segregation law, violating the segregation law and creating a disturbance.
Well, talking out of turn might have been creating a disturbance.
Right. Somebody was going to Durham. I quickly gave them a note, my mother's name, telephone and gave her instructions to wire or call Walter White, who was Roy Wilkins' precedessor.
Yes.
In the NAACP. So that by …I suppose that this must have been somewhere around four or five o'clock in the afternoon and by evening, NAACP lawyers from Richmond were asking at the jail to see us.
Was Oliver Hill involved?
Oliver Hill, Cooley and Valentine, all NAACP lawyers. Meanwhile, the
minute that we got into our jail cell, we sat down and did a report, a
summary, immediately of the case, the facts, a chart of the bus,
everything that we could think of that would be of any value in this
case. When the lawyers came, we presented it to them and they looked it
over and they said, "Well, this is practically as good as a lawyer's
brief." So, this implied that you should study law. Well, I throw this
in, because this again is one of the pointers toward law school. When
the state discovered that the NAACP was going to challenge and probably
use this as a test case, it withdrew the charge of the segregation
statute and left standing the creation of a disturbance. I began to
think, although I couldn't say it in these terms, I didn't have the
legal skill, but they can't charge you …well, they can't do indirectly
what they can't do directly. In other words, they are
To penalize you for another violation.
Right and they are afraid to penalize you for what they really want to penalize you for, because they know that these laws are now increasingly under legal challenge and of course, this was 1940. In 1946, the identical statutes under which I was convicted were declared unconsitutional in Irene Morgan's case, Commonwealth vs. Morgan. So, it took six years.
Now, did they end up dropping the charge of disturbing the peace, or did you lose the case or …
No, they convicted me and Roy Wilkins informed us that the NAACP could not afford to appeal the case and therefore we would have to either pay the fine or go to jail. We refused to pay the fine. We went to jail and while in jail, began to use Gandhian tactics on the jailer, with some modest success. The jailer who had threatened to throw my you-know-what in the dungeon when I came in, as we went out apologized in the way in which southerners used to not only apologize, "you are sort of the better kind," … this kind of thing.
"And if you get a degree, you might be my peer, soon."
Right.
Now, you did not engage in any political consciousness raising while you were in jail?
Oh, yes.
You did?
We were thrown into a cell with three or four women who were there for
reasons of either streetwalking or maybe violating a curfew, or one
woman had hit her boyfriend over the head and broken a bottle, but these
And who made pens and pencils available, or did you have them already?
Oh, we insisted on having all our pens and paper and typewriters and by this time, it was known that the White House was interested in the case. My sister here in Washington had interrupted Mrs. Roosevelt in the middle of a garden party and told her that her sister had been arrested in Virginia and Mrs. Roosevelt had called the governor of Virginia and by this time, somebody alerted the people in Petersburg, "Be careful."
Was Darden the governor of Virginia at that point?
No. Who was the governor? Darden had not come in yet, it
It was Price, o.k. And you had known …Eleanor Roosevelt has called you one of her two best friends.
Yes, I had known her …
Now, you had known her for how long by 1940?
Actually, probably not more …I didn't know her really well even then, but I think that we had been in correspondence. I had been corresponding with her, peppering her since maybe 1938, since the University of North Carolina incident, again saying …I didn't know her well, you saw a letter there signed by her own name, so we would say roughly that I had known her for about two years.
Let the record show that Dr. Murray has files on both the UNC case and the Petersburg bus case.
The point I am trying to make is that by this time, I think the local Petersburg authorities began to say, "These may be unusual prisoners, in the sense that we 've got to be very careful about them." So, the second time around, this is when we are not paying the fine and are serving our term, that we were allowed our typewriter and whatnot. But even so, I think that we had pencils and pads, I just can't function without having my little notebook and pencil and so, however we communicated, we did a kind of an educational job in saying why we were there, what had happened and whatnot, we got back an apology and in a sense, an admission of "we are proud of you," if I recall what came back from the male prisoners… It indicated that consciousness raising could go on right in the middle of a jail. I think that I have one of these notes, I'm not sure where it is.
Now, do you have any idea that they suffered at all as a result, I
No, we had no information about the people inside the jail, but I did think that it was significant that when we showed up for trial, you see, we appealed this and the next time we showed up for trial, here was the entire sociology class of …is it Virginia Union?
Yes, Virginia Union in Richmond.
Well, this was in Petersburg …what is the school there?
Oh, Virginia State College.
Virginia State College, sitting there. When we walked into the courthouse, there they were. See, here are some notes, "notes slipped under the door from male prisoners to female prisoners."
These notes are dated March 23 and 26 of 1940. Is it possible to read?
[Reading] "Thanks for your advice. I did not know that is the same one
that I spoke to last night, but that it will still be a little better in
my behavior as …", well, as something. But the attitude, what I'm really
trying to suggest is that the attitude of the men changed and then they
began to ask for help themselves, you see. "Dear Murray and Mac, I am
amazed how you all feel, I can imagine how you all feel, but I hope you
will get out all right. I had some bad luck, too. I am accused of
shooting a cop, so you can imagine how I feel and the fix I am in, but
if I get over this, I will never show my face again in these parts."
What I am really trying to say to you …here is another one: "Just a few
lines to let
A rapport and a new kind of awareness.
Can you imagine what it might have been like if I had had the background and the training and understanding, let's say, of the 1960s. You see, this is groping. This is a historical development, groping, a sense of trying to educate my fellow prisoners but not really having the skills to do anything to help them or to get their story out.
But then on the other hand, given that it is this period, had you any greater skills and had you been more militant, you might not be here today. So, during King's period, it's a different story.
Yes, but I think that you begin to see that …
Yes, you do begin to see, you do see very well.
O.K., now let's move on to the other incident, because this is one that I have read about so often in the newspapers and in the Workers Defense League files and it is one that I'm sure posterity will be interested in and that is the case of Odell Waller, the black sharecropper. Now, if you could briefly give us the facts of the case and then tell us how you participated in the Workers Defense League prior to your going to law school.
Odell Waller was a sharecropper. Oscar Davis was a farmer who was his
landlord. Oscar Davis, being not really a planter, but also himself a
relatively small, grubby farmer. They had a dispute over a wheat crop.
Apparently the division was supposed to be Odell and his mother
And it's first degree murder.
Yes, it's first degree murder. This case has been kicking
Now, as board member, are you field secretary at the same time or were you field secretary after?
No, I was field secretary after.
O.K.
Also, I identified, because six months earlier, I had been arrested in Virginia. Remember that this case happens in the summer of 1940 and it was in…well, three months earlier, it was in March, 1940 that I have my Waterloo. So, there are all these emotional pulls and identifications. When the Workers Defense League asks me if I will go down and investigate and see what I can come up with, then I go down to investigate and my quest leads me from southwest Virginia where Odell Waller lived to Richmond, to the death house, only to discover that if I am not a lawyer, I can't interview him in the death house. So, all of this is tying up. Eventually, I was able, eventually on the second trip down, I got permission to interview him. Then, I think that it is on a second trip that I go down to try to raise some funds among the local ministers.
And his mother is also engaged in this?
Yes, his mother is engaged in this. I think that it is in Richmond that I
want to come before, or ask permission to come before the local
ministers alliance, the Negro ministers alliance, only to discover that
Dr. Leon Ransom, who is Professor of Constitutional Law and Criminal Law
at Howard University, also …I think that it is Ransom and maybe Thurgood
Marshall, I'm not sure …I think it may be the two of them …are coming
cause
celebre. So much has happened, there is just one thing after
another, that they give me five minutes. They almost say, "What do you
want? We don't really have time for you, but we will give you five
minutes to say what you have to say." I get up to speak and maybe for
the first time in my life, I get out two words and then I just burst
into tears and stand there and just utterly collapse in tears trying to
tell the story of this young sharecropper. I won't tell you how
embarassing it was to me, but it was like a miracle. It brought forth,
after these men had already shelled out for Thurgood and Leon Ransom and
whatnot, it brought forth twenty-three dollars and in those days, for an
unknown case and an unknown person and on the heels of this cause celebre, this was almost unheard of. So, this began both
my identification with the case and a two year struggle. But meanwhile,
back at the hotel, Thurgood, I guess …I think that Thurgood was on that
trip …anyway, Dr. Ransom was there and Dr. Ransom was acting dean of the
law school and I just kind of, you know, rapping back and forth, said,
"Well look, if I'm going to be messing around with these cases, I might
as well study law." He said, "Come on, we'd love to have you." I said,
"Give me a fellowship and I will." He says, "O.K., I'll give you a
fellowship." It was in that kind of banter back and forth that sure
enough, he went back and sent me the papers. I filled them out, almost
forgetting about them and went on my way, working on the Odell Waller
case, spent the summer writing and planning to write a book, to write
what later became Proud Shoes, and toward the end of
the summer, out of the clear blue, I got a letter from Ransom stating
that, "You have been admitted to law school and awarded a
scholarship."
Would you mention one thing before we leave Waller and move to Howard Law School, and that is, the poll tax and the jury …
O.K. Our defense, our appellate, that is, our appeal to try to get
Waller's case reversed, was based upon the fact that he was convicted by
an all poll tax jury. The jury lists being based upon the voting lists
and the voting lists being based upon the payment of a poll tax, which
was cumulative for at least three years. Since I think that it was about
a dollar and a half a year, it would mean that a person who didn't pay
his poll tax for three years had to pay four dollars and fifty cents and
this was almost prohibitive for sharecroppers. So, you had a poll tax
jury which, for all practical purposes, was a planters jury. Our
contention was that such a jury was a denial of equal protection and of
course, that the poll tax …this was calling into question the
constitutionality of the poll tax. In due course, that argument became
the law of the land. I think that it was the Harper
case some years later [1966] and so, the Virginia poll tax was struck
down as unconstitutional. In Waller's case, unfortunately, he was
represented by an inexperienced but very well intentioned lawyer. And
while the instincts of the lawyer were correct, and that is, an attempt
to show that Waller had been convicted by a poll tax jury, he had not
put in the record evidence, the kind of foundational evidence that would
permit him to raise the constitutional question before the Supreme
Court. So, purely on the basis of procedural limitations, we could not
get the Supreme Court to take the case, because in scanning the record,
they could not find the basis upon which to raise the question.
Right. We know that a federal question must be raised before the Supreme Court.
Right. And I kept saying to myself as this happened, and I'm in there pitching, not as a lawyer, but as a special field secretary raising funds, working with the lawyers and that kind of thing, and I kept saying to myself, "If we lose this man's life, I must study law." And we lost his life.
Yes. Even appeals to the governor did not succeed and as I recall reading in the papers, lawyers who were firmly convinced that one could work through the judicial system, wrote letters to the governor and had appeals in newspapers that because of the injustice of the poll tax, his sentence should be commuted and Colgate Darden did not feel that he should do this.
I think perhaps that you would be amused at this little footnote to history. Waller was executed July 2, 1942. I graduated from Howard University Law School in June, 1944 at the top of my class and winner of a Rosenwald Fellowship for graduate study in law. I took it upon myself to send an engraved invitation to Howard University Commencement to Governor Darden, reminding him of the Odell Waller case and my role in it, and suggesting to him that a live lawyer was far more a danger to his system than a dead sharecropper.
Certainly a necessary memorial to an unnecessary death.
Right.
Well, let us move on to Howard Law School. You've mentioned Leon Ransom and the kinds of issues that pushed you towards law school. Were there other heroes and heroines or idols …
I just …
Or embittering experiences or circumstances under which you …
You see, I just missed Charles Houston. You see, my three greats were Charles Houston, William H. Hastie, and Leon Ransom. Houston, I think, retired the very summer before I entered, I think that was perhaps his last year.
Yes, he was in private practice.
Yes, but even though he wasn't teaching on the hill, I was aware of him and I think that he was aware of me and so for a year or so, I've forgotten when he died …
He died in 1950.
Yes. So, during that period at Howard, I was somehow under his influence. I do want to back up a little bit, however, and tell you of a little incident that made law school almost a must for me. When we were …when Mac, my friend and I, were preparing for the Petersburg trial, we …
This is your appeal?
This is our appeal and it was an appeal from the police court to the next
highest court, the Hustings Court not a real appellate court, but it was
almost like what they would call a trial de novo, you
would hold a hearing in a police court and then you would go to …
Another municipal court.
Yes. In preparing for that appeal, all the lawyers involved met at Howard
Law School with Bill Hastie and Thurgood Marshall and Ransom. The whole
corps of them met. Here are these two little insignificant people, but
the issue is so important that here is this battery of brilliant legal
minds at work. They went through every constitutional phase of the
thing, every act of it. One would act as the lawyer for the prosecution,
to tear
You know that Hastie instituted that particular kind of method of teaching law because blacks had so few opportunities to take part in the ways that the courts worked.
And being the participants in this case and therefore knowing all the facts of the case, just to sit there and watch these lawyers in their legal antics, I 'm sure that this had a tremendous impetus to shove me toward training in the law.
O.K., so at the law school, two things happened immediately. I became aware of sex prejudice.
That was something that I was going to ask you about.
I became aware of it in my freshman year at law school. It came upon me
as a terrible shock. I had not grown up in a family where limitations
were placed upon women. My whole family tradition had been
self-sufficient women. My grandfather, patriarch though he was, believed
in his daughters being self-sufficient and independent and so it just
simply was not a part of my family tradition to expect any limitations
upon what a woman could and could not do. I had never thought of myself
in terms of a woman. I had thought of myself in preparing to be a civil
rights lawyer for this cause. I had not been in school, I guess for two
or three days, and Professor Robert Ming, said …I can't tell whether he
was kidding or being sarcastic or what, but he said, "We don't know why
women come to law school anyway, but since you're here …" However you
take it, one has to respond, you can't just say that this is really
kidding. Then the second thing, was that there was a notice on the
bulletin board very shortly, maybe two or three weeks after school began
which said, "All male members of the first year class are
And the professor who was involved in making a suggestion of a female legal society was not one of the white professors at the law school?
There were no white professors.
At that point, there were no white professors, in the twenties and thirties?
No, there were none at that point. [in the 1940's] So, my whole experience at law school was an experience of learning really for the first time what, in a way, a crude kind of sexism can be, an unvarnished one. It is not the …the sexism in a minority group, and I would think that this is true in machismo, the hispanic tradition, it is not a smooth kind thing, it isn't so disguised. It is a kind of straight out machismo.
In fact, so much a part of custom that one is not supposed to question it, which is why it can be crude.
Yes. And so, this is the beginning of my conscious feminism, which began at Howard University back in the 1940s.
Now, rarely does a person become committed to direct action and then move strictly into the world of scholarship. I mean, books and study and all that kind of thing. Aside from sexism at Howard Law School, did you attempt, given the difficulties of legal study, I mean with doing legal study and then you have the sexism problem, did you attempt to combine the study with protest or anything such as that? Did particular professors involve you in outside activities?
Actually not, from the point of view of professors. I did become involved in direct action in 1943 and 1944, my second and third year. This came about, however, not so much from what we were learning in law school, as the … what was happening to people in wartime, what was happening to thoughtful young Negroes in wartime in the United States with our men …
Going into Jim Crow armies.
Yes, but still going to fight for the Four Freedoms, the sharpness of the notion of Nazism and its racial …the revulsion that this was causing and immediate association of the Nazi Aryanism with racism in this country, the fact that women …that law schools were among the least protected in terms of selective service and therefore, my classmates were almost wiped out.
They were disappearing, yes.
And a sense of my being in a protected position and "what am I doing to
make this country better when they come back?" And this being the point
of view, to some extent, of many Howard University women. What can we do
to make this country democratic, while our men are
As a graduate, did you work with undergraduates also?
I worked with undergraduates, I imagine that most of the students were …well, there were some graduate students, but I would guess that the bulk of these were undergraduates. The bulk of them were women and undergraduates and we began to participate in sit-downs in restaurants in the spring of 1943 and the spring of 1944, with some modest success. I say "modest success," because we were not able to carry on a continuous campaign due to the fact that Howard University receives a considerable amount of money from Congress and Senator Bilbo—the famous, or infamous depending on how you look at him Senator from Mississippi—, he is the man who used to campaign on sending all Negroes back to Africa. Well, Bilbo was sitting on the D.C. Committee and former president, Mordecai Johnson, ordered us to cease and desist because Howard University appropriations were on the spot.
It is the case, however, that whenever it was not a time for consideration of appropriations, he generally encouraged relative freedom of speech.
Right. And interestingly enough, we did not really defy him, because I think that we realistically knew that the fate of the institution was at stake and we were not willing to take responsibility for that kind of thing, but we did then turn our reform energies upon the administration of the school and call for a whole review and revamping of administrative procedure …
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
In a sense, what we were asking for was a reorganization of the way in which student-faculty-administration relationships developed, so that students would have more say in the planning of the university. I graduated that year, 1944, and I think that this impetus carried forward a little bit to the next year, but I don't think it became a real part of the school administration policy. It may well be that the failure of the school to have a kind of foresight in the 1940s perpetuated a condition that caused such a great deal of student unrest in the sixties.
Of course, one problem being that Mordecai Johnson was actually pushed into that position and was the first black president of Howard University and was a minister, not an administrator and had to work through intuition and through the advice of as many people as he could find to counsel him. This is certainly one of the greatest of hardships and with alumni at all points calling for his dismissal and for the reinstatement of a white president. All of these things, I think, probably added to the fact that students were not going to continue the same kind of activities, although we do know that they continued with public accomodations in later years, downtown D.C. and Thompson restaurants were cases that continued throughout the period. Now, following your graduation from Howard, you sought a graduate degree in law and eventually went to California, U.C. Berkeley and earned a L.L.M. Now, why did you not go to Carolina or some other place and take the bar exam?
Well, first of all, I went to California because, although my Rosenwald Fellowship called for graduate study of law at Harvard University Law School, Harvard rejected me because of my sex.
Yes, I was going to ask you why you thought that you could go
Naively, I did not know that Harvard did not admit women and did not believe my professors and fellow students when they kidded me and said how Harvard would not let me in because I was a woman. You see, up until this time, I had so concentrated on race, civil rights, I was almost utterly unaware of the disability of sex.
Yes, you certainly had the example of Ransom, of Hastie, of Houston, and they had all been black and they all had succeeded and so it would seem logical that you should be able to go there. What was the experience at California at the law school like? Was there the same kind of closeness in the student body in terms of work or were you relatively to yourself?
I was relatively to myself because I was literally the only graduate
student. Remember that this is wartime, 1944, 1945. I went to California
because it was the only school in the country that had retained its
major faculty. Many of the law schools, both students and faculty were
decimated. The faculty going off on wartime assignments and the students
going into the army. It so happened that many of the old masters, Paul
Radin, D.O. McGovney, Ballantine, of Ballantine's Corporations, men who had made their mark, very often in
eastern universities, very often at Harvard University, were getting
close to retirement and they had gravitated toward California. So,
California had a fairly good concentration of faculty and they were
willing to take me on as a graduate student. Yale wouldn't take me on
because their whole graduate program had closed down during the war and
so, California was the only place that I could go.
Now, I do want to go back to why you didn't take the North
North Carolina had a segregation statute and if I am to be admitted to the Bar, I must swear or affirm that I will uphold the laws of the state in which I am admitted and I simply could not affirm that I would uphold the segregation laws.
Now, did you take the New York Bar exams immediately after Howard, or after California?
After California. Right after I got my graduate degree, almost simultaneously with getting my graduate degree, I took and passed the California Bar and for a very brief time, had a temporary appointment as Deputy Attorney General of the State of California and got bumped when wartime veterans came back and exercised their preferential status. So then I returned east and eventually took the New York Bar.
Now, two things. Did the Rosenwald Fellowship entirely take care of your needs?
No, I got an extension, with an extended stipend, but I supplemented that by waiting tables at International House, where I was a resident and by acting as a house counsel and in one case, I was able to get my meals and in the second case, I was able to get my rent and that was what took me through.
Now, I understand that you worked on The Los Angeles
Sentinel for awhile. When did this occur?
Between graduation from Howard in June and the opening of California in
October. The summer of 1944, I worked on The
Sentinel.
And did you find any sexism in relationship to this?
No. Loren Miller, the late Judge Loren Miller, who wrote The Petitioners, he and I hit it off beautifully.
First of all, we had this common tradition of civil rights and he was
really a beautiful human being and so that was a very, very happy
relationship and they just turned me loose as a roving reporter and let
me go my way, so I had no sense of sex discrimination.
Now, what would you consider your most memorable case for the short time that you served as Deputy Attorney General of California? That was under Governor Warren, wasn't it?
That was under Governor Warren. I no more than literally took office when I was handed the investigation of a case known as the Fontana Case. Fontana, California, not too far from San Bernadino, not too far from Los Angeles. This was a case in which a migrating family from Mississippi, of mixed racial heritage, so that its identification was really unclear …they could have been Indian, they could have been whatever, apparently bought property in Fontana and there must have been some sort of gentlemen's agreement whereas whites resided on, we'll say, north of this invisible line and blacks or Negroes or colored or Hispanic or whatever …
Any nonwhites.
Any nonwhites would live south of this line. And apparently, this family, without any knowledge of this, bought this lot and began to construct their house and they were building it themselves.
Therefore, it did not involve a restrictive covenant.
No, it didn't involve a restrictive convenant, but it involved some sort
of gentlemen's agreement, I think of zoning. They were warned by the
local police and sheriff and in California, the whole
Or a neighborhood organization.
Right. I think it was like a family, a father and mother and four or five children. They went into Los Angeles and appealed to the FBI for protection and the FBI said that it had no jurisdiction. The upshot of the situation was that when they came back one night to light their lantern …and understand, this was apparently in late fall or early winter, they were building the house and I think that it was in the tar paper stage, building it little by little and they had an oil drum to keep them warm and a lantern for light …well, this lantern exploded and there was a flash fire and every single one of them was burned to death. The circumstances pointed toward murder, really. And this investigation of this case fell into the Attorney General's office and was assigned to me. That was my first case.
And the upshot of that …or were you around for the upshot of it?
All I could do, with the best of my investigation, was to … we could not
seem to get evidence of what really happened, but I recall writing up
the case and probably leaving open the question of who was responsible
but pointing the finger at the failure of the law enforcement officials
who should have been protecting the people, but rather were warning them
to get out. I doubt that any resolution was made of the case. In some
ways, it was a cause celebre, because it indicated the
intensity
Now, would you care to compare or contrast, either your personal experience or what might have been the general nonwhite experience or Afro-American experience, either in North Carolina and in New York, D.C. and Berkeley, California, or any of those places, as combined with either North Carolina and D.C. or North Carolina and California or something like that. Are there any in particular that seem to be strikingly similar or strikingly different or what?
If you are talking about the period of pre-war and World War II, in North
Carolina the racial segregation was rigidly enforced by law, so that any
deviation placed you immediately in jeapordy of being arrested and the
full force of the law being directed against you. In Washington, D.C.,
there were no segregation laws and we were able to carry out our sit-ins
and picketing without being arrested because we were able to show the
law enforcement officials that first of all, there was no segregation
law and secondly, there was no law against picketing. In California,
there was not only no segregation law, but there were in fact, civil
rights laws. Moreover, in California, there was not just a black-white
presence, but there was a spectrum of whites, which might be divided
into native Californians and in-migrants from the South, Oklahoma,
Arkansas and people who were really refugees from the Dustbowl
catastrophes of the mid-thirties. There were Mexicanos, well, Hispanics,
and there were Orientals and I was in California right at the time of
the beginnings of …well, first of all, there had been the internment of
the Japanese-Americans. People of Japanese descent, Issei, Nisei, and I
discovered that in the hierarchy at the time that I was there, whites,
of
Your thesis for your L.L.M. had nothing to do with this or was it strictly on a legal matter that was not related to minorities or was it related to civil rights?
I began my graduate work as a continuation of something that I had
started at Howard University in my senior year, my senior civil rights
paper. This paper raised the question as to whether or not Plessy vs. Ferguson and the Civil Rights
Cases of 1883 should not be overruled. My intense desire was to find a
legal basis for overruling the segregation decisions. I worked on that
intensively for almost a whole year, going
Now, did he direct you to move toward the Fourteenth or did he simply let you go on your way?
Well, we had to …we tried both. That is, I was working with both, but
basically trying to use the Thirteenth Amendment, because I was first
after the Civil Rights Cases and once I got the Civil Rights Cases
straightened out, then I would move toward Plessy vs.
Ferguson. So, I literally had to switch my
graduate work and go over into the labor field and there I did a study
of the right to equal opportunity in employment. It was the first
definitive published law review article on the right to equal
opportunity in employment. That was the beginnings, as you know, of the
FEPC, Fair Employment Practices. I might say, however, that the thesis
Mayer vs. Jones?
Jones vs. Mayer, I believe. [Jones v.
Alfred H. Mayer Co. (1969)] Yes. It was decided in favor of the fact
that the Thirteenth Amendment was held … I would like to say here, if
you will notice that the questions you've been asking me about my
activities and the things that I was involved in, that in not a single
one of these little campaigns was I victorious. In other words, in each
case, I personally failed, but I have lived to see the thesis upon which
I was operating vindicated and what I very often say is that I've lived
to see my lost causes found.
So individually, you might have failed, but not really personally.
Right.
Now, I'm interested, from 1948 until 1960, you went into private practice with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison in New York City.
Well, from 1948 until 1956, I was in private practice by myself.
Oh, I see. Then from '56 until 1960, you were with them.
And during that period, 1948 until 1952, States' Laws On
Race and Color was a research job that I did for the Women's
Division of the Methodist Church. They published it and according to
Thurgood Marshall, that became the Bible for the civil rights lawyers
when they were fighting these segregation cases.
Now, I understand that this law firm included such people as Arthur Goldberg and Adlai Stevenson and I just wonder what it was like working in that firm, for you. Whether or not, had you not had the opportunity to go to Ghana, you would have stuck with it longer and if there were any cases that seemed to you to be very significant as you worked in the firm, because you became an associate of the firm.
Well, the first Negro associate in that firm was Bill Coleman, who you now recognize as Secretary of Transportation. [1975] The second Negro to be an associate in that firm was myself. I would not take anything for the experience. It gave me an opportunity to practice "gentlemen's law" with all the facilities of a million dollar law firm, with all the prestige that carried in terms of the courtesy that one might have in the courts, with all of the necessary equipment for efficiency. To give you some example of the way in which this firm worked, it would contribute from time to time, the labor of its lawyers to, we will say, "legal aid."
I understand that it had at least a hundred lawyers. Is that right?
Oh, yes. And it has even more today. It would, as I say, contribute, for
example, it would contribute my services to assist the legal aid in an
appeal. We kept strict accounting of our time for billing our clients
and when we didn't have a client to bill, we would use what was known as
"general office." In other words, every moment of our time was charged
against something, either a client or general expenses. I was selected
to do an appeal on a rape case for the Legal Aid. When I finished and
argued my case and figured out the time charges, it was close to five
thousand dollars. So, that gives you some idea of how …of what it costs
The
State Press, were intimidated and persuaded to withdraw their
advertisements. So, they were forced to the wall. Their newspaper really
went out of circulation because people withdrew their ads. During that
period, I helped, along with others, voluntary gift ads from supporters.
People would put in their ad whatever they wanted to, in terms of a
quotation, and you would have someone like Senior Partner Lloyd K.
Garrison, who by the way, was my sponsor for the New York Bar and is the
great-grandson of William Lloyd Garrison. So, he would put in a
quotation, say, from his great-grandfather. We raised several hundred
dollars. It was nothing but a symbolic gesture, there was nothing that
we could do really to save the paper. But in the process, I kept saying
to myself, "What am I doing sitting up here in a Madison Avenue law
firm, with a very good salary and a month's vacation and all the
benefits? I'm really in the wrong place." Ultimately, it simply was not
for me.
Now, did you volunteer your services in Ghana or were you asked to come to Ghana or how did that occur?
I answered an ad. They advertised in British papers for senior lecturers. They were trying to start their law school.
In Accra?
Accra. They advertised in a British newspaper and a friend of mine sent
me the ad and I answered it and their Attorney General came
The Constitution and Government of Ghana.
Yes. So, that's how that came about.
Now, what was the experience like being Senior Lecturer and also, if you would like to remark upon it, what was the experience like working with a co-author who was a non-black South African?
Well, you have two questions. One, I discovered that I was a civil libertarian and a person committed to human rights whether I was in North Carolina or whether I was in Accra, Ghana. And it soon became clear to me that Kwame Nkrumah had dictatorial instincts and was suppressing freedom of speech, was deliberately suppressing the freedom of the trade unions, of women's organizations, of youth organizations, was permitting and in a sense encouraging and almost demanding a personality cult.
Do you think that he did this …this is just your opinion, of course, but did this seem to be something that was direct or indirect as a result of having an increasing bureaucracy or because he had such convictions about the directions in which the nation had to go if it were to be indeed independent economically and politically?
No, I think that history will bear me out, that Nkrumah had
Now, you were there …
I was there almost two years. But it seemed to me that Nkrumah was kind of bored with the notion of having to try to develop a little country, that his horizon called for a United States of Africa.
And indeed, his political views called for Pan-Africanism.
Right. And therefore, his concerns seemed to be greater in terms of trying to bring about political intrigues or political unities than a really digging down into the real problems of his own country.
That's why I asked if it seemed that sometimes the problems arose indirectly because he was so concerned about organizing a continent?
Right. I really think, as I say, that he was bored with the notion of sticking to the reall problems of his little country. Unfortunately for him, he started out, you see, as the first independent leader, but within a very few years, all around him these little independent countries began springing up, each with its strong man, each with its sort of personality cult and where he might have been, say, the big brother of one or two countries, when suddenly all of these little countries began to grow up and have their own little unique respective nationalisms, or kind of development toward national pride, he was no longer the big brother. He could not exercise the big brother role. He then had as his protege, Lumumba, who was a young man and the rumor was that he, Nkrumah, almost bled the country of money to help Lumumba bring about a domination of the then Congo. I've forgotten …Zaire is it now?
Yes.
And of course, this failed because before Nkrumah could move in, was strong enough to move in …
You mean before Lumumba could move in.
No, if you remember, before the explosion, when you had practically a civil war, before Nkrumah could move in with troops, the United Nations made the move.
Oh, I see. Yes.
No, Nkrumah was never really able. His attempts to gain hegemony or leadership over various countries failed. In my opinion, he was a real tragedy.
It is very interesting that the great ability, the great foresight, all the ideals and with the political training that he had, one can only speculate that if he had had different sorts of advisors or something …
That, and perhaps it was unfortunate that he spent so many years in the United States and got this sense of what it must be to have a big country, a subcontinent united and the power of a subcontinent. I've often felt that his sojourn in the United States made a tremendous impact and contributed to this obsession of a United States of Africa.
One could probably talk forever about the numbers of Africans who, as a result of being either in the United States or a large country in Europe, have had problems with going back home and that kind of thing. Did you want to comment about working with Leslie Rubin, a South African?
Working with whom?
With Leslie Rubin, a non-black South African.
Leslie and I had a very good relationship. Leslie had been
That was his opinion, also?
Yes.
Now, you were Senior Lecturer in Constitutional and Administrative Law. What was his area?
He may have taught a similar thing at
Now, there are two other sort of disparate topics that I wanted you to
comment on in terms of the way you used your legal expertise. Two
commissions, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the
Committee on Civil and Political Rights, the President's Commission on
the Status of Women. First of all that, and then being the Stulberg
Professor in Law
Well, let's see. Let me take them chronologically. The Civil and
Political Rights Committee of the President's Commission on the Status
of Women came first. There, I did, at the request of the Commission, I
did a study, a re-examination of the Fourteenth Amendment with respect
to state discriminatory laws and practices with regard to sex. I urged …
remember that this is 1962 … urged that the Fourteenth Amendment be
used, using the civil rights precedents, to take advantage of the civil
rights precedents, to make the Fourteenth Amendment clearly applicable
to discrimination, state enforced governmental discrimination because of
sex. My strategy there was that up until that time, there had been
almost no possibility of the ratification of an Equal Rights Amendment
and that what we ought to do in the meantime, since there didn't seem to
be an opportunity for a breakthrough … I was not per
se opposed to an Equal Rights Amendment. I just felt that it was
unrealistic to suppose that it would happen anytime soon and that we
should take advantage of the Fourteenth Amendment. In practical history,
this is exactly what has happened. We are still four states short of an
Equal Rights Amendment, but a significant number of cases have
increasingly made applicable the Fourteenth Amendment to sex
discrimination as well as race discrimination. I don't want to push that
too far because it has not gone as far as it should. It has not gone as
far as … the Supreme Court has not yet ruled that sex discrimination per se is constitutionally suspect, as it has done in
the case of race.
Now, did you use your thesis at California as the basis for any of your work with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission?
My thesis at California was …there was a twenty-five year span between them and the Equal Employment Opportunity was just in its rudimentary stage. What I did do at the EEOC, which was purely gratuitous in a sense, I was troubled by the fact that while the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in its public stance and in its relationship to employers and labor unions and I guess employment agencies, took a fairly good position on equal opportunity without regard to sex …
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[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
…that it was enforcing the law of equal opportunity, but that when you
looked at its own internal structure, you saw that it was as guilty if
not more guilty than employers in its employment policy in relation to
race and sex. So, I made the same kind of chart for the structure of
EEOC that EEOC had made with respect to employers and showed that blacks
and women were concentrated in the lower spots, that women were not
being given an opportunity for moving into policy-making positions in
accordance with their ability. This little document, I understand,
bumped around the office. I didn't stay long enough to see it
implemented but it was at least my contribution.
Now, as the Stulberg Professor of Law and Politics at Brandeis, do you feel that it was simply your presence as a black female holding that position that was the most significant, or that the students that you influenced and their subsequent careers was most significant? What did you feel?
I think that all of these factors played a role.
Now, it is '68 through '73, is that correct?
Right. Five years. I think …number one, I developed a legal studies program at the undergraduate level. This was in line with what has been a trend within the last five or six years. It was just beginning at the time that I went to Brandeis, an effort to bring back into the liberal arts program some exposure to legal education. It has been criminal that people should go through four years of liberal arts education and come out utterly ignorant of a system which touches their lives at every important point from birth to death. So that this was a kind of pioneer effort that was almost wholly independent of being black or a female or anything else. I mean, it had its own justification. Secondly, I discovered inadvertantly that I was a role model and I began my legal education classes with very few female students, mostly male students who saw themselves as pre-law students. Gradually, my classes began to fill up with women and women beginning to discover that they had aptitudes for law. I had such things as students who had started out in anthropology, psychology majors, English majors, suddenly coming to me at the end of their senior year and saying, "We took the law school apptitude test and we did pretty well and would you give me a recommendation to go to law school." So, this was entirely unexpected.
Did you have any black female students that you had contact with?
Only a few. This was a period when many black students were very much involved with African and Afro-American studies. I thought unfortunately so. I felt that they ought always to take a major in the traditional curriculum and then supplement that with courses in African and Afro-American studies and then if they wished to do African and Afro-american studies, to do it at the graduate level. But to always have this traditional thing that they could fall back on or that would enrich, would give them skills that they could use.
Of course, I guess that it's obvious to us now, hindsight always gives us more wisdom, but the fascination of King, Stokely Carmichael, Black Power and the whole thing …
I do want to say, however, that I had several black students, both male and female, who were crackerjacks and who went on to law school and who have, I think, done very well.
Now finally, in terms of career, it is very interesting to me that you have returned to writing, but more significantly that in 1973, you resigned the professorship to become a candidate for the priesthood, or at least to become a seminarian, first at General Theological Seminary and then at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia and what I would like to know, is there any connection between your decision to become a seminarian and ultimately seek ordination to the priesthood and your concern about sex discrimination in the United States and if so, what? If not, is this at all connected with your general pioneering efforts in the struggle for societal change?
This question about the relationship to sex discrimination is one which I
have asked myself. I think I can honestly say, "No. It is not directly
connected, or it was not directly motivated by my interest in sex
discrimination." When I applied to become a candidate for Holy Orders,
the reading that I had at that time, in early 1973, was a very positive
and encouraging one in respect to women in the priesthood. Therefore, I
did not expect, I completely miscalculated the controversy that was to
arise as a result of the non-decision of the General Convention of the
Episcopal Church in the fall of 1973. I think that I can truthfully say
that my decision to become a candidate for Holy Orders is much more
closely related to my feeling of standing in the tradition of Martin
Luther King, Jr. and my strong conviction that basically, all of these
problems of human rights in which I had been involved for most of my
adult life, sex, race, all of the problems of human rights, that
basically these were moral and spiritual problems. And I think that I
was driven more into this position when I saw that the particular
profession to which I had devoted the larger sector of my life, law, was
…that we had reached a point where law could not give us the answers.
You know, here we are, the busing controversy in Boston. I began to see
women, feminists, behaving in the same hostile extreme way that I had
seen black militants. Instead of the possibilities of reconciliation,
there seemed to be even greater and greater alienation and to me it was
important to keep the tradition of Martin Luther King alive and this all
seemed to point toward my witnessing where my conviction was. And if my
conviction is a spiritual conviction, then I should witness in that way
and make it clear where I am standing. Moreover, it seemed to me as I
looked back over my life that I was being
Now, when you speak of the tradition of Martin Luther King, you are emphasizing primarily what? The notion of nonviolence and Christian love, brotherhood or what?
It seemed to me that Martin Luther King stood for two things. He stood
for liberation, which is the contemporary term, but he also stood for
the possibility of reconciliation between people, among peoples. He was
not satisfied to merely enter into the struggle. He would call it, and
in Christian terms we would call it, "salvation." After he died, the
notion of reconciliation was almost discarded in the black militant
stance. My feeling is that if this country is to survive, we must live
together in harmony and we must live together in a spirit of harmony,
you can call it brotherhood or whatnot. We cannot survive as a divided
country. Therefore, there is a need for people to be involved with and
concerned about reconciliation even as we are working on liberation.
One's concern for reconciliation …
Now, for the final section of the interview, I would like to return to
your writings and explore something that we have already Dark Testament again come to mind and I'm quoting
you: "Of us who darkly stand, beared to the spittle of every curse, nor
left the dignity of beasts, let none say, ‘those were not men, but
cowards all.’ Better our seed rot on the ground and our hearts burn to
ash than the years be empty of our imprint."
If you link that with the final passage, which is sort of my credo, "We
have no other dream, no land but this, with slow deliberate hands, these
years have set her image on our brow, we are her seed, have born a seed
native and pure as unblemished cotton. Then let the dream linger on …"
and that's the dream of freedom …" Let it be the test of nations. Let it
be the quest of all our days, the fevered pounding of our blood, the
measure of our souls. That none shall rest in any land and none return
to dreamless sleep, no heart be quited, no tongue be stilled until the
final man may stand in any place and thrust his shoulders to the sky,
friend and brother to every other man." Now, I had to read the whole
thing so that one would see that this is part of a piece. I am saying
that we must accept the challenge of our existence. Our existence being
that of a rejected, unwanted, persecuted minority and that in a sense,
we cannot accept this. We must make our contribution to history.
Remember, I am writing this in 1943, but that the way in which we do
this, this constant insistence …no word is mentioned of violence …"No
heart be quited, no tongue be still." If I may be slightly profane
against what I consider fairly profound expression, I would say, "Don't
shoot them, worry them to death." It is this notion of never letting
this principle, never letting this dream die, always expressing it in
our lives, in our being.
Yes. I was going to ask you a question about that later in the interview,
now if I may go back just a little bit to the issue of racial struggle,
I'm interested …was Dark Testament and the political
activities that ensued and had to do with racial justice, something born
of a personal need, a feeling about things that had been done to blacks
close to you because of racism, something having to do with vindication
of the race, or anything such as that or a combination of all of these
things, that moved you to participate in the issue of the poll tax,
restrictive covenants, segregation of accomodations and things such as
that?
I think the same thing that made me write poetry, Dark
Testament, the same kind of …I don't know whether to call it
fire, the same kind of unrest, the same kind of response to situations,
made me participate in activities. I'm inclined to think that when I
could effectively act, I did not write. When I could not act, when I was
blocked from acting, it came out in words. It had to come out in some
way and being both a person who is moved to express in words as well as
in the body, that very often it took both forms, but that in each case,
I was striving for the highest form of action. I didn't say that I
achieved it, but that
Yes. In going through and reading, I think of someone else who wrote about the connection, in writing a preface to one of your books, the connection between a lawyer's use of language and a poet's use of language, it's the same kind of expression.
And our poets are said to be our prophets. When you begin to talk about
prophets, then you begin to move into the field of religion. The
prophetic role of the minister to proclaim the Word and, unlike, some
black poets, I chose to take what I believe to be my mother tongue,
namely the English language, and try to utilize it in what I considered
its most distilled sense. In other words, to use the language of the
oppressor in its most effective side. Not necessarily to use the
colloquium of the group with which I am identified with racially,
although you will find in Dark Testament little
phrases indicating that what I tried to do was to experiment with the
various rhythms of Negro speech and occasionally a little of the local
and colloquial speech. But basically, to utilize the tool of language,
to take the weapon of white Americans, to take the language of white
America and use it as a tool, an instrument, a weapon.
Now I find that not only in your poetry, but also in your law journal
articles and in articles that have been reprinted in other anthologies,
not only with regard to race but with regard to sex discrimination and a
combination of sex and race discrimination, that you tend to use
language as a weapon. With regard to sex discrimination, you've
To say that one is a militant feminist is a kind of relative term. In 1962, I might have been considered a militant feminist. In 1976, I might be considered a very moderate or even conservative feminist, if you follow me, because events may move people to take far more radical positions than I will take. I am radical to the extent that I want to see the individual human being as free as is possible to fulfull that individual human being's potential, creative potential. I am not …let's say that radical feminists are usually today, in our society, identified as white. I personally have two problems, that is, two problems that are built in. I must always be concerned, not theoretically, but I must be involved with and necessarily concerned with racial liberation. But I must also personally be concerned with sexual liberation, because as I often say, the two meet in me, the two meet in any individual who is both woman and a member of an oppressed group or a minority group.
Now that is exactly related to a question that I wanted to ask you, about
an article that you wrote in 1970 called, "The Liberation of Black
Women." In this piece, you discuss the double victimization of black
women by "the twin immoralities of Jane Crow and Jim Crow." Now first of
all, as background, I would like to say that in 1965 you co-authored an
article entitled, "Jane Crow and the Law: Discrimination and Title VII."
Well, one common parallel factor about race and sex discrimination are that they are biological. They are biologically permanent characteristics of the person. Age is not necessarily biologically permanent. You grow from a child to adult, an alien may become a citizen, a person who is in one profession may move over to another, but where you have a permanent characteristic, i.e., color, race or sex, it is on the basis of one's birth that one becomes a member of that caste, so to speak. It is completely imposed upon one and there is no way that one can escape except as the society is changed.
Now, do you consider that to be caste? In '65, the two of you considered this sort of comparable to class, at least you said.
Well, we may have talked about class in '65, but it has become
increasingly clear that as people have gone more deeply into the whole
problem of sex …we were kind of out there on the frontier almost, of our
particular era …but more and more women feminist scholars are beginning
to see sex as a caste, because you are born into it. Now, I don't say
that race and sex are identical. I do say that they have certain
comparable characteristics. I would describe it as, let us say, a kind
of a graph. At one end of the spectrum there are issues and problems
that are exclusively racial. Uniquely racial. At the opposite end of the
spectrum, there are problems and issues which are uniquely sexual, but
in
Now, in direct connection with that, I would like to quote four arguments
that you made in 1970 in the article on the liberation of black women
and I'd like you to remark upon these arguments in light of what we know
now about the surveillance of private citizens, the infiltration of
black groups, Watergate, the rising overt racism that has been perceived
in this country, high unemployment, the recession or depression,
depending on what race you are. I'd like to know if you still argue
these same points or what would be different about your arguments. They
are the following: "Black women have an equal stake in women's
liberation and black liberation. They are the key figures at the
juncture of these two movements. White women feminists are their natural
allies in both causes. Black women have a special stake in the revolt
against the treatment of women primarily as sex objects, for their own
history has left them with scars of brutal and degrading sexual
exploitation." And finally,
I am not sure that I would alter that statement in any significant regard
except to say that I have been enlightened by the theologian, a Roman
Catholic theologian, Rosemary Reuther, who is a Professor of Theology at
Howard University. She is, from her side of the fence, as interested I
think, in the relationship between sex and race as I am from my side of
the fence. And she makes the point, she discusses the whole business of
the liberation of women and she …let me read what she says, because I
don't like to … "In fact, racism and sexism have been closely
interrelated historically, especially in the American South, but they
have not been exactly parallel. Rather we should recognize them as
interstructural elements of oppression within the overarching system of
male domination, white male domination. But this interstructuring of
oppression by sex, race and also class, creates intermediate tensions
and alienations between white women and black women, between black men
and white women and even between black men
But do you still believe that the natural allies are of necessity white women? Or women, let's say as opposed to the natural allies being simply nonwhite peoples?
Natural allies are people who have comparable
But is there not a problem and it hinges on a word that you used …you said "women that understand." In the United States, the …
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[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
…saying that the media is so controlled.
Yes, and publication is so controlled in this country that although women may temporarily be able to commit themselves to a movement for women's liberation, or whatever, that white women live in a country where one can move to the point of rationalizing just being white and there are enough women who could do that, such that those who understood would not be in sufficient numbers to provide the necessary allies for any sort of real fundamental change in society.
If we accept this, there is no hope. For never forget that if you are talking about the black minority, you are talking about one as against nine and the black minority will never be able to achieve liberation.
As a minority.
As a minority.
Is there to your mind less feasibility in what is generally considered the socialist option, and that is the consciousness-raising of working class people, so that they understand how they are depersonalized and dehumanized and thus they would become the allies? Do you see that there is more possibility of women understanding or working class people who soon become, to use a Marxian term, the proletariat and the unemployed?
My remark should not suggest that I meant that women exclusively were allies. I am writing in the context of a feminist approach and I am talking about women. When you raise the question of working class people, certainly working class people should be natural allies of blacks, particularly in terms of poor blacks and working class blacks. But let me point out that perhaps machismo is strongest in the working class sector. I have reached that point in my conviction where being a woman is perhaps a more complex and more difficult status than being a black. First of all, it is the oldest, the most continuous, the most recalcitrant, the most stubborn kind of prejudice and oppression, if you want to use that term. It is thoroughly supported by the most authoritative kind of thing that can be drawn to support it, namely, Holy Scriptures. In other words …
Well, one can use Holy Scriptures to support almost anything.
Right, but Holy Scripture …what I'm suggesting here is that the church,
the church which one would expect to be on the side of the oppressed, on
the side of human dignity, on the side of human equality, sexism calls
in God as its authority. Incidentally, this is the whole thing, the
basic theological argument in barring women from the
I guess that in the same sense, the socialist has the same dilemma. I
mean, after all, where do you find the greatest and most intense racism
except among working class Dark Testament,
written in 1943. I'm struck by the concept of a common plight of
Americans when you wrote the following lines: "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."
Now, I guess that there are two questions that I have that relate to
that. The first one is, will your ordination, your subsequent and
ultimate ordination into the priesthood restrict your activities with
regard to human rights or make them more difficult? Because you are
becoming part of an institution, or taking part in a religion, which you
yourself have described as constraining because of such problems as
sexual discrimination and the way
Shall we say that law has its limitations?
Yes, law has its limitations, law can protect us in certain instances, but it certainly cannot solve all the problems. Then turning to the church, is in a sense, to turn to a belief in either a sense of morality or the capacity for a sense of morality and to say something about the conscience of America. What I really wonder is if you simply insist on believing that America has a conscience, but it is simply repressed somewhere, or if you really think that the things that have been said are in fact its ideals, and that one can appeal to what is right, what is ethical and achieve within at least a generation or so some sort of significant change?
I think I had better start by saying that this is not turning to the
church, in a sense. My …from earliest childhood, I have always been a
part of the church. There have been times when I have left it, but I
have always more or less been in some way involved with the church. At
this stage of my life, I perhaps am thinking more of what
I was just going to ask you if you thought it
I have even said and preached that the women's ordination movement in the Episcopal Church may in fact be a prophetic movement like the prophets of the Old Testament, of the Eighth Century B.C. saying, in a sense, "You are standing under judgement and Israel will be destroyed." So, what I'm really trying to say is that it is perhaps deeper than thinking that America, the entity America, will have a conscience, will ever solve the racial problem. I frankly don't know.
So, it's not an issue any longer of being optimistic about America, it's a more personal issue, more personal in what you do with your own life and that you do what you think is the best thing to do in relationship to what you feel is right?
I suppose …you know, as you ask me these questions, you must remember
that there will be certain limitations on whatever activities I make. I
am not the vigorous, you know, swashbuckling activist of my thirties.
How one feels and how one acts and how one can use one's energies in
one's sixties may be quite different from what one does in the thirties.
I don't think that I will basically change in terms of my thrust for
human rights, human dignity,
I was just thinking in terms of the fact that obviously there are physical restraints that come of age, but the disciplinary restraint of the priesthood, of being in the priesthood, especially of the Episcopal Church, which is not the same kind of institution, say, as a Baptist Church. This means that you can be less individualistic in expressing the …
Yes, well of course, the whole Christian religion is a community, a
religion of community. All of us, you, I having been baptized according
to the Christian faith are members of the royal priesthood of all
believers. The church, the Christian church, Baptist, Methodist,
whatever it is, the Christian church is the priesthood of all believers.
Those of us who become ordained clergy merely have special ministries
within this general ministry of the Christian church. This is the
doctrine of the Christian church, not of the Episcopal Church, but of
the Christian church. Yes, there probably will be discipline. I hope
that I will continue to do what I have tried to do most of my life and
that is, when there was a principle which I felt I ought to act on, I
did
There is something else that I personally wanted to ask. Is your commitment to the ministry in any way an indication of some belief that rational analysis, persuasion and activism are not in and of themselves sufficient? That if indeed there is to be a world that holds all people as equals, as brothers, as people of worth, dignity, with rights, that there must be, that there essentially will have to be something more than rational analysis?
Something more than …
More than rational analysis. Well, it's clear that …
Yes, well, it's this whole question of man's relationship to the
ultimate, and if he doesn't have that, then all else stands on a shaky
foundation. What you've just asked me, rational analysis is man trying
to be God. The Christian faith says that there is only one God and that
man cannot be God, that man is a created being, he is a creature and is
totally dependent upon God. This is why ultimately …I mean, this is why
a person like myself would probably tend to try to move toward
ultimates. I am not at all sure that there is anything inconsistent with
this kind of Christian commitment and the goal of liberation. If you
have been aware of the various liberation
Once again, I would like to turn to what has become one of my favorite
poems, I think that there is a strong conviction even in 1943, that the
struggle was neither for black liberation, from white oppression and
racism or a battle of males against females, rather a struggle of those
who believe in freedom, justice, equality or equitable treatment as an
aspect of human rights. This is as significant as food, shelter and
clothing, against those who would maintain that these should be set
aside for a minority of the oldest inhabitants. That seems to be said to
me by the first verse of Dark Testament, in which you
say that "Freedom is a dream, haunting as amber wine, a world remembered
out of time, not Eden's Gate, but freedom lures us down a trail of
skulls where men forever crushed the dreamers, never the dream." This is
a strong, poignant part of the poem. I think that it is highly
significant of your own consciousness. In fact, it is intriguing to me.
One comment on America: I cannot speak for America. I can speak for one
American. This has to do with personal responsibility. Major J. Jones,
who is one of the black theologians. I think that he is dean of Gammon
Theological Institute down in Atlanta, Georgia, and he wrote a book on a
sense of ethics to go with black theology. He talked of assuming a
stance of freedom. He also talked of black Americans
I think that you have been most kind in answering so many questions and
spending so much time with me and somehow, it is not even sufficient to
simply say "Thank you," for myself or for the Southern Oral History
Program. I wonder if you might do one thing for me and then if you care
to, you might also for yourself for the conclusion of this interview,
select something that you would either like to read or make a final
statement. But I would like you to read for us again, the very final
verse of Dark Testament.
"Then let the dream linger on. Let it be the test of nations. Let it be the quest of all our days. The fevered pounding of our blood, the measure of our souls, that none shall rest in any land and none return to dreamless sleep, no harp be quieted, no tongue be stilled, until the final man may stand in any place and thrust his shoulders to the sky, friend and brother to every other man."
I would again like to express my appreciation to Dr. Murray for this interview and then there is one other point that she would like to make and we would both like to call it, perhaps, an addendum to this interview. It has to do with women and black women and all people, really. They are the words of Sojourner Truth and I shall let Dr. Murray continue from there.
Well, earlier in the interview, you were asking me about heroes and at
some point I had wanted to say to you that my great heroine, I suppose
that my great heroine of this century was Eleanor Roosevelt, but my
great heroine of the nineteenth century, and you will see that her
picture is hanging over my bed, is Sojourner Truth. Sojourner Truth was
a slave and eventually, an emancipated slave, but she had a tremendous
insight and appreciation into the women's movement and was one of the
foremost spokesmen for the women's movement as well as the abolition
movement in the nineteenth century. And one of her most famous
statements is known as "Aren't I a Woman?" Now, this comes from her
biography, Sojourner Truth, Narrative and Book of
Life, which is put out by Ebony Classics and it is written in
dialect. I'm not sure that I can present it properly, but I'd like to
try and I'd like to end our interview
We have come to the end of our visit with Dr. Pauli Murray, a very
singular person in this age, a poet who could write words from Dark Testament, as you have heard, who has written
about blackness and personhood in Proud Shoes and who
has, at this point in her life, begun a new journey moving toward what
she considers to be her personal responsibility. I think that all of us,
not only myself, not only those of the Program, but also those who will
hear the interview, read the transcript later, would like to wish her
well in this journey, and perhaps an appropriate end to this interview
would be a quotation from scripture and simply say to Dr. Murray, as was
said to Esther, "Who knows but what thou hast come for such a time as
this."
END OF INTERVIEW
cum laude, from General Theological
Seminary, New York City. On January 8, 1977 she was ordained an
Episcopal priest at the Washington Cathedral.
Gaines
decision was announced Dec. 12, 1938.