Murray discusses her efforts to gain admittance to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1938. After spending several years living in New York and working on her poetry, Murray returned to North Carolina, partly at the behest of her Aunt Pauline. Murray decided to apply to the law school at UNC, in part because the Thomas Hocutt case was currently in the headlines and she did not think she would be barred from admittance on the basis of race. Nevertheless, Murray was denied entrance for that very reason. She describes her reaction to this event and her efforts to get the NAACP to intervene on her behalf. In so doing, she discusses the role of the NAACP in civil rights legal cases during those years, explaining that they could not help her because various aspects of her case did not ensure its victory.