Confronting Barriers All Her Life

by Becky Stone

get in. The Jim Crow high school in Durham only educated its students through the 11th grade course of study.

Murray got a degree from Hunter in Creative Writing, but she used the power of words to creatively fight for change. Her poetry was a pointed critique of the racism in the United States. However, she used her skill to craft letters of protest. Murray believed that one typewriter and one person are a movement. Murray kept copies of all of her letters and the correspondence she received. She wisely sent a copy of the letter she wrote to President Roosevelt to the First Lady. She never got a response from the President, but Eleanor Roosevelt was kind enough to reply. Murray did not agree with everything the First Lady said, so Murray wrote back. This correspondence led to a lifelong friendship.

Murray attacked the University of North Carolina with a battering ram of letters when they rejected her application to graduate school because of her race in 1938. This battle, she did not win. However, she loosened the lock. In 1951, a black student was accepted at the law school. In 1955, black students were admitted for undergraduate study.

Murray was ahead of her time and never shy about being early. In 1940, she was arrested for refusing to move to the colored seats on a segregated bus when it crossed from Washington, D.C. into Virginia – a good 14 years before that kind of action drew national attention in the Civil Rights movement.

In that same vein, in 1943 while a student at Howard Law, Murray organized and led student sit-ins that led to the desegregation of two restaurants. Murray was not the first woman to study law at Howard Law

School, but she may well have been the first to raise a ruckus about the sexism she encountered there. She went to law school expressly to destroy Jim Crow, yet her colleagues and professors were blind to their own bias against women, which Murray called “Jane Crow”.

Murray won the Rosenwald Fellowship upon graduating from Howard Law. It went to the graduate with the highest grade average and was customarily used for graduate study at Harvard. Pauli Murray went right ahead and applied. She was rejected because women were not accepted at Harvard Law. Murray waged another battle through correspondence. And again, Murray lost. But in 1950, six years later, Harvard Law admitted women.

Murray had very public battles with both Jim and Jane Crow. Her legal thinking on segregation produced the seminal idea used in the arguments that won Brown v. Board of Education in the Supreme Court. She applied that same thinking to arguments for women’s rights. Murray served on President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women and was a founding member of the National Organization for Women. Later in life, Murray confronted the sexism in her church, the Episcopal denomination. She approached it as she did everything in life – with careful research, creative thinking, and carefully crafted arguments. Murray was the only African-American in the first class of women to be ordained in the Episcopal church. Her thinking changed with her theological studies. She no longer thought in terms of Negroes’ rights, or women’s rights, or labor rights. Her all-consuming desire was the guarantee of human rights, and she believed that it could be accomplished through spiritual growth.

Pauli Murray was often “the first” or “the only.” She stated repeatedly that she did not take on these battles to bring glory to herself. Her goal was to bring down barriers and make the way easier for those who followed. She would be proud to see how others have taken the fight forward.

Daytime Programs

Adult Program: Jim Crow: Its History, Our Heritage

Tuesday, July 11, 2023 at 2:30 p.m.

Ashland Public Library

Explore what historians consider the beginning of “Jim Crow”, race laws to restrict or deny citizenship rights to newly emancipated enslaved citizens. We will take a look at how these laws work and how Americans of all colors were affected. Program to include a few writing exercises that will allow us to think about what the experience of living under Jim Crow might have been like and how the legacy of slavery influences our lives today.

Teen and Adult Program: States Laws on Race & Color - Ohio

Saturday, July 15, 2023, at 2 p.m.

Ashland University (Ronk Lecture Hall, College of Education)

In this workshop participants will look at this index which was called “the bible” for civil rights attorneys prior to the 1954 Supreme Court Decision on Brown v Board of Education Topeka KS. It was compiled over 2 years by Pauli Murray for the Women’s Division of the United Methodist Church. They will also discover what laws, positive and negative, were on the books in Ohio and discuss their reaction to them.

About Becky Stone

Becky Stone was born and raised in Philadelphia. She currently lives near Asheville in Western North Carolina. She earned her undergraduate degree at Vassar College in Drama with a minor in French. Her M.A. is in Elementary Educational Counseling from Villanova University. She worked for seven years for the Philadelphia School System as a counselor and taught theater for 10 years at a classical Christian school in Fletcher, NC. Becky has been a Chautauqua scholar since 2003 when she first researched and presented Pauli Murray for the Greenville (S.C.) Chautauqua. Her other characters are Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, and Josephine Baker. Becky continues to act in theater. More often she is on stage as a storyteller at festivals, libraries, and schools.

OPENING ACT: ROGER & ROBIN

The group is led by a very talented and well-known area singer, songwriter, and musician, Roger Semer. He is joined by his singing partner, Robin Holthouse. The duo has been singing together since 2014. The band features a beautiful mix of two-part harmonies, accompanied by intricate acoustic guitar. They offer an eclectic assortment of classic rock, folk and country, featuring hits from the 50’s through today. facebook.com/ robin.n.roger.56

Murray Bibliography

Bell-Scott, Patricia. The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2016.

Murray, Pauli. Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1989. (Originally published: Song in a Weary Throat. New York: Harper & Row, 1987)

Murray, Pauli. Dark Testament and other poems. Norwalk, CT: Silvermine Publishers, 1970.

Murray, Pauli. Proud Shoes: The Story of An American Family. New York: Harper & Row, 1956.

Rosenberg, Rosalind. Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Saxby, Troy. Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Calledthe “Robin Hood of the Seas” by his allies and “Black Sam” by his enemies, Samuel Bellamy fought for liberty, equality, and fraternity sixty years before the American and French revolutions. As the fiercely antislavery captain and commodore of the Republic of Pirates, he recruited a diverse crew of all races, classes, and creeds.

Sam’s rebellion against injustice began in his teens, when aristocrats forced the Bellamys and their neighbors off centuries-old farmsteads when they seized their common lands. Relocating to Portsmouth, the family struggled, leading Sam to join the privateer crew of Captain Forster at the start of the War of Spanish Succession, a decade-long, mostly maritime dispute, with Catholic Spain and France fighting Protestant Britain and Denmark over who would be king of Spain.

The terms of the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht outlawed “privateers” (legal pirates commissioned under a “Letter of Marque”), leaving many with