Born in Baltimore and orphaned at an early age, Pauli Murray was raised on Cameron Street behind Maplewood Cemetery in Durham, North Carolina, by her maternal grandparents and an aunt, in whose first-grade class she learned to read. Two other aunts also took a keen interest in her upbringing. "Having no parents of my own," she wrote in her poignant memoir Proud Shoes, "I had in effect three mothers, each trying to impress upon me those traits of character expected of a Fitzgerald—stern devotion to duty, capacity for hard work, industry and thrift, and above all honor and courage in all things."

She graduated at the top of her class from Hillside High School, and with honors from Hunter College in New York, but was denied admission to law school at the University of North Carolina in 1938 because of her race, and to Harvard University because of her gender. These and other experiences spurred her to a life of activism, working to dismantle barriers of race and gender. From sit-ins to integrate Washington, D.C., lunch counters in the 1940s, through her efforts as a founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in the early 1970s, Murray took challenges head-on, while generally avoiding the limelight.

After receiving her law degree at Howard University, she later earned a master's degree in law from the University of California at Berkeley, and was a tutor in law at Yale, where she received her doctorate in 1965. Pauli Murray had a distinguished and varied career as a civil rights lawyer, a professor, a college vice president, and deputy attorney general of California. She was named Woman of the Year by Mademoiselle in 1947. Beneath her drive, her will, her achievements, lay "the elusiveness of her self-esteem," and the fact that she was "not entirely free from the prevalent idea that I must prove myself." The idea of writing a family memoir began to grow in her shortly after college, "but the struggle to educate myself and to earn a living during the Depression, and then my law studies and practice, kept me from writing for many years." Encouraged by her literary association with the poet Stephen Vincent Benet, she interrupted her law practice to spend four years researching and writing Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family, which was published in 1956.

Murray became so immersed in her research for the book that for months after retracing the legendary routes of the Underground Railroad, she found herself dating correspondence 1854 instead of 1954. "Proud Shoes is a book of such variety of incident and such depths and changes of tone as to astonish one who mistakes it simply for a family chronicle," a New York Herald Tribune reviewer wrote. "It is history, it is biography, and it is also a story that, at its best, is dramatic enough to satisfy the demands of fiction...."

In addition to Proud Shoes, Murray compiled a massive reference work on state race laws and published a prize-winning volume of poetry, Dark Testament and Other Poems (1970). Her autobiographical Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage (1987) was published two years after her death.

At age sixty-two, when many people are planning retirement, Pauli Murray entered seminary and embarked upon a new career. In 1977, she was the first black woman in the U.S. to become an Episcopalian priest. In performing her first Holy Eucharist at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, where her grandmother, a slave, had been baptized, Murray finally believed that "All the strands of my life had come together."

Excerpt from Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (Harper & Row, 1956)

I did not see Grandfather again until after the undertaker came and left and a black crepe was hung on our door. He was lying on a bier in front of the fireplace, dressed in his salt-and-pepper-gray broadcloth suit and covered from his chest down with a long dark drape. Out of childish curiosity I slipped into the parlor and looked underneath the drape. Grandfather, who had always been my symbol of strength and authority, now looked tiny and shrunken. He was fully dressed except for his shoes, and his white-stockinged feet turned upward and curled over a bit. I remember wondering why a person was buried without his shoes on. For years I could not go into the parlor without still seeing the image of Grandfather lying in his dark suit before the fireplace with his white-stockinged feet curled up and over. The family patriarch had gone down in death, and it was like the shock of a great landmark tree crashing in the forest. It was the signal for the gathering of all the relatives from near and far. Most of our blood kinsfolk came together for a three-day period of mourning. The ban on exiles was lifted temporarily, old associations were renewed, family stories embellished by collective memories were retold, and sometimes new business ventures were started. The wake had the solemnity of a high religious observance with an undertone of family reunion. There was subdued merriment among the more distant relatives while the chief mourners stayed in a special room surrounded by only the closest of friends. The atmosphere was hushed most of the time except for the occasional irreverent laughter of children. It seemed to me that I had more visitors and playmates during those three days than I had had in my entire life at Grandfather’s house. But when the day of the funeral came, the only sign of grief among Grandmother and my aunts was their pale, tight-lipped appearance in their long black dresses and flowing black veils. They marched—not walked—in the funeral procession, as Grandfather had always marched before them, and they all sang his favorite hymns as if they were the choir instead of the bereaved. It was a family custom to sing a loved one on his way to the other side and it has been followed to this day. Once the family patriarch was lowered into his grave, however, and the long black funeral veils were laid away for the future, his mantle of authority fell naturally and wordlessly upon that next member of the clan, man or woman, who had been emerging through the years. Every family must have such a head, it seemed; otherwise it became rudderless and scattered, losing its strength and identity. For the Fitzgerald clan of Fitzgeralds and Cleggs, that day it became Great-Aunt Mary, the oldest survivor of those who had come south in 1869. In our immediate family it was Aunt Pauline. Grandfather was buried in the Fitzgerald family graveyard where Great-Grandfather Thomas, Great-Grandmother Sarah Ann, Uncle Richard and other relatives already rested. It was on the west side of Chapel Hill Road next to the old section of Maplewood Cemetery. Only an iron picket fence separated the Fitzgeralds from their white contemporaries who had been early settlers in Durham, but a far wider gulf separated the living descendants. And it was in Grandfather’s death that I found a symbol which would somehow sustain me until I grew older and found other ways of balancing loyalty with revolt. Grandfather died in 1919 and it would be a number of years before the graves of World War I veterans appeared. Meanwhile the white cemetery from our back door to Chapel Hill Road and beyond was filled with Confederate dead. Every Memorial Day or Decoration Day, the cemetery hillside was dotted with crossbarred Confederate flags. As a Union veteran, Grandfather was entitled to a United States flag for his grave, so every May I walked proudly through a field of Confederate flags hugging my gold-pointed replica of Old Glory. I crossed Chapel Hill Road to the Fitzgerald family burial ground and planted it at the head of Grandfather’s grave. This solitary American flag just outside the iron fence which separated it from the Confederate banners waving on the other side was an act of hunger and defiance. It tied me and my family to something bigger than the Rebel atmosphere in which we found ourselves. In time Grandfather would be joined by Grandmother here and we would sell Grandmother’s farm and the family homeplace. We would scatter and there would not be one Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald descendant left in the South. We would become city folk in stifling little apartments in northern cities, far from the land and rootless, and the Fitzgerald name would die out leaving only the Fitzgerald mark here and there. We younger ones would search for something we had lost or perhaps had never had. But for that moment upon this lone flag I hung my nativity and the right to claim my heritage. It bore mute testimony to the irrefutable fact that I was an American and it helped to negate in my mind the signs and symbols of inferiority and apartness. In those early years there was little identity in my mind between the Union flag which waved over my grandfather’s grave and the United States flag upon which I looked with so much skepticism at West End School. It would be a while yet before I realized that the two were the same. I spent many hours digging up weeds, cutting grass and tending the family plot. It was only a few feet from the main highway between Durham and Chapel Hill. I wanted the white people who drove by to be sure to see this banner and me standing by it. Whatever else they denied me, they could not take from me this right and the undiminished stature it gave me. For there at least at Grandfather’s grave with the American flag in my hands, I could stand very tall and in proud shoes.

Excerpt from Dark Testament
in Dark Testament and Other Poems (Silvermine, 1970)

1 Freedom is a dream Haunting as amber wine Or worlds remembered out of time. Not Eden’s gate, but freedom Lures us down a trail of skulls Where men forever crush the dreamers- Never the dream. I was an Israelite walking a sea bottom, I was a Negro slave following the North Star, I was an immigrant huddled in ship’s belly, I was a Mormon searching for a temple, I was a refugee clogging roads to nowhere- Always the dream was the same- always the dream was freedom. 8 Hope is a crushed stalk Between clenched fingers. Hope is a bird’s wing Broken by a stone. Hope is a word in a tuneless ditty- A word whispered with the wind, A dream of forty acres and a mule, A cabin of one’s own and a moment to rest, A name and place for one’s children And children’s children at last . . . Hope is a song in a weary throat.

Excerpt from Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage
(Harper & Row, 1987)

I came to Africa, among other reasons, to see for myself black people in their own homeland and come to grips with the pervasive myth of innate racial inferiority that stigmatizes all people of discernible African descent in the United States. Although now widely discredited, this powerful myth shaped my growing years and gave me ambivalent feelings about myself. A remote African ancestry about which I knew little, linked with a heritage of slavery and continued inferior status in America, has been the source of a hidden shame. I need to confront the vestiges of shame embedded in my identity by making an on-the-spot assessment of my African background and my relationship to it. . . . Traveling about the countryside, I have not only seen piercing reminders of a radical break with the African past but have also realized how subsequent distortions of this past to justify chattel slavery in the United States contributed to a legacy of shame. When I go to villages in the interior of Ghana, where the people continue to follow many of their ancient customs, I am struck by their innate dignity, their ceremonial courtesy, and their strong sense of community cooperation in building a house or road. Although they are nonliterate and have few belongings or creature comforts, they are rooted in their own land and have a strong sense of self. An African man may house his family in a mud hut, sleep on the ground, barely make a living scrabbling in parched earth, and have only one ceremonial cloth of cheap fabric. Yet when he drapes his toga about his shoulder and comes to greet a stranger, he walks with such self-assurance that I cannot help thinking how his proud bearing contrasts with the bearing of his sharecropper counterparts I have seen in rural America. I find myself pondering the great violence done to the human spirit through American slavery and its aftermath, originally in the name of “Christianizing black savages.” The contrast is even more sharply drawn when I visit a local chief seated on a raised platform in his inner courtyard, dressed in colorful robes and surrounded by his toga-clad council of village elders. An umbrella is held over his head and his linguist stands by to communicate his greetings and responses, although the chief understands and speaks fluent English. He receives visitors according to a formal ritual marked by gravity, which includes an exchange of gifts and the pouring of a libation from the visitor’s gift of costly gin drop by drop upon the ground, accompanied by solemn incantations. Here again I saw the self-possession of black people whose spirits have not been crippled by generations of repression.

Dark Testament, and Other Poems. Norwalk, Conn.: Silvermine, 1970.

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

Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family. New York: Harper, 1956.

Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.

Ms. Murray was also a contributor to general interest periodicals and legal and religious journals, including Anglican Theological Review, Southern Exposure, and the George Washington Law Review.

Additional information on Ms. Murray can be found in:

Bryant, Flora Renda. An Examination of the Social History of Pauli Murray. Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina, Columbia, 1991.

Haney, Elly. "Pauli Murray: Acting and Remembering." Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 4 (Fall 1988): 75-79.

Hiatt, Suzanne R. "Pauli Murray: May Her Song Be Heard at Last." Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 4 (Fall 1988): 69-73.

Humez, Jean M. "Pauli Murray's Histories of Loyalty and Revolt." Black American Literature Forum 24 (Summer 1990): 315-335.

Kuralt, Charles. On the Road with Charles Kuralt. New York: Putnam, 1985.

Miller, Casey. "Pauli Murray." Ms, vol. 8, no. 9 (March 1980): 60-64.

Mooney, Regina Elizabeth. Transgression as Transformation: An Investigation into the Relationship between Mystically Religious Experience and Moral Experience in the Lives of Dorothy Day and Pauli Murray. Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1992.

O'Dell, Margarete Darlene. Sites of Southern Memory: The Autobiographies of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray. Ph.D. dissertation, College of William and Mary, 1997.

Williams, Pat. "The Struggle to Belong." The New York Times Biographical Service 18 (March 1987): 282-284.

Links to further information:

Pauli Murray Human Relations Award

Review of Song in a Weary Throat