Pauli Murray was a remarkable woman. Born into a family that blended
slaves, slave-owning whites, Cherokee Indians, freeborn African Americans – a
family whose history she would later celebrate in her book Proud Shoes – she grew up an orphan in her grandparents’ home in
Durham, NC. Bright and energetic but poor, Murray graduated from the city’s
segregated schools in 1926. In a display of characteristic determination, she
applied to Hunter College in NYC. Rejected because she was so poorly prepared,
she moved in with a cousin, enrolled in high school in NY, and entered Hunter a
year later. The struggle to find work and stay in school in the midst of the
Great Depression was so intense, however, that Murray, already suffering from
malnutrition, nearly succumbed to tuberculosis. Shortly after her graduation
from Hunter in 1933, she found brief sanctuary in Camp Tera, one of the handful
of women’s camps established by the New Deal as a counterpart to the men’s
Civilian Conservation Corps, and then as an employee of remedial reading and
workers’ education projects funded by the WPA.
“World events were breeding a new militancy in younger Negroes like
me,” she would write; “One did not need Communist propaganda to expose the
inescapable parallel between Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany and the repression
of Negroes in the American South. Daily occurrences pointed up the hypocrisy of
a United States policy that condemned Fascism abroad while tolerating an
incipient Fascism within its own borders.” In 1938, she applied to the law
school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, attracted by the
work of its sociologists on race relations and farm tenancy. Many law school
students supported her admission, as did Frank Porter Graham, the president of
the university, but state law mandated her rejection because of race.
Torn between her writing and law, Murray threw herself into working for
social justice. Her involvement in the unsuccessful struggle to obtain clemency
for Odell Waller, a black sharecropper whose right to be tried by a
representative jury had been denied because Virginia called to jury service
only those who had paid a poll tax, brought her to the attention of Leon Ransom
of Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C. When Howard University
offered her a scholarship in 1941, she entered law school “with the
single-minded intention of destroying Jim Crow.”
Murray had an extraordinary legal career as a champion of racial and
gender justice, serving as a consultant to the President’s Committee on the
Status of Women in preparing its 1963 report and on the National Board of the
ACLU. In January 1977, she became one of the first women to be ordained an
Episcopal priest.
Here is an excerpt of her accounts of time at Howard Law School:
“Ironically, if Howard Law School equipped me for effective struggle
against Jim Crow, it was also the place where I first became conscious of the
twin evil of discriminatory sex bias, which I quickly labeled Jane Crow. In my preoccupation
with the brutalities of racism, I had failed until now to recognize the
subtler, more ambiguous expressions of sexism. In the all-female setting of
Hunter College, women were prominent in professional and leadership positions.
My awareness of the additional burden of sex discrimination had been further
delayed by my WPA experience. Hilda Smith, national director of the WPA Workers’
Education Project, was a woman, my local project director and my immediate
supervisor were both women, and it had not occurred to me that women as a group
received unequal treatment. Now, however, the racial factor was removed in the
intimate environment of a Negro law school dominated by men, and the factor of
gender was fully exposed.
During my first year at Howard there were only two women in the law
school student body, both of us in the first-year class. When the other woman
dropped out before the end of the first term, I was left as the only female for
the rest of that year, and I remained the only woman in my class for the entire
three-year course. While I was there, not more than two or three women enrolled
in the lower classes of the law school. We had no women on the faculty, and the
only woman professional on staff was…the registrar, who had graduated from the
law school many years earlier.
The men were not openly hostile; in fact, they were friendly. But I
soon learned that women were often the objects of ridicule disguised as a joke.
I was shocked on the first day of class when one of our professors said in his
opening remarks that he really didn’t know why women came to law school, but
that since we were there the men would have to put up with us. His banter
brought forth loud laughter from the male students. I was too humiliated to
respond, but thought the professor did not know it, he had just guaranteed that
I would become the top student in his class. Later I began to notice that no
matter how well prepared I was or how often I raised my hand, I seldom got to
recite. It was not that professors deliberately ignored me but that their
freewheeling classroom style of informal discussion allowed the men’s deeper
voices to obliterate my lighter voice, and my classmates seemed to take it for
granted that I had nothing to contribute. For much of that first year I was
condemned to silence unless the male students exhausted their arguments or were
completely stumped by a professor’s question.”
Kerber, Linda K. & DeHart, Jane Sherron, Eds. Women’s America:
refocusing the past. Oxford University Press, NY, 1995. p.478-479
For your consideration:
Jokes can often disguise hostility. Have you had a comparable experience to Pauli's? Can you think of individuals in the public sphere - pundits, comedians, teachers, etc. - who use 'humor' in this manner?
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