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  • Book cover of Proud Shoes
    Pauli Murray

     · 1999

    First published in 1956, Proud Shoes is the remarkable true story of slavery, survival, and miscegenation in the South from the pre-Civil War era through the Reconstruction. Written by Pauli Murray the legendary civil rights activist and one of the founders of NOW, Proud Shoes chronicles the lives of Murray's maternal grandparents. From the birth of her grandmother, Cornelia Smith, daughter of a slave whose beauty incited the master's sons to near murder to the story of her grandfather Robert Fitzgerald, whose free black father married a white woman in 1840, Proud Shoes offers a revealing glimpse of our nation's history.

  • Book cover of Pauli Murray
    Pauli Murray

     · 2006

    Pauli Murray was a bold thinker whose passion for racial justice, equality, and freedom was rooted in a deep and sustaining religious life. A pioneer throughout her life, she was an early activist in the civil rights movement; a professor of law at Brandeis, a poet and author of two acclaimed memoirs, a cofounder of the National Organization of Women; and finally at age 66, the first African-America woman ordained in the Episcopal Church.

  • Book cover of Pauli Murray & Caroline Ware

    Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware: Forty Years of Letters in Black and White

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    No author available

     · 1984

    A history about a southern family's roots and black family life as experienced by the Fitzgerald and Smith families of Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. An account of Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald.

  • Book cover of Song in a Weary Throat
    Pauli Murray

     · 2018

    THE STORY BEHIND THE DOCUMENTARY MY NAME IS PAULI MURRAY A prophetic memoir by the activist who “articulated the intellectual foundations” (The New Yorker) of the civil rights and women’s rights movements. First published posthumously in 1987, Pauli Murray’s Song in a Weary Throat was critically lauded, winning the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award among other distinctions. Yet Murray’s name and extraordinary influence receded from view in the intervening years; now they are once again entering the public discourse. At last, with the republication of this “beautifully crafted” memoir, Song in a Weary Throat takes its rightful place among the great civil rights autobiographies of the twentieth century. In a voice that is energetic, wry, and direct, Murray tells of a childhood dramatically altered by the sudden loss of her spirited, hard-working parents. Orphaned at age four, she was sent from Baltimore to segregated Durham, North Carolina, to live with her unflappable Aunt Pauline, who, while strict, was liberal-minded in accepting the tomboy Pauli as “my little boy-girl.” In fact, throughout her life, Murray would struggle with feelings of sexual “in-betweenness”—she tried unsuccessfully to get her doctors to give her testosterone—that today we would recognize as a transgendered identity. We then follow Murray north at the age of seventeen to New York City’s Hunter College, to her embrace of Gandhi’s Satyagraha—nonviolent resistance—and south again, where she experienced Jim Crow firsthand. An early Freedom Rider, she was arrested in 1940, fifteen years before Rosa Parks’ disobedience, for sitting in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus. Murray’s activism led to relationships with Thurgood Marshall and Eleanor Roosevelt—who respectfully referred to Murray as a “firebrand”—and propelled her to a Howard University law degree and a lifelong fight against "Jane Crow" sexism. We also read Betty Friedan’s enthusiastic response to Murray’s call for an NAACP for Women—the origins of NOW. Murray sets these thrilling high-water marks against the backdrop of uncertain finances, chronic fatigue, and tragic losses both private and public, as Patricia Bell-Scott’s engaging introduction brings to life. Now, more than thirty years after her death in 1985, Murray—poet, memoirist, lawyer, activist, and Episcopal priest—gains long-deserved recognition through a rediscovered memoir that serves as a “powerful witness” (Brittney Cooper) to a pivotal era in the American twentieth century.

  • Book cover of Dark Testament: and Other Poems
    Pauli Murray

     · 2018

    With the cadences of Martin Luther King Jr. and the lyricism of Langston Hughes, the great civil rights activist Pauli Murray’s sole book of poems finally returns to print. There has been explosive interest in the life of Pauli Murray, as reflected in a recent profile in The New Yorker, the publication of a definitive biography, and a new Yale University college in her name. Murray has been suddenly cited by leading historians as a woman who contributed far more to the civil rights movement than anyone knew, being arrested in 1940—fifteen years before Rosa Parks—for refusing to give up her seat on a Virginia bus. Celebrated by twenty-first-century readers as a civil rights activist on the level of King, Parks, and John Lewis, she is also being rediscovered as a gifted writer of memoir, sermons, and poems. Originally published in 1970 and long unavailable, Dark Testament and Other Poems attests to her fierce lyrical powers. At turns song, prayer, and lamentation, Murray’s poems speak to the brutal history of slavery and Jim Crow and the dream of racial justice and equality.

  • Book cover of Song in a Weary Throat
    Pauli Murray

     · 1987

    Autobiography of an American woman, a pioneer civil rights activist and feminist. Granddaughter of a slave and great-granddaughter of a slave owner, growing up in the "colored" section of Durham, North Carolina in the early 20th century, she rebelled against the segregation that was an accepted fact of life in the South.

  • Book cover of To Speak a Defiant Word
    Pauli Murray

     · 2023

    Twenty-five years of writings by the religious thinker and activist Pauli Murray A Seminary Coop Notable Book of 2023 The religious thought and activism that shaped the late twentieth century is typically described in terms of Black men from the major Black denominations, a depiction that fails to account for the voices of those who not only challenged racism but also forced a confrontation with class and gender. Of these overlooked voices, none is more important than that of Pauli Murray (1910-1985), the nonbinary Black lawyer, activist, poet, and Episcopal priest who influenced such icons as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall. Anthony B. Pinn has collected Murray's most important sermons, lectures, and speeches from 1960 through 1985, showcasing her religious thought and activism as well as her original and compassionate literary voice. In highlighting major themes in Murray's writing--including the strength and rights of women, faithfulness, religious community, and suffering--Pinn's collection reveals the evolution in Murray's religious ideas and her sense of ministry, unpacking her role in a tumultuous period of American history, as well as her thriving legacy.

  • Book cover of Generations Women in the South

    The time has come, Lillian Smith wrote in 1962, for women to risk the "great and daring creative act" of discovering and articulating their own identity. Three years later, Southern women of a younger generation, fortified by the skills and self-respect earned in the black civil-rights movement, issued the first manifesto of a new feminism. Their words landed with explosive force, setting off cultural reverberations which have shaken the lives of men and women alike. A little more than a decade after that, this issue of Southern Exposure began to take form. Its creation has taken us back into history and deep into the meaning of our own lives. As we set out to understand the situation of Southern women, we found ourselves "in search of our mothers' gardens." We found ourselves naming an experience we share across the generations. "So many of the stories that I write," Alice Walker discovered, "are my mother's stories." To speak in our own voices, we had first to give expression to a "promise song" that has been there all along.

  • Book cover of The Case for Equality in State Jury Service