Pauli Murray, March 23, 1940
Pauli Murray was born Anna Pauline Murray in 1910, the child of Agnes Fitzgerald Murray, a trained nurse who died in 1914, and William H. Murray, a schoolteacher who was murdered in 1923. Murray went to live with relatives in New York City, and after entering Hunter College in 1929 took on the gender-neutral name Pauli.
Gender identification was a life-long concern for Murray; therefore, this post will not use either feminine or masculine pronouns in reference to Murray, who self-described as a “he/she personality” in correspondence with her family. In later life Murray self-described as a woman and used she/her/hers pronouns.
Murray’s white great-grandfather had attended the University of North Carolina, and his father before him had been both a university trustee and a member of Congress. However, when Murray applied for postgraduate studies at UNC in 1938, a stinging reply from the graduate school dean stated baldly, “Under the laws of North Carolina…members of your race are not admitted to the University.” Murray sent copies of further correspondence with the dean to Thurgood Marshall, legal counsel for the NAACP, but Marshall decided against using this case as a test case because Murray’s residency in New York rather than North Carolina would have made a favorable decision more difficult.
Murray worked for the WPA in 1939 and then supported tenant farmers as executive secretary for National Sharecroppers Week. On March 23, 1940, Murray and a friend, Adeline McBean, traveled south to spend Easter with Murray’s Aunt Pauline. In Washington, D.C., they took a bus to Richmond, and then an overflow connecting bus to Durham, North Carolina. Sitting two rows from the rear in seats cramped by the wheel well, McBean began to fill ill as the bus raced to make up for lost time. When some passengers left the bus in Petersburg, Murray and McBean moved forward two rows, still remaining behind all the white passengers. When he saw them move, the driver, Frank Morris, told them to go back, citing a company rule that “black passengers fill the bus from the rear and white passengers from the front.” McBean tried to explain that she was ill and that other seat was broken, and they declined to move. Morris angrily went into the station to call his superiors, returning forty-five minutes later with two policemen.
McBean, whom Murray describes as “a peppery, self-assertive young woman of West Indian parentage” who had never encountered southern segregation law, called out, “If you’re looking for me, here I am. But you needn’t think that your big brass buttons and your shiny bullets are going to scare me, because I have rights, they’re substantial, and I’m sitting on them.” The officers were stymied. On one hand, they weren’t sure Murray and McBean were defying any Jim Crow laws. On the other hand, McBean had publicly ridiculed two policemen who represented the racist authority that instituted those laws.
Morris repaired the broken seat and Murray and McBean moved back one row. Problem solved – almost! Morris began handing out witness cards to the white passengers but not the Black passengers. Later Murray wrote that “this final damning implication that black people were nobodies and did not have to be taken into account was more than I could bear.” Murray called out, asking why he did not give cards to the people in the back. Morris jumped off the bus and returned with the policemen. Warrants were read and Murray and McBean were arrested. On leaving the bus, ill, frightened, and not having eaten since noon, McBean fainted. They were driven to the Petersburg hospital, where McBean was treated for minor bruises and “hysteria.” Then they were taken to spend Easter weekend in Petersburg City Prison in a foul, bug-ridden cell. Though they were treated harshly by prison officials, they always replied quietly and politely.
A powerful team of NAACP lawyers led by Thurgood Marshall defended their case in order to challenge the state segregation laws in interstate travel. However, the judge found them guilty of creating a disturbance, but not of breaking any segregation laws. Rather than pay the $10 fine, Murray and McBean chose to go back to jail. After several days the Workers Defense League (WDL) paid their fines and they were released.
While working afterward on the administrative committee of the WDL, Murray took an increasing interest in the law and graduated at the top of the class at Howard Law School in 1944. Harvard Law School then rejected Murray’s application for further study, not on the basis of race, but rather that of gender. After earning an LLM from the Boalt School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, Murray began a remarkable career as a lawyer, activist, poet, and thinker. As a member of President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, Murray coined the term “Jane Crow” to draw parallels between the evils of racism and sexism. While serving for eight years on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union, Murray was also one of the twenty-eight founding members of the National Organization of Women. In 1977 Murray was ordained as an Episcopal priest.
Let us close with the insightful and powerful description of the evil of Jim Crow from Murray’s 1987 memoir, Song in a Weary Throat (p. 141):
“The bus was the quintessence of the segregation evil, because there the separation of the races was merely symbolic. The intimacy of the bus interior permitted the public humiliation of black people to be carried out in the presence of privileged white spectators, who witness our shame in silence or indifference.
It was not the fact of separation that hurt so much; it was, as everybody knew, the fact that the overriding purpose of segregation was to humiliate and degrade colored people. Even if one quietly accepted being forced to sit in the back of the bus, there was apt to be some white driver whose contemptuous treatment of Negro passengers, combined with his uniform and swaggering manner, gave him a striking resemblance to a Nazi storm trooper.”
Pauli Murray, 1941