Refusing To Move

Speaker 1:
Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Joanne Freeman:
From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Joanne Freeman:
Welcome to BackStory, the show that looks at the history behind the headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman.

Ed Ayers:
And I’m Ed Ayers.

Joanne Freeman:
If you’re new to the podcast, each week, along with our colleagues, Nathan Connolly and Brian Balogh, we explore a different aspect of American history.

Joanne Freeman:
In March of 1940, 29-year-old Pauli Murray got on a Greyhound bus with a friend in Washington, DC. Murray was headed south to Durham, North Carolina, Murray’s hometown, to spend time with relatives for the Easter holiday.

Pauli Murray:
The bus we started out on was a long, very nice bus, plenty of room, and we probably sat somewhat to the rear of the center of the bus, having plenty of room for whites, plenty of room for Negros.

Joanne Freeman:
That’s a 1976 recording of Pauli conducted by the Southern Oral History Program. Pauli and Pauli’s friend Adelene McBean were both African American. So riding the bus in 1940 meant enduring segregation laws and being forced to sit in the back section reserved for black folks. Murray and McBean got on the bus in Washington with no problem. It wasn’t very crowded, and as Murray said, they sat close to the center, but everything changed in Virginia when they switched buses in Petersburg.

Pauli Murray:
And so we got in and sat, again, slightly rear of center. Somehow the way in which the bus population shifted, brought on a considerable number of white people, more than had been in the past. And so the time came when the driver came back and asked us to get up and move back. When I’m looking out the window and seeing that when those Negros get on, they’re going to be enough Negros to take care of all that back, so there’s no reason for me to move.

Joanne Freeman:
Murray told the driver they weren’t going to move. But as the driver pressed Murray and McBean on it, they looked and saw the open seat behind them was broken. There was no way they could sit there, but the drivers still expected them to.

Pauli Murray:
At this point, they go out and get the cops and arrest us. So it really has nothing to do with breaking the segregation law. It really has nothing to do with creating a disturbance. And so it was simply the whole Southern custom that must be satisfied and you simply cannot break the taboo, and they charged us with breaking the segregation law, violating the segregation law, and creating a disturbance.

Joanne Freeman:
Again, keep in mind this is 1940. It’s 15 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, a move that helped kickstart the Montgomery bus boycott. While Murray’s act of civil disobedience was similar in practice, it didn’t create the same ripple effect. Murray and McBean’s arrest in Petersburg caught the attention of the NAACP. The organization was hoping to use the case to challenge the law on segregated interstate travel, but the state of Virginia wanted to avoid a big trial, so they dropped most of the charges. In the end, Murray and McBean were left with one violation of disorderly conduct.

Pauli Murray:
They convicted me and the NAACP could not afford to appeal the case, and therefore, we would have to either pay the fine or go to jail, and we refused to pay the fine, we went to jail.

Joanne Freeman:
The arrest never became a landmark court case. It may not be in most history books, but for Pauli Murray, it was the beginning of something big.

Joanne Freeman:
A year later, in 1941, Pauli Murray enrolled at Howard Law School. Immediately, Murray began tackling the big question that had marked that fateful bus trip through Virginia, how do you prove segregation is unconstitutional?

Serena Mayeri:
She believed that segregation should be challenged in a bit more of a head on fashion than was in vogue at that time.

Joanne Freeman:
This is Serena Mayeri, she’s a law and history professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Serena Mayeri:
So what Murray wanted to see happen was to challenge separate but equal directly as Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund eventually did in Brown v. Board of Education a decade later. And when they did decide to do that, Murray later found out that they looked back at this paper that she had written in law school and drew from it in preparing their briefs in Brown, which, of course, was the case that ultimately did declare separate but equal to be inherently unequal.

Pauli Murray:
I have lived to see the thesis upon which I was operating, vindicated. And what I say very often is that I’ve lived to see my lost [inaudible 00:05:53] found.

Joanne Freeman:
But this law school paper wasn’t the only document Murray wrote that influenced Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP’s lawyers. A few years after graduating from Howard, Murray delivered another major stamp on civil rights history.

Pauli Murray:
1948 to 1952, this was the state’s laws on race and color was a research job I did for the women’s division of the Methodist Church.

Serena Mayeri:
It was originally meant to be just a little pamphlet, but she really cataloged every single law having to do with race at the state level in the United States at the time, which was a really herculean undertaking.

Pauli Murray:
They published it and that, according to Thurgood Marshall, that became the Bible for the civil rights lawyers when they were fighting these segregation cases.

Serena Mayeri:
He obtained a copy of the book apparently for every lawyer on his staff.

Joanne Freeman:
Through all this work, it’s safe to say that Murray was essential in helping to outlaw segregation. But to say Murray only worked within the world of civil rights would be a major understatement.

Serena Mayeri:
She was really grappling with a lot of the complexities of racial identity, of gender and sexual identity, both as they manifested in life and also in the law itself.

Pauli Murray:
I am saying that we must accept the challenge of our existence, our existence being that of a rejected, unwanted, persecuted minority, and that in a sense, we cannot accept this. We must make our contribution to history.

Ed Ayers:
Today, you can see the effects of Pauli Murray’s achievements at American law, politics and culture. So for that reason, and many more, this week on BackStory, we’re devoting the entire episode to the inspiring but little known life and legacy of Pauli Murray.

Joanne Freeman:
We’ll discuss more of Murray’s work in the legal world and how Murray helped to secure equal rights for women.

Ed Ayers:
And you’ll hear about Murray’s religious faith and how Murray became the first African American woman ordained as an Episcopalian priest.

Joanne Freeman:
And on top of everything else, Murray was a poet. So throughout the show, you’ll hear folks sharing some of Murray’s poetry and reading acting on what it means to them.

Ed Ayers:
And just a quick note about some of the language we’re going to use in this episode, Pauli Murray often self-identified as a woman and used she and her pronouns. You can see this in public writings like Murray’s autobiography, but in private, Murray grappled with a nuanced and complicated gender identity. This identity was often at odds with the strict gender and sexual constructs of the 20th century, and it was often in flux. In other words, Murray defied categories of all kinds. For that reason, the question of pronouns is a complicated one in the case of Pauli Murray. So after careful consideration, we decided to opt out of using any pronouns when referring to Pauli Murray throughout this episode. Instead, you’ll hear us say Pauli Murray, Murray, or sometimes just Pauli, but you’ll hear our guests alternate between different pronouns. We’ve let each guest decide for themselves which pronoun they think best fits when talking about Pauli.