Pauli’s Righteous Roots

Joanne Freeman:
But first, we want to give some background to Murray’s upbringing to the roots that helped establish Murray as a champion of civil rights. And to help us with that, we have our producer Charlie Shelton-Ormond with us in the studio. Hi, Charlie.

Charlie S.:
Hey, Joanne. Yes, to really get a full picture of Pauli Murray’s life, it’s important to know something about Murray’s origins to know where it all started. And to do that, I recently visited Murray’s childhood home in Durham, North Carolina.

Barbara Lau:
Charlie, Barbara Lau. I’m trying to find another one, but…

Charlie S.:
Barbara Lau is the Director of the Pauli Murray Project in Durham, and she’s leading the restoration of the house to turn it into the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice. Lau says the center’s mission is to preserve Murray’s memory. But once you walk in the house, you can already feel Murray’s presence in the woodwork.

Barbara Lau:
When I come here, I always know that I’m almost visiting Pauli because her spirit is in this house. People feel that when they come here. So literally, when you look around, and you look at the staircase, and you look at the railing, and you look at the windows and the doors, these are things that were here when Pauli was here.

Charlie S.:
Lau gave me a quick tour. But even though it’s two storeys, it’s not a big house.

Barbara Lau:
We think this was a bedroom and this was the parlor, but feel free to go upstairs. Fireplace surrounds and the floor, and it’s all… We’re walking on the floors that she walked on. That just makes being here even more moving, because it was in this house that Pauli became the freedom fighter, the justice lover that she was.

Charlie S.:
The house was built in 1898 by Pauli Murray’s grandfather, Robert Fitzgerald, who was originally from Pennsylvania. Today it’s known as the Pauli Murray family home, but it’s actually not where most of Murray’s immediate family lived. Murray was born in Baltimore in 1910, and at just three years old, Murray was sent to Durham to live with Murray’s aunt, Pauline, and Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald, Murray’s grandparents. This happened after Murray’s mom died from a cerebral hemorrhage and Murray’s father found himself unable to care for the couple’s six children.

Charlie S.:
During Pauli’s childhood in Durham, the family home in the city’s Western neighborhood was always buzzing with relatives and neighbors. Today, the house is joined by other old homes of various shapes and sizes lining the street. Right behind the family home is a cemetery where some of Pauli Murray’s relatives are buried. Inside the house, the spirit of Murray’s family history swirls around you even though there isn’t too much to look at. The interior lays of bare as Lau’s team continues to renovate. But on the outside, it pops with a light blue coat of paint and a brand new porch stretching across the front. The exterior evokes the days when young Pauli live there in the 1910s and ’20s, running throughout the house. But while Pauli was surrounded by the Fitzgerald side of the family, Pauli was also separated from siblings who lived with other relatives.

Pauli Murray:
I lived in grandfather’s house, which meant more or less that I was a very small child growing up with four to five very settled adults living in grandfather’s house and being a part of a larger family and extended family. In those days, the Fitzgeralds and their kin religion gave me, I think, a sense of real roots and security. On the other hand, I had a different name. I had my own family, of which I was very conscious of, and in some ways I was alien. I felt very much part of the house, I was made to feel a part of the family, I knew that I was a Fitzgerald descendant, and yet there was always this longing for my family, my brothers and sisters, and a kind of, I guess, sadness about not having parents.

Barbara Lau:
This place was the one in which I think she felt she was most attached to.

Charlie S.:
Lau says restorations on the home will take a while, but they have some good momentum. That’s because in 2016, the house was named a National Historic Landmark.

Barbara Lau:
We are North Carolina’s only National Historic Landmark focused on a woman, and we are the only National Historic Landmark that we’re aware of in the United States focused on a woman of color who is also LGBTQ.

Charlie S.:
And just like Lau mentioned, it was here in this house where the foundations of Pauli Murray’s social activism were born. For evidence of this, look no further than Murray’s memoir, Proud Shoes. In it, Pauli Murray remembers seeing family members support each other, as well as the entire neighborhood.

Barbara Lau:
They really, the Fitzgeralds, helped to create Durham, certainly created this Western community, this black community.

Charlie S.:
And inside the family home, it was people like aunt Pauline and grandfather Robert Fitzgerald who empowered Murray to pursue a life of rigorous academics and activism, in other words, to study hard and to stand up for what’s right.

Barbara Lau:
She witnessed and heard stories from her grandfather about fighting in the Civil War, about coming South afterward to fight what he called the Second Great War, the war against ignorance, and being a teacher, being someone who ran for office, being someone who encouraged people during the Reconstruction Era to vote. And then he has four daughters, and his oldest daughter, Aunt Pauline becomes a teacher and really feels committed to that next generation, preparing them, preparing them to be well-rounded, aware, literate, active citizens. And so Pauli is growing up in the midst of this and understanding their commitment in light of the fact that this isn’t too huge house, this was not a rich household, this was a household that really did struggle to get by sometimes. And so she got to see that it was so important to them that they would dedicate themselves to those efforts versus say something that was just about a career making money.

Pauli Murray:
I had not grown up in a family where limitations were placed upon women. My whole family tradition had been self-sufficient women. My grandfather, patriarch though he was, believed in his daughters being self-sufficient and independent. And so it just simply was not a part of my family tradition to expect any limitations upon what a woman could do or what she couldn’t do, and I’d never thought of myself in terms of a woman. I thought of myself in preparing to be a civil rights lawyer for this cause.

Ed Ayers:
So Charlie, a question that must occur to people listening to this episode is, with all the things that Pauli Murray accomplished or was a part of, why haven’t more people heard about Murray? What does Barbara Lau think of that?

Charlie S.:
Yeah, Lau says people like Pauli, who were always working behind the scenes. Well, they really couldn’t be the face of the movement, whether it was civil rights or gender equality.

Barbara Lau:
They didn’t conform to what we imagined was a civil rights leader or a women’s liberation leader or a labor organizer. So she wasn’t really willing to change herself to fit into those stereotypes, and she ran up against those boundaries over and over and over in her life. She wrote a great letter to the president of the board of NOW in the 1960s. They were trying to get her to join their board and she said, “You know, I can’t be a worker one day, a Negro one day, a woman the next. I have to find the unifying principles under which I can operate.” She said, “Now, for you this might be good politics. For me, this is the price of survival.”

Barbara Lau:
So I think it’s not so much why haven’t we heard about Pauli Murray, we weren’t ready for Pauli Murray. Now, today’s politics, today’s reality, today’s conversations, now we’re ready for some of what Pauli Murray’s wisdom teaches us.

Kiki Petrosino:
This is Kiki Petrosino. I’m a poet and I live in Charlottesville, Virginia. Dark Testament: Verse 8 by Pauli Murray.

Kiki Petrosino:
“Hope is the crushed stock 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 40 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. Give me a song of hope and a world where I can sing it. Give me a song of faith and a people to believe in it. Give me a song of kindliness and a country where I can live it. Give me a song of hope and love and a brown girl’s heart to hear it.”

Kiki Petrosino:
For me, Pauli Murray is a poet of great wisdom and courage, and also a poet of great intellect. This section of Dark Testament has a deceptively simple surface. It starts out as a series of definitions of what hope is, and then it elegantly turns into a prayer, “Give me a song of hope,” she says, “Give me a song of faith.” It seems that the intended audience for her prayer, as much as any divine entity, is really us, the reader, America as a whole. We have the power to bring equality into our world and to make this place better for all people.