Saint Pauli

Dr. Parket T.:
My name is Dr. Parker T. Hurley and I live in Durham, North Carolina. And this is Prophecy, which is one of my favorite poems of Pauli Murray’s from the Dark Testament.

Dr. Parket T.:
“I sing of a new American, separate from all others, yet enlarged and diminished by all others. I am the child of kings and serfs, freemen and slaves, having neither superiors nor inferiors, progeny of all colors, all cultures, all systems, all beliefs. I have been enslaved, yet my spirit is unbound. I have been cast aside, but I sparkle in the darkness. I have been slain but live on in the rivers of history. I seek no conquest, no wealth, no power, no revenge. I seek only discovery of the illimitable Heights and depths of my own being.”

Dr. Parket T.:
I thought this poem in particular really highlights seeing Pauli as being very prophetic. I always think of him, and I say him because we know historically that the identity of around being a woman really didn’t fully encapsulate his experiencing of themself. So I like to play with pronouns in those ways, but I think this poem in general really speaks to his prophecy around what I would think of like a transformative healing justice, like what it means to reconcile with a multitude of us as people. So how can we think of ourselves as oppressor and oppressed and recognizing that that is really where any kind of transformation is possible at first, just thinking about how do we hold all of these multitudes within ourselves, and I think that Pauli did that the best.

Dr. Parket T.:
I chose the poem in particular also as a non-binary black trans man with white lineage, also reconciling my own power and privilege in multitude of histories. And I really feel that Pauli, more so than many other ancestors, really give light and power to my own positionality.

Ramona M.:
Everyone in attendance at the Church of the Holy Cross that Sunday understood that this was a homecoming and an extremely poignant moment in, well, history.

Ramona M.:
Pauli Murray read the gospel from a 19th century Bible that belonged to Cornelia Fitzgerald, Murray’s grandmother. It was a gift from the people who enslaved her. They brought Cornelia to be baptized at that church in 1854, free in the eyes of God but recorded as a slave in church records. The fact that Murray was presiding over a service at all was testament to the power of faith, and in more ways than one. When Murray entered seminary at the age of 62, women were not permitted to be priests in the Episcopal Church.

Kelly Brown:
Whether or not you’re a priest is between you and God. God called you. The church may or may not recognize that.

Ramona M.:
Kelly Brown Douglas is the Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Kelly Brown:
So it seems to me that for Pauli Murray, whether or not at this point the church recognized that call, she could do no other but to begin to live into it and to pursue that aspect of herself.

Ramona M.:
Douglas says that long before seminary, Murray was an active participant at Episcopal conventions fighting for women’s ordination and equality in black ministry. During the church’s 1969 annual fundraising campaign, Murray wrote that asking women to support the church financially was like taxation without representation.

Kelly Brown:
I knew her as a rebel in the church, who indeed fought for the equality of women, just as she, of course, fought for the equality of women in civil society. So she was a loud voice and a rebel, and she tried to open the law canons of the church up.

Ramona M.:
Pauli Murray entered seminary three years after the governing body of the Episcopal Church voted down women’s ordination and four years before they’d approve it. But Murray didn’t seek ordination simply to prove a point.

Pauli Murray:
From earliest childhood, I have always been a part of the church. There have been times when I have left it, but I have always more or less been in some way involved with the church.

Ramona M.:
Raised in a church-going family, Murray was confirmed at age nine by Henry Beard Delany, one of the first black Episcopal bishops in the United States. Later when Delany was on his deathbed, he pronounced that young Pauli Murray was a child of destiny. Murray’s life bore out that prophecy. Immense contributions to civil rights and the fight for equity are proof of that, but racism and sexism remained unvanquished in 1973 and Murray began to consider these problems in a different way.

Pauli Murray:
Basically, all of these problems of human rights in which I had been involved for most of my adult life, sex, race, all of the problems of human rights, that basically these were moral and spiritual problems, that we had reached a point where law could not give us the answers.

Ramona M.:
Murray believed America and the world was suffering because it had not reconciled itself in the spiritual realm.

Pauli Murray:
I began to realize that universally, all of mankind is constantly falling down from these high ideals, which we have said, that racism and sexism are actually sins, the sickness of sin, that human beings are not are really in harmony in relationship to their creator. And since they are not, they are not able to be in harmony in relationship and to love, to respect their neighbor.

Kelly Brown:
She really believed that faith meant partnering with God and mending the earth and mending the world from that which divided people one from another, and hence from God, and that’s the work she did.

Ramona M.:
Dean Douglas says that becoming a priest was a natural extension of Murray’s work towards justice.

Kelly Brown:
When we look at her life through the lens of who she was as a priest, we see that it was a journey that she was on throughout her life.

Pauli Murray:
It seemed to me that it came out of my writings, it came out in my speeches, it came out in my rather steadfast devotion to the notion of reconciliation as well as liberation, and I asked myself, “What do you want to do with the time you have left?” And this seemed to be the answer.

Ramona M.:
Pauli Murray’s theology, like Murray, is not what you’d expect.

Kelly Brown:
Many would suggest that Pauli Murray was a protowomanist theologian, that is, someone who was really talking about this theology that has emerged from the intersecting realities of what it means to be black and female.

Ramona M.:
Exposed to sexism in the black power movement and racism in the feminist movement, Murray rejected and was suspicious of categorization, often because no category was completely inclusive.

Kelly Brown:
Pauli Murray was before her time as a queer theologian queering the boundaries of human constructs that did not allow us to appreciate the diversity of God’s creation.

Ramona M.:
Murray’s main goal was the reconciliation of humanity.

Kelly Brown:
And I think her whole theology flowed from who she was and how she tried to reconcile her own being, and felt that she was living in a world that didn’t allow her the room to be herself. And for her, that’s what reconciliation, I think, was all about if we understand it from the inside-out for Pauli Murray. She was trying to create a world where she could be.

Kelly Brown:
(music)

Ramona M.:
Before Pauli Murray gave the sermon that Sunday in Chapel Hill, the congregants sang A Mighty Fortress is Our God. Murray told the congregation, “Those of you who are as old as I am will remember that that was the funeral hymn of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and it was the funeral hymn of my best friend, whose death was the catalytic agent that sent me into the ordained ministry.” That friend was Irene Barlow, Murray’s companion who had died from cancer the year Marie entered seminary. As Barlow was dying, Murray stood by her bed, reading the 23rd Psalm. Murray would later write “R – by her life, her love, her example and her death – pointed me towards this road.”

Ramona M.:
That’s Sunday Murray preached, “True community is a struggle. We may not live to see its victories, but struggle on we must.” This to me is the most remarkable thing about Pauli Murray’s faith. How could someone believe America could live up to its values when they had spent a lifetime witnessing its blatant hypocrisy.

Kelly Brown:
When I think of Pauli Murray, I think of the fact that, wow, this woman never lost her hope.

Ramona M.:
Dean Douglas says that faith and the possibility of a better world is what kept Murray going.

Kelly Brown:
And she never, to the bitter end, lost her hope in a world that would indeed allow for all of God’s diverse creation and all of the rich complexity and intersectionalities to live into the fullness of who they were. And so I think of Pauli Murray and say to myself, “Nope. No matter even in this current situation and climate in which we find ourselves in, you never have an excuse or reason to give up hope.”

Kelly Brown:
(music)

Joanne Freeman:
That piece was produced by Ramona Martinez. Special thanks to Dean Kelly Douglas and Sarah Azaransky, who’s booked on Pauli Murray, The Dream is Freedom, informed the segment. To listen to the sermon Pauli Murray gave at Church of the Holy Cross, please visit our website, backstoryradio.org.

Ed Ayers:
We’re going to end this week’s episode with one last poem written by Pauli Murray, who died in 1985. Here is Murray reciting the final verses of Dark Testament.

Pauli Murray:
“Then let the dream linger on. Let it be the test of nations. Let it be the quest of all our days. The fevered pounding of our blood, the measure of our souls, that none shall rest in any land and none return to dreamless sleep, no heart be quieted, no tongue be stilled, until the final man may stand in any place and thrust his shoulders to the sky, friend and brother to every other man.”

Joanne Freeman:
That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryRadio.

Ed Ayers:
A special thanks this week to the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 13:
Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and president emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History in American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.