Sorry it has been a while, this issue of the newsletter has been in the works for a long while. I had to read a whole dense book for research. I say have as if I didn't want to. That's a lie! I found Pauli Murray especially fascinating. Here we go. This issue is about two black women who worked for civil rights in their respective time periods, a century apart.
First up is Ellen Craft. She and her husband were both born to slaves in the 19th century, but Ellen Craft’s mother was a mixed race slave and her father was her white master. Her master’s wife gave her to her daughter because she didn’t like having Ellen around the house to remind her that her husband had slept with another woman. Ellen worked for her as a house slave for a while. When she was 20 she married William, who was also a slave. They wanted to have kids, but didn’t want them to be slaves, so they planned an escape.
Since Ellen could pass for white, she disguised herself as a white man, putting her arm in a sling so that no one could confront her about her inability to write. William travelled with her as her personal servant/slave.
When they got to Philadelphia, many abolitionists found their case interesting and had them speak publicly about it. Since societal norms dictated that Ellen could not speak to a group of mixed race people, she often dressed in the men’s clothes and stood to the side while her husband told their story. However, a few times she did tell their story herself, and the public was fascinated by this bold woman’s escape with her husband. When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, it allowed bounty hunters to come into the North to capture runaway slaves, and the Crafts were shuttled from safe house to safe house before finally fleeing to England.
There, Ellen learned how to write and had five kids with William. She participated in Emancipation and Women’s Suffrage movements, and after the Civil War the couple returned to the United States and bought land in Georgia. They founded a school for children of freed slaves, but it ended up closing due to both financial and other problems when whites in the area made their lives difficult. Their farm failed, and they went to live with their daughter until their death just at the turn of the 20th century.
Pauli Murray, shown above, was an activist in the 20th century, and her story is finally becoming more wildly known. Pauli was born in 1910, to a mixed race family with black, white, and Native American roots. Her parents both identified as black. Her mother died when she was young and her father was committed to an institution when he had mental health issues. Pauli lived with her aunts and her grandparents. Her father died when she was thirteen, beaten to death by a white guard at the institution he was at. When Pauli turned sixteen, she moved to New York City to finish high school and go to college. She lived with her cousin Maude, who passed for white, and Pauli didn’t look fully white. The neighbors talked, but Pauli didn’t care. She tried to get into Columbia but they wouldn’t admit women, and didn’t have enough money to go to Barnard, so she enrolled at Hunter College in 1927. She graduated with a BA in English in 1933.
Pauli had some health issues, and ended up taking a job at Camp Tera, a She-She-She conservation camp which was a female version of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) formed as part of the New Deal by the First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The purpose was to improve infrastructure, work on conservation, and provide jobs to young people. Pauli was at the camp for three months. She met Eleanor Roosevelt and began corresponding with her. That correspondence forms the basis of a book that came out recently that I recommend reading if you’re at all interested in this subject.
Anyway, while Pauli was at camp, she met a white counselor named Peg Holmes and fell in love. The two of them entered a relationship. When the camp director found a Marxist book in her things, that was the last straw and he kicked them both out. Peg and Pauli left the camp in 1935 and hitched rides or hopped trains to get home.
Pauli applied to UNC in 1938 but she was rejected because she was black. Her case was widely publicized. North Carolina was segregated, and Pauli wrote letters to officials to embarrass them into action, releasing their repsonses to the media. It didn’t work. The leader of the NAACP didn’t take her case because he didn’t like that she released her correspondence to the media. Pauli was also problematic for them because she openly dated women and wore pants instead of skirts and dresses.
In 1940, Pauli was hospitalized after she was found wandering around upset because her girlfriend had broken up with her. The police took her to New York City for psychiatric treatment. A month or so later, she left the hospital with her girlfriend Adelene McBean, and they took a bus to Durham to visit her aunt. When the bus was in Virginia, the two of them moved out of the broken seats in the back of the bus to the front, in the white section. They were thrown in jail, and were convicted of disorderly conduct. The NAACP did not defend them, so the Workers’ Defense League paid their fine. The WDL then hired Pauli on their administrative committee.
Working with the WDL, Pauli became even more of an activist, working on the case of Odell Waller, a black sharecropper who was sentenced to death for killing his white landlord. Pauli and the WDL argued that Waller had shot Davis because he was afraid for his life as they argued. Pauli raised money for Waller’s appeal and wrote to the governor and first lady. Through Eleanor, she got the President to request Waller’s death sentence to be commuted, which he did, but the Governor did not commute the sentence and Waller was executed.
Pauli became interested in civil rights law, and in 1941 she started at Howard University’s law school as the only woman. She faced a lot of discrimination and sexism, which she called “Jane Crow” (after “Jim Crow”). She joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and participated in lots of sit-ins in the 1940s which were precursors to the larger sit-ins that took place later in the fifties and sixties. Pauli graduated first in her class, and usually men who graduated first at Howard were awarded fellowships at Harvard University. However, Harvard didn’t accept women at that time and wouldn’t take Pauli, even with a letter of support from the President (FDR). Pauli was pissed. She went to Berkeley and got her degree there, passing the bar in 1945 and getting a job as the state’s first black DA.
In 1950, Pauli published States’ Laws on Race and Color, which Thurgood Marshall called the “bible” of the civil rights movement. Her examination and criticisms of the state segregation laws in the United States were used to help in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, and helped the Supreme Court rule that public schools had to be desegregated.
Pauli moved to Ghana for a year in 1960, working as faculty at the Ghana School of Law. She went to Yale after that to become the first black person to get a J.S.D. from that school. She taught at Brandeis for a few years in American Studies in the late 60s and early 70s.
Pauli was appointed to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women by JFK in 1961. She argued that the 14th Amendment forbade sex discrimination as well as racial discrimination, and she criticized the sexism in the civil rights movement. She wrote a letter asking why in the 1963 March on Washington no women made major speeches or were included in the leaders who went to the White House. She said:
I have been increasingly perturbed over the blatant disparity between the major role which Negro women have played and are playing in the crucial grassroots levels of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions. It is indefensible to call a national march on Washington and send out a call which contains the name of not a single woman leader.
In 1966, Pauli cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW), and she wrote to the Commissioner that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was not upholding the part of its mission that included gender. Her work on this issue was cited by Ruth Bader Ginsburg when arguing successfully that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to gender.
Pauli introduced classes on African-American studies and Women’s Studies at Brandeis, which were never offered there before, as well as teaching law classes. When Pauli was in her sixties, she left Brandeis and joined the Episcopal seminary. In 1977 she became the first black woman ordained as an Episcopal priest, and one of the first women. She preached her first sermon in Durham in 1978, and worked for the rest of her life in Washington DC, focusing on helping the sick. In 1985 she died of cancer in her home with her lifelong friend Maida Springer Kemp in Pittsburgh. In 2012 she was honored by the church as a person whose “life has exemplified what it means to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and make a difference in the world”.
Pauli had problems with her sexual and gender identity throughout her life. She didn’t think she was homosexual, she thought she had an “inverted sex instinct” that made her behave as if she was a man attracted to women. She dated women who she said were “extremely feminine and heterosexual”. She wore her hair short and liked pants; she often passed for a boy. She changed her name from Pauline to Pauli and got hormonal treatments in the 1940s. She even asked for surgery to find out if she was intersex. Still, she lived her life as richly as possible, publicly and privately, it seems. She was a fascinating person.
