Jane Crow


Book Description

Euro-African-American activist Paulli Murray was a feminist lawyer, who played pivotal roles in both the modern civil rights and women's movements. Born in 1910 and identified as female, she believed from childhood she was male. Before there was a social movement to support transgender identity, she devised attacks on all arbitrary distinctions, greatly expanding the idea of equality in the process.




Pauli Murray


Book Description

The Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray (1910–1985) was a trailblazing social activist, writer, lawyer, civil rights organizer, and campaigner for gender rights. In the 1930s and 1940s, she was active in radical left-wing political groups and helped innovate nonviolent protest strategies against segregation that would become iconic in later decades, and in the 1960s, she cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW). In addition, Murray became the first African American to receive a Yale law doctorate and the first black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. Yet, behind her great public successes, Murray battled many personal demons, including bouts of poor physical and mental health, conflicts over her gender and sexual identities, family traumas, and financial difficulties. In this intimate biography, Troy Saxby provides the most comprehensive account of Murray's inner life to date, revealing her struggles in poignant detail and deepening our understanding and admiration of her numerous achievements in the face of pronounced racism, homophobia, transphobia, and political persecution. Saxby interweaves the personal and the political, showing how the two are always entwined, to tell the life story of one of twentieth-century America's most fascinating and inspirational figures.




Proud Shoes


Book Description

First published in 1956, Proud Shoes is the remarkable true story of slavery, survival, and miscegenation in the South from the pre-Civil War era through the Reconstruction. Written by Pauli Murray the legendary civil rights activist and one of the founders of NOW, Proud Shoes chronicles the lives of Murray's maternal grandparents. From the birth of her grandmother, Cornelia Smith, daughter of a slave whose beauty incited the master's sons to near murder to the story of her grandfather Robert Fitzgerald, whose free black father married a white woman in 1840, Proud Shoes offers a revealing glimpse of our nation's history.




Pauli Murray


Book Description

This biography of Pauli Murray is a groundbreaking new nonfiction book intended for the middle grade audience written in verse. Pauli Murray was a thorn in the side of white America demanding justice and equal treatment for all. She was a queer civil rights and women's rights activist before any movement advocated for either--the brilliant mind that, in 1944, conceptualized the arguments that would win Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka; and in 1964, the arguments that won women equality in the workplace. Throughout her life, she fought for the oppressed, not only through changing laws, but by using her powerful prose to influence those who could affect change. She lived by her convictions and challenged authority to demand fairness and justice regardless of the personal consequences. Without seeking acknowledgment, glory, or financial gain for what she did, Pauli Murray fought in the trenches for many of the rights we take for granted. Her goal was human rights and the dignity of life for all.




To Speak a Defiant Word


Book Description

Twenty-five years of writings by the religious thinker and activist Pauli Murray The religious thought and activism that shaped the late twentieth century is typically described in terms of Black men from the major Black denominations, a depiction that fails to account for the voices of those who not only challenged racism but also forced a confrontation with class and gender. Of these overlooked voices, none is more important than that of Pauli Murray (1910–1985), the nonbinary Black lawyer, activist, poet, and Episcopal priest who influenced such icons as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall. Anthony B. Pinn has collected Murray’s most important sermons, lectures, and speeches from 1960 through 1985, showcasing her religious thought and activism as well as her original and compassionate literary voice. In highlighting major themes in Murray’s writing—including the strength and rights of women, faithfulness, religious community, and suffering—Pinn’s collection reveals the evolution in Murray’s religious ideas and her sense of ministry, unpacking her role in a tumultuous period of American history, as well as her thriving legacy.




Song in a Weary Throat


Book Description

Autobiography of an American woman, a pioneer civil rights activist and feminist. Granddaughter of a slave and great-granddaughter of a slave owner, growing up in the "colored" section of Durham, North Carolina in the early 20th century, she rebelled against the segregation that was an accepted fact of life in the South.




Dark Testament: and Other Poems


Book Description

With the cadences of Martin Luther King Jr. and the lyricism of Langston Hughes, the great civil rights activist Pauli Murray’s sole book of poems finally returns to print. There has been explosive interest in the life of Pauli Murray, as reflected in a recent profile in The New Yorker, the publication of a definitive biography, and a new Yale University college in her name. Murray has been suddenly cited by leading historians as a woman who contributed far more to the civil rights movement than anyone knew, being arrested in 1940—fifteen years before Rosa Parks—for refusing to give up her seat on a Virginia bus. Celebrated by twenty-first-century readers as a civil rights activist on the level of King, Parks, and John Lewis, she is also being rediscovered as a gifted writer of memoir, sermons, and poems. Originally published in 1970 and long unavailable, Dark Testament and Other Poems attests to her fierce lyrical powers. At turns song, prayer, and lamentation, Murray’s poems speak to the brutal history of slavery and Jim Crow and the dream of racial justice and equality.




Radicalism at the Crossroads


Book Description

With the exception of a few iconic moments such as Rosa Parks’s 1955 refusal to move to the back of a Montgomery bus, we hear little about what black women activists did prior to 1960. Perhaps this gap is due to the severe repression that radicals of any color in America faced as early as the 1930s, and into the Red Scare of the 1950s. To be radical, and black and a woman was to be forced to the margins and consequently, these women’s stories have been deeply buried and all but forgotten by the general public and historians alike. In this exciting work of historical recovery, Dayo F. Gore unearths and examines a dynamic, extended network of black radical women during the early Cold War, including established Communist Party activists such as Claudia Jones, artists and writers such as Beulah Richardson, and lesser known organizers such as Vicki Garvin and Thelma Dale. These women were part of a black left that laid much of the groundwork for both the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and later strains of black radicalism. Radicalism at the Crossroads offers a sustained and in-depth analysis of the political thought and activism of black women radicals during the Cold War period and adds a new dimension to our understanding of this tumultuous time in United States history.




Breaking White Supremacy


Book Description

The award–winning author of The New Abolition continues his history of black social gospel with this study of its influence on the Civil Rights movement. The civil rights movement was one of the most searing developments in modern American history. It abounded with noble visions, resounded with magnificent rhetoric, and ended in nightmarish despair. It won a few legislative victories and had a profound impact on U.S. society, but failed to break white supremacy. The symbol of the movement, Martin Luther King Jr., soared so high that he tends to overwhelm anything associated with him. Yet the tradition that best describes him and other leaders of the civil rights movement has been strangely overlooked. In his latest book, Gary Dorrien continues to unearth the heyday and legacy of the black social gospel, a tradition with a shimmering history, a martyred central figure, and enduring relevance today. This part of the story centers around King and the mid-twentieth-century black church leaders who embraced the progressive, justice-oriented, internationalist social gospel from the beginning of their careers and fulfilled it, inspiring and leading America’s greatest liberation movement.