By Ethan Clauset and Leslie Smith
“Under the laws of North Carolina, and under the resolutions of the Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina, members of your race are not admitted to the University.â€
Those words, from the dean of the graduate school, denied a young Pauli Murray entry to UNC. She had applied to study sociology with Guy Johnson and Howard Odum. It was December 1938. Two days earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of Lloyd Gaines in his suit against the state of Missouri, which had denied his entry to the University of Missouri School of Law solely on the grounds of his race. It would be another 13 years before black students would enter UNC’s classrooms, and the burden of segregation would linger for many more decades. In 1978, Pauli Murray, then a graduate of Howard University School of Law and an ordained Episcopal priest, was offered an honorary degree by UNC Chancellor Ferebee Taylor. She was eager to accept the offer, until weeks later there appeared in the press a dispute over desegregation between UNC and the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare. UNC was defiant; HEW threatened to cut off federal aid and charged UNC with failing to implement an effective plan to desegregate higher education in North Carolina. Murray felt she could only decline the honor; to accept it would have seemed to endorse the university’s position.
Anna Pauline (Pauli) Murray was born in 1910 in Baltimore to Agnes and Will Murray. Her mother’s family, the Fitzgeralds, owned brickyards in North Carolina, in Durham and Orange County. The Duke Freeman Center on Faber Street now sits where the Durham brickyard once stood. Her grandmother Cornelia Fitzgerald was the daughter of lawyer Sidney Smith and Harriet, a part-Cherokee slave owned by the Smith family. What we now know as Smith Level Road runs past the site of the Smith plantation. In 1885, the Smiths donated 1,500 acres of land in Chatham County to the university for the purpose of setting up a fund to aid poor students.
When Pauli was 3, her mother died and her father was institutionalized. Her siblings went to her father’s family in Baltimore, but she chose to live with her mother’s family in Durham: her aunt Pauline and the Fitzgerald grandparents. Aunt Pauline was a first-grade teacher, and for lack of child care Pauli sat in on her aunt’s classes at the West End school on Ferrell Street, a dirt road that started with a lumberyard and ended with a dump. The rickety schoolhouse was not far from the Liggett & Myers warehouses near West Main Street. She later attended Hillside High School on Umstead Street and upon graduation decided to go to Columbia University. The realities of segregation and economic constraints instead led her to Hunter College. After graduating in 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, she managed to find work with the National Urban League and then later with the Works Progress Administration. After her WPA experience, she attended the Brookwood Labor College, an AFL-CIO supported school for trade union members. In a later interview, she said that “this school catapulted [her] into a radical stance.â€
In 1938, she was feeling pressure from her family to return to North Carolina. Her application to UNC was not made out of naiveté – she was aware of one other black applicant, Raymond Hocutt. In 1933, he applied to and was rejected from UNC’s School of Pharmacy. She knew the names of his NAACP attorneys and she knew he had been rejected on a technicality – for failing to present satisfactory “scholastic qualifications.†When her own application was rejected, she wrote a letter to Frank Graham and appealed to Thurgood Marshall to take up her cause. The NAACP was looking for an “airtight†case, though, and believed that her lack of firm North Carolina residency made it too risky. To their credit, UNC students and faculty were generally supportive of her. The Daily Tar Heel ran a lengthy editorial supporting those who opposed her admission, stating that, “Prejudices in Southern minds can never be removed if they are suppressed and denied by external forces from without.†While it is perhaps admirable that this statement contains an admission of prejudice, it was sadly typical of a range of moderate and liberal opinion at the time, that the problem of white supremacy was too delicate a matter to be resolved by anyone but the white supremacists themselves.
In law school at Howard University, Pauli Murray continued to wage a personal war on segregation. In the early 1940s, Howard was one of the only law schools in the country with a strong civil rights curriculum. In 1944, the student chapter of the NAACP, including Murray, staged a series of actions at segregated restaurants in downtown Washington D.C. They were not unlike the Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins that would take place 20 years later – young people entered the restaurant in twos and threes, were refused service and quietly took seats at a table. Outside, a picket line carried signs linking segregation and Hitler. She graduated at the top of her class, winning a fellowship to Harvard, only to be turned down because Harvard did not admit women.
She went on to attend school at Berkeley and received a Juris doctorate from Yale, then taught law and politics in Ghana as well as at Boston University and Brandeis. In 1973, she entered the General Theological Seminary in New York and was ordained in 1977, the first black woman to become an Episcopal priest in the United States. She died in 1985, vigorously writing and ministering until the end. Her life was so much more than can be conveyed in this short piece. More can be found in three books: her 1989 autobiography, a memoir, Song in a Weary Throat, and a family chronicle, Proud Shoes.
6 replies on “Finding Pauli Murray”
Excellent piece Ethan. Thank you for sharing this. I know it is only one of the hidden stories of Chapel Hill and North Carolina.
Really nice article on the amazing Pauli Murray. Thnx!
Could I draw your attention to the book Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware: Forty Years of letters in black and white, which I edited and which was published by UNC in Oct. 2006. I trust it is in the Chapel Hill Public Library, but if not I will happily lend you a copy. Pauli’s own books are fine as far as they go, but there are many things she discussed in her correspondence with Ware that do not appear in the volumes of her autobiography.(Incidentally, Song in a Weary Throat and the Autobiography are the same book under two different titles) I’m glad to see your excellent article. Anne Scott
[…] MILL, our arts, music and literature, publication is out this week. Featured stories include: • Finding Pauli Murray; • Written in Stone — reflections on black history • Hidden Voices’ Because […]
Pauli Murray is a major figure in an excellent new book by Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie. Gilmore makes the case that another reason the NAACP declined to take up her case in 1938 was her sexuality. Thurgood Marshall told her she was “too maverick” and she had once been briefly hospitalized in NYC after quarrel with a female lover. I’m a little embarrassed that we neglected this important detail, but our main source for this article was Murray’s own memoir, which I don’t believe makes any mention of this.
[…] Finding Pauli Murray; • Written in Stone — reflections on black history • Hidden Voices’ Because […]