[MUSIC PLAYING]
- Hi, everybody.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- I'm Jane Kamensky.
I'm the faculty director
of the Schlesinger Library.
And I want to welcome
you to this panel
discussion of rediscovering
Pauline Murray, who has never
really been
undiscovered, but seems
to be having quite a moment now.
I'm going to just say a little
bit about what this event means
to Schlesinger, what our
particular claim to Murray's
legacy and her claim
on our interest is,
and then introduce my colleague,
Dr. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham,
who is going to introduce
the panel, which
will proceed in a true
conversational format.
So we've all been so excited
in the last couple of years
as more and more new work about
the life and legacy of Pauli
Murray has come out with
Dr. Patricia Bell-Scott's
award-winning and much
noticed book, The Firebrand
and the First Lady; last year,
with Rosalind Rosenberg's
eminent book, Jane Crow, a
cradle-to-grave biography
of Murray forthcoming
next week; and
with important chapter-length
and article-length work
on Murray by Ken Mack in
the Harvard Law School,
and Brittney Cooper at
Rutgers, and many more.
Schlesinger takes particular
interest in all things
Pauli Murray because
we are the repository
of her extensive
collection of papers.
And I just wanted to tell you
how big this collection is.
So the collection began
to come to us in 1970.
And then more installments
proceeded by will
in the wake of Pauli
Murray's death in 1985.
And it now comprises 58
linear feet, 135 file boxes,
5 half-file boxes, 2 folio
boxes, 12 folio folders,
and on and on.
The finding aid
runs to 220 pages
which is a biography
in and of itself,
and also shows the meticulous
work that the library does
describing things.
The index to the finding
aid begins with the AARP
and ends with Philip
Zwerling, which
shows some of the
range of contacts
that Murray had over
her life and activism
in many different directions.
We want to have a
multifaceted discussion
of Murray's biography,
and work, and legacy
with scholars who
have thought about her
from many different directions.
And presiding over the panel
is my colleague, Evelyn Brooks
Higginbotham, who is Victor
S. Thomas Professor of History
and of African, African-American
Studies at Harvard.
She is herself a
pioneer in the history
of African American
women, not least,
but not only with her important,
book Righteous Discontent--
The Women's Movement
in the Black Baptist
Church, 1880 to 1920.
I think one of the
exciting things about this,
not only interdisciplinary,
but intergenerational panel,
is Brittney Cooper's forthcoming
book engages very fully
with the terms of discourse
that Evelyn Higginbotham set out
in that pioneering book.
So Evelyn, if you
will take it from here
and introduce the rest
of the panel, thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
- I'm going to invite you-- why
don't you come on up and sit
down now so that we can
just immediately start?
It is really a pleasure
to be here today.
There's so much to
discover and discover
and to rediscover
about Pauli Murray
that I think the title of this
symposium is quite appropriate.
I'd like to tell you what
we're going to do today.
We're going to have
a conversation.
And we will-- each
one of the panelists--
will answer a question.
And they will talk about some of
the things that they've found.
And then around 5:30, we
will open it up to you
so that you can ask
questions of them.
Our first speaker will
be Patricia Bell-Scott.
And I'll just read
according to the way
that they are sitting here too.
She is professor emerita
of women's studies
and human development
and family science
at the University of Georgia.
She is the author, as you
heard, of The Firebrand
and the First Lady--
Portrait of a Friendship--
Pauli Murray, Eleanor
Roosevelt, and the Struggle
for Social Justice.
And this book was a finalist
for the Carnegie Medal
for Excellence in Nonfiction.
It was also nominated
for the National Book
Award in Nonfiction.
It has just received
all kinds of accolades.
I have known Patricia
Bell-Scott for decades
as we remembered our
days in day school
together when we were
among the founding
people in Women's History.
And Patricia Bell-Scott is
really an amazing pioneer.
She is a co-founder of the
National Women's Studies
Association.
She served for a decade as
co-founding editor of Sage.
She's written a number
of prize-winning books.
But my all time favorite is her
co-authorship of All the Women
Are White, All the Blacks Are
Men, But Some Of Us Are Brave.
So I want to thank
you, Patricia,
for brave because this is one
of the first women's studies
textbooks to address race,
class, and sexuality.
Brittney Cooper is
assistant professor
of women's and gender
studies and Africana studies
at Rutgers University.
And I must tell you, she
has just received tenure.
[APPLAUSE]
And so we want to
recognize that.
She teaches courses on
black feminist theory,
black intellectual thought,
hip-hop, gender, and the media.
And her first book,
Beyond Respectability--
The Intellectual
Thought of Race Women
will be released next
month from the University
of Illinois Press.
She's also co-editor
of the Crunk Feminist
Collection released earlier this
year from the Feminist Press.
And she's a scholar.
She's also quite a
public intellectual.
And she's well-known on radio,
podcasts, and television.
Rosalind Rosenberg, professor
of history emerita at Barnard
is another pioneering
figure in women's history.
She taught at Columbia
and Wesleyan Universities
before coming to Barnard, where
she taught American women's
gender and legal history
until her retirement in 2011.
Her books include Beyond
Separate Spheres--
Intellectual Roots of Modern
Feminism, Divided Lives--
American Women in
the 20th Century,
and most recently, Jane Crow--
The Life of Pauli Murray.
And finally, Kenneth Mack is
the Inaugural Lawrence D. Biele
Professor of Law and
affiliate professor
of history at Harvard.
He is currently a Radcliffe
Fellow at the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study.
His 2012 book,
Representing the Race--
The Creation of the
Civil Rights Lawyer,
was a Washington Post
Best Book of the Year--
one of their Best Books of the
Year; a National Book Festival
selection; and it was also a
finalist for several awards.
He is also the co-editor
of The New Black--
What Has Changed-- and What
Has Not-- with Race in America.
He's also co-editor
of-- well, that.
That in that came out in 2013.
So we will begin.
Can everybody hear me?
Well, it's quite a pleasure.
I'm already hooked up.
But you are going to be
speaking in the microphone.
So let me start
with you, Patricia.
In your illuminating
book on the friendship
between Pauli Murray
and Eleanor Roosevelt,
she calls Eleanor
Roosevelt "ER".
But you begin with the
words from a letter
that Pauli Murray wrote to you.
Now that was impressive.
In 1983, you
received this letter.
And you state that one of the
reasons you undertook the study
was piqued by a reference
to ER that was found
in Murray's letter to you.
So tell us more about
why and how you began
this intellectual journey.
- I want to start by saying
that I was introduced to Pauli
Murray in the early 1970s when
I was a young faculty member
developing a course on
African-American women.
Can you hear me?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
- Not well?
Can you hear me now?
- Yes.
- I'm going to
have to lean over.
I was introduced to
Pauli Murray in the 1970s
when I was developing a course
on African-American women.
I discovered her
memoir, Proud Shoes.
She had not yet
entered the ministry
or published her autobiography.
But I soon discovered that she
was a person of many talents.
I tracked down her poetry
collection, which was out
of print; some of
her legal essays;
as well as some of
her opinion pieces.
Her feminist writings,
such as the essay,
"The Liberation of Black
Women," spoke to me at a time
when I was in the midst of
three career-shifting projects.
I was involved in the founding
of the National Women's Studies
Association.
I was co-auditing the textbook,
But Some of Us Are Brave.
And I was co-founding
the journal, Sage.
These last two projects-- the
textbook and the journal--
caught Murray's attention.
And she reacted as she often
did when something stirred her.
She shot off two letters.
The first letter
concerned her irritation
with Newsweek
Magazine which had run
a feature on women's studies,
ignoring the contributions
of black women in our textbook.
Dear Sisters-- Pauli Murray
wrote to us on November 25,
1983--
if Newsweek doesn't see
the value of your work,
here's an old-timer who does.
So be encouraged.
It can be done.
This reference to herself is
an old-timer makes me smile.
She was only 73.
And now that I have my Medicare
card, it seems young to me.
Her second missive-- dated
December 12th, 1983--
came after I invited her
to join the board of Sage.
That missive was sprinkled with
encouragement for our group,
with admiration for
the women activists
who had taken the
lessons that they
had learned in the labor
and civil rights movements
and applied them to
the women's movement.
And it also had fond mention
of the President's Commission
on the Status of
Women, for which
Murray had been a
subcommittee member,
and to which John F. Kennedy
had appointed Eleanor
Roosevelt as Commission Chair.
Murray's letter
also carried a line
that made me feel as if she were
pointing her finger in my face.
She said, "Dear Pat,
You need to know
some of the veterans of the
battle whose shoulders you now
stand on."
I was an all-knowing
32-year-old at the time.
And that directive
made me squirm.
Prior commitments
prevented Murray
from contributing to Sage
because she was working
furiously on her autobiography.
And although I dashed off
an appreciative reply,
I never got the
chance to ask her
about the veterans
whose shoulders I stood.
Her death 18 months later, at
age 74 from pancreatic cancer,
caught me off guard.
Having knowledge
of her illness, I
had respected her wish
to write undisturbed.
I was distraught to
learn of her death
and thought that I might
write something about her.
But having a full
plate at the time,
I convinced myself that
whatever I wanted to do
would have to wait.
But somehow or other, her
lines, the words in that letter,
kept bothering me.
And I finally decided to go
back to the notion of looking
at this friendship between
Pauli and Eleanor Roosevelt
that she intimated in a letter.
And I made this decision
for several reasons.
First of all, I have always
had a personal and a research
interest in women's friendships
and women's personal writings,
particularly
letters and diaries.
I immediately recognized
when I took a look-- just
a quick look-- at the
correspondence between Pauli
and Eleanor, that
there was more there
and that it deserved
attention beyond what
is mentioned by previous
biographers and historians.
My sense of being
drawn into the project
was affirmed four years
into the research when
I came across an August 19,
1971 letter to her friend,
the historian Caroline Ware, in
which Murray spoke of the notes
that she was making for a future
biographer whose work probably
would not be published
in her lifetime.
I felt a haunting presence,
as if Murray were hovering
near my writing desk, when I
read that she had envisioned
a biography that
began with her battle
to enroll at the University
of North Carolina
and the friendship with Mrs. R.
That I had responded to a wish
Murray made long before
I imagined this book,
confirmed my instinct
that her letter to me
was more than coincidence--
that she was, indeed, not only
pointing her finger in my face
but pointing me in a direction.
Let me make a few
comments about what
I learned in the spirit of
discovering and rediscovery.
First of all, I discovered that
the decades-long friendship
with Eleanor Roosevelt, whom
Murray would describe later
as a maternal figure,
was a place of growth
and acceptance--
that Murray could test
her intellectual powers
in this relationship
and that she never felt
rejected because of her beliefs
or who she was, was vital
to her well-being
and dare I say,
to Eleanor's growing
understanding of race
and the complex discrimination
African-American women suffer.
I discovered that
the personality
traits that we've come
to associate with Murray
as an adult were
evident in girlhood.
She was an
independent spirit who
preferred working
alone as opposed
to in groups because she
was almost always ahead
of the curve in her thinking.
She was impatient with
convention and bureaucracies.
And she was often simply
smarter than the people
with whom she had to work.
She was willing to challenge
inequality and authority
figures head-on no
matter who they were.
Indeed, she filed
her first complaint
against discrimination
over the breakfast table
when she was barely
six years old,
when she asked Aunt Colleen,
how come you give grandfather
three pancakes and me only one?
And she never stopped asking
hard questions, no matter
how brash or inappropriate.
I discovered that
she was innately shy
and that she was
most comfortable,
and at her best, expressing
herself on the written page.
I discovered that she
was warm and loving,
that she refused to accept
medical or cultural definitions
of her gender identity
and sexual orientation.
I discovered that
the challenges she
faced having to do with
gender identity and sexuality
were compounded by
health problems, the most
persistent of these
being a long-term smoking
addiction, thyroid disease that
was manifested in mood swings
and not diagnosed until
she was in her mid life.
She also suffered
intermittently from exhaustion
and malnutrition.
All of these factors
impacted her overall sense
of well-being, her temperament,
her employment, work
performance, and relationships.
I discovered that
the tragic death
of Murray's seven-month pregnant
mother of a cerebral hemorrhage
and the racially-motivated
murder of her father
in a mental hospital when
he was an inmate, as well
as her experience
as a child raised
by racially proud elderly kin
who were churchgoing school
teachers, nurtured
her compassion
for the vulnerable
and chronically ill,
her intellectual
curiosity, her love
of African-American
literature and history,
and her devotion to the church.
Finally, I continued
to be awed by how
methodically and
relentlessly she worked
to become an integrated
person, embracing
the fullness of all her
interest, abilities,
and identities.
In fact, I particularly
like a little letter
that she sent to friends
explaining this quest
for wholeness in her life.
And it was written during the
early days of her ministry
when she said, "We bring
our total selves to God--
our sexuality, our joyousness,
our foolishness, et cetera,
et cetera."
And this is how I hope that
we as scholars, artists,
and activists can
and will examine
her life in its fullness.
- Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Now Brittney, in
your remarkable book,
Beyond Respectability,
you analyze black women's
intellectual discourse
as it was articulated
over the course of the
entire 20th century,
actually, and with attention
to the sexism inherent in Jane
Crow politics.
And that's Murray's
term, of course--
and also in
respectability politics
with its own gender-disciplining
implications.
So I'd like for you to elaborate
on this issue of respectability
and Jane Crow.
And do that in regard to
your own interesting theory--
because you have an interesting
theory on black gender
socialization.
So tell us about that.
- Sure.
Thank you so much
for the question.
I hope you all
know how excited I
am to be sitting at this table
with these luminary folks
because I know that they've made
it possible for me to be here
and for me to do this work.
And so thank you and
thank you and also
because we get to call
Pauli Murray's name.
And we should do that every
time we have the opportunity.
So in my new book,
Beyond Respectability,
I try to situate and
understand Dr. Pauli
Murray within a long line
of race women thinkers
and public intellectuals
who reshaped
our ideas about gender, race,
and leadership over the course
of the 20th century.
And one of the drums that
I tried to beat in my book
is to say, what does
it actually look
like to take black
women seriously
as thinkers and theorists?
We say that we do this.
And yet sometimes, it's not
clear in the work that we do.
So I think it is
really important
to say that it matters that
Murray names this concept
of Jane Crow at Howard--
also my alma mater--
a very pro-black and
pro-male intellectual
space when she's a law
student there in the 1940s.
Jane Crow was not simply a
fancy way of naming sexism.
She wasn't merely being clever.
It was, in particular,
a way to articulate
the politics of sexism coming
out of black communities that
had a deeply sophisticated
analysis of the perils
of Jim Crow.
So in my book, I
argue that quote,
"In addition to being
an early formulation
of intersectional
theory, Jane Crow
also sought to name
a powerful system
of gender disciplining within
black intellectual communities.
This system propped
up by deep investments
in the hetero norms of
respectability politics
demanded proper
sexual and gender
performances from black women if
they desired to be race leaders
and attempted to silence,
humiliate, and isolate them
when they chose not to comply."
So commensurate with
the cultural and gender
disciplining that Pauli
Murray experienced at Howard,
it was there, I argue, that
she became a race woman.
So let me say more about
what I mean by that.
And first, I want to say that
I approached Dr. Higginbotham's
expansive and pioneering
formulation of respectability
politics in this book in ways.
Let me let's talk more
about how I approach it
and think about
it as particularly
relevant because Murray's
articulation of Jane Crow
politics is deeply
tethered to black ideas
about respectability.
So I argue that respectability
politics did not
emerge after enslavement and
the end of Reconstruction
as simply a survival
strategy or simply
as a mode of public engagement.
It was certainly those things.
But I argue that
respectability discourse also
constituted one of the earliest
theorizations of gender itself
within newly emancipated
black communities.
So Anna Julia Cooper, the
pioneering 19th century
thinker, argued in her 1892
book, A Voice From the South,
that black people were quote,
"the inheritors of a manhood
and womanhood
impoverished and de-based
by two centuries and more of
compression and degradation."
So her argument was that black
people got gender concepts that
came out of enslavement
that were not particularly
useful for articulating a
notion of black humanity
in any way that would make the
argument that black people were
worthy of protection.
So respectability
politics, though it engaged
in a significant amount of
gender and class policing,
was really an attempt, I
argue, by black communities
to both articulate and
produce legible categories
of black manhood
and black womanhood.
It's not simply enough to see
it as a survival strategy.
It's also important to see
these black people coming out
of the period of enslavement
and Reconstruction,
as well deeply invested in
creating gender categories that
would articulate black humanity.
And so that means
respecting black people
as theorists of
their own condition,
as theorists of gender,
and then thinking
about Pauli Murray as herself,
a theorist of gender identity,
not merely a performer
or a participant
in existing definitions.
So by the time
Pauli Murray made it
to Howard Law
School in the 1940s,
she had reached the
institutional vanguard
for the performance of black
respectable achievements.
And I'm critiquing
my institution
because it's my institution.
The quest for
civil rights, which
Howard was deeply invested
in, unfortunately,
encoded within it an expectation
of respectable black behavior.
So Murray's insistence on
living in the tension of gender
nonconformity disrupted existing
black theories of gender--
theories and ideas that many
black communities were deeply
invested in because they saw
the de-gendering processes--
Hortense Spillers
talks about it--
in slavery as one
that had left them
with impoverished and
bankrupt conceptions of gender
in the first place.
So it is in that
context, then, that I
argue for two important
understandings of Jane Crow.
One is, of course,
to see it as part
of the early formulation of
intersectionality theorizing
and to think about it in
the intellectual history
of critical race
theory, to think about
in terms of the work that
Kimberly Crenshaw will
come along as a legal professor
and do a couple of decades
later.
But I also think
it's important to see
Jane Crow as participating
in a culture of, what I call,
gender disciplining
necessary to uphold
both black respectability
politics and existing
black gender conceptions.
Let me say, then, a bit more
about Murray's time at Howard
so that we can
have full context.
So despite the
auspiciousness of Howard's
intellectual and
political culture,
Murray bore the brunt of deeply
ingrained sexist practices.
She was the only female
student in her class.
And because of that,
she was excluded
from joining the campus
legal fraternity.
And when she
confronted the dean--
and I think many of us will say
that she was always confronting
somebody--
so when she confronted Dean
Leon Ransom about this obviously
exclusive process,
he told her to start
her own legal sorority.
She perceived her
exclusion from the quote,
"fraternity of lawyers who would
make civil rights history,"
not as an isolated
case of sexism
but rather as a representative
case of a larger practice
of sexist exclusion
among many of the most
notable civil rights pioneers.
The discovery, wrote Murray,
that Ransom and other men
I deeply admired because
of their dedication
to civil rights, men
who themselves suffered
racial indignities
could countenance
the exclusion of women from
their professional association
aroused an incipient
feminism in me
long before I knew the
meaning of the term feminism.
Her experience with the
intellectual and political
culture at Howard
involved, then,
a kind of cultural disciplining
and gender policing designed
to force Murray into her place.
Dealing with the kinds of
racial masculinity propagated
at Howard is sort of race
normative masculinity
about what respectable
black manhood should
look like and appear to be,
and the deliberate exclusion
from certain privileges on
account of her femaleness,
certainly didn't help matters.
When Murray confronted the
politics of racial manhood
in operation at Howard,
she also confronted a kind
of racial disciplining
that uncoated a demand
for strict gender conformity.
Racial respectability
demanded not only
heteronormative gender
role performances
and sexual relations, but also
cisgender identity performances
as well.
And
That's one of the things
that Murray helps us to see--
that even before we have
the language of trans
and cis, which we use today--
that there was still
the expectation
that black people,
if they wanted
to be respectable and have
any sort of public face,
would indeed be cisgender.
So she's living out
the politics of this
even though the
language hasn't been
invented to articulate
the harms and the stakes
of such practices.
Though she was clearly committed
to the uplift of her race,
Murray, as many of
us know, struggled
to quote, "become a woman."
Her own personal
process of becoming
coincides with her recognition
and increasing acknowledgement
of sexism and embrace of
feminism as a response to it.
Feminism, then, and in
particular her experience
and naming of Jane Crow, helped
Murray to reconcile herself
with femaleness and womanhood.
But she chose to acknowledge
the biological fact
of her femaleness
and came to believe
in a set of
political commitments
that challenge sexism.
This process at Howard,
this naming of Jane Crow,
was part of the
process by which she
came to embrace her
identity as a woman
because naming the
discrimination that she faced
was part of her
process of coming
into a particular kind
of gender identity.
So then I argue finally,
that Jane Crow also
named a sociospatial
race and gender formation
in the context of
black institutions,
like Howard, that shaped black
women as knowledge producers
and race leaders.
And whereas intersexual
approaches have always sought
to make black women socially and
juridically legible, Jane Crow,
Murray's concept
and theorization,
exposed the ways in which the
culture of legal institutions
in the civil rights era
symbolized by Howard Law School
both reified definitions
of womanhood--
even as it fought to
make them more visible--
but reified definitions
in ways that
could both limit and harm
queer and gender non-conforming
persons like Murray.
Thus, Jane Crow is
also deeply rooted
in a black intellectual
history context that
sought not only to
institutionalize particular
definitions of
racial freedom, i.e.
The quest for civil
rights, but also to
formalize a narrative of proper
race manhood and womanhood.
Consequently, I argue
that it was at Howard
that Murray became not only a
woman but also a race woman.
Thank you.
- Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Well, Rosalind,
reading the first page
of your amazing biography
of Pauli Murray,
I was immediately
struck, as some of you
will be, when you read that
Murray's many accomplishments,
so you argue, occurred in so
many arenas at the very time
she struggled.
And this is the
interesting phrase.
I quote Rosalind, "With
what we would today
call a transgender identity."
Now what led you to believe
that her struggles over
her gender identity
were far more
than a source of personal pain?
Because what you're
saying is not
just that she was pained about
this transgender identity
or confused about it.
You're arguing that those
very struggles over her gender
identity actually shaped all
of her political and social and
legal insights.
So talk about that.
- Struggling with that idea
made me take a very long time
with this book.
Murray lived in her head even
more than most academics do.
And late in her life,
she told a friend
that God had given her a male
brain inside a female-ish body.
And she'd felt this way for
as long as she could remember.
As a child, Murray had worn
boys' clothes, engaged in boys'
activities, read boys' books.
The neighbors laughed,
but she persisted.
You may have noticed in the
advertisement for this panel
a picture of Pauli Murray
in a Boy Scout uniform.
That picture was taken
when Pauli was 20 years old
on a hitch hiking trip that
took her through Bridgeport,
Connecticut, where she
was detained by the police
after using a men's bathroom
at the local train station.
By that time, she had abandoned
her birth name, Anna Pauline,
and was going by
the nickname, Paul.
Although, soon thereafter,
she chose the more gender
ambiguous Pauli and stuck with
it for the rest of her life.
In the years that
followed, Murray
found support for her
sense of inner maleness
in the work of early 20th
century sexologists, chief
among them, Havelock
Ellis, who argued that sex
existed on a continuum.
Everyone is partly
male and partly female.
As an extreme example,
Ellis offered the idea
of the pseudohermaphrodite--
a person with internal
organs associated
with one gender and
external characteristics
associated with another.
Bingo.
Murray felt that she had
found her self-definition
as a pseudohermaphrodite.
Murray also found encouragement
in the work of endocrinologists
in the 1930s, in her 20s,
who pointed to sex hormones
as the critical
element in determining
whether a fetus develops
into a boy or a girl.
Some scientists also
reported that hormones
could help effeminate boys
become more masculine.
And Murray reasoned
that if hormones
could help effeminate boys to
be more manly, that they could
do the same thing for her.
And so for 20 years,
Murray begged doctors
to give her testosterone.
They refused.
She requested an
x-ray of her abdomen
in order to prove that she
had internal male sex organs.
The x-rays showed nothing.
She underwent
exploratory surgery
for persistent abdominal pain.
The surgeon found an inflamed
appendix and fallopian
tube, but not the
testes that Murray
had hoped he would discover.
Not able to persuade anyone
that her true self was male,
Murray suffered repeated
emotional breakdowns.
She spent time in
psychiatric hospitals.
One doctor gave
her a diagnosis--
schizophrenia--
based on his finding
that she was under the
delusion that she was a man.
Now these personal defeats would
have destroyed most people.
But they didn't destroy Murray.
She was an extremely
resilient person.
But I think that her family
reinforced this lifesaving
quality.
She learned early on that she
was part of a long Civil Rights
Movement that stretched all
the way back to Sojourner Truth
and forward to W.E.B Du Bois,
whose magazine, The Crisis,
appeared at the family home
in Durham, in which she
read from childhood.
The pride that Murray drew
from this past helped turn
a crushing experience-- the
medical dismissal of her gender
dysphoria--
into part of a larger
campaign for human rights.
Now the historian's
secret weapon,
I was told in graduate
school, is chronology.
This is not, today,
as popular as it was
when I was in graduate school.
But I've always taken
it very seriously.
And as I created a
timeline of Murray's life,
I could see that Murray's most
important insights corresponded
to periods of most
intense personal struggle.
As an example-- and Brittney
and I did not coordinate this--
Let's take the years
1941 to 1944 when
she was at Howard Law School.
She was in her early '30s.
These were the years,
starting at Howard,
in which she developed the idea
of Jane Crow, as Brittney has
said, to convey the compounding
effect of race and gender
oppression.
The only woman in
her class, Murray
could not understand
why male classmates, who
had come to Howard to
equip themselves to fight
against race
discrimination, routinely
discriminated against
her because she
appeared to be a woman.
One of the most
important lessons
that Murray drew from
her legal education
was the power of analogy.
In college at Hunter
College in New York,
she'd learned from a
class in anthropology
that race was not a
biological fact but an idea.
In law school, Murray came
to see sex as an analogous
condition to race--
not a biological fact,
but an idea, and not
a particularly good one.
For as with the concept
of race, so was sex.
Sex and race both
were categories
that were artificial, arbitrary,
without clear boundaries.
Murray inwardly male,
outwardly female-ish
was living proof of that.
When Murray
graduated from Howard
first in the class in 1944,
she applied for graduate study
at Harvard University.
Valedictorians from
Howard Law School
routinely came here to
Harvard for an advanced degree
to prepare them to
teach in law schools,
to be professors in law schools.
Harvard rejected Pauli
Murray because of her gender.
She responded with an appeal
to the law Harvard Law School
faculty.
And at the same
time, a new doctor--
she kept getting new doctors.
The same time that a new doctor
was withholding testosterone,
this is what she wrote.
"Gentlemen, I would
gladly change my sex
to meet your requirements.
But since the way to such change
has not been revealed to me,
I have no recourse but to
appeal to you to change
your minds on this subject.
Are you to tell me that one
is as difficult as the other?
Apparently so."
Harvard would not have her.
Murray responded to
this defeat by writing
a series of papers over
the next several months
in which she laid
out an argument that
would guide her work over
the next two decades.
Her argument was that both the
13th and the 14th Amendments
barred any arbitrary
classification by color.
By analogy, she proposed
that the same reasoning
held for sex.
In the years that followed,
Murray gave up on the idea
that she had hidden
male sex organs.
She could not ignore the x-ray
and the surgical evidence
that they did not exist.
But she never
abandoned her sense
of inner maleness centered
in her male brain.
She deployed that feeling
throughout the rest of her life
to attack the laws, customs,
and practices that discriminated
first, on the basis of race;
second, on the basis of gender;
and finally, on the basis of
what she came to call status
as a "social minority", which
was as close as she was ever
to able to bring
herself in her lifetime
to meaning gay, lesbian,
bisexual, transgender,
or disabled.
Rarely has so much
personal frustration
been channeled into such
transformative public
achievement.
Murray's frustration led her
to pressure Thurgood Marshall
to attack segregation head-on
and to inspire Ruth Bader
Ginsburg to argue that
the Equal Protection
Clause of the 14th Amendment
should be understand to protect
not only against
discrimination based on race,
but also discrimination
based on gender.
Murray's work was a gift
that has kept on giving.
We are all the beneficiaries
of her courage.
- Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
- So Ken, from your
own discussion--
and it's a rich discussion.
I've used your book in
my African-American Lives
and the Law class.
In your discussion, you see
and you see through this panel,
there are so many different
perspectives on Murray.
And it does lead one to believe
that her life appeals not only
to all that was going on in
her past, but to us today.
It's so relevant.
These issues that we seem
to be talking about today
were issues that were
so germane to her.
And so, it made me wonder if
it isn't unreasonable to think
that it would take just a
whole diversity of skills
to even write about this woman.
Now, do you think
I'm exaggerating?
- No.
No I don't.
So to illustrate, I think
you speak exactly right.
And to illustrate, let
me just use some words.
How would we describe
Pauli Murray?
Well, we often describe
people by what they do.
So what did she do?
She was a writer, a poet, a
social activist, a civil rights
lawyer, a practicing lawyer--
which is different than
a civil rights lawyer.
She worked at Paul
Weiss, a white-shoe law
firm in New York-- one of
the first African-Americans
to ever work at such a
law firm in the 1950s.
She's a professor.
She's a feminist theorist.
And she was an Episcopal priest.
We might also ask, how
would we describe her
in terms of her identity?
Well, with a whole bunch of
other words that come to mind--
black woman, southerner,
mixed-race person,
black, middle-class person.
Her upbringing in
Durham was always
key to understanding how
she became who she was.
A gender non-conforming person;
our current word is queer.
She was a black American.
She went to Ghana and discovered
that Kwame Nkrumah's brand
of Pan-Africanism
was not for her.
She felt like a black American.
And human-- her final term
for all this stuff she came up
with--
I shouldn't say final.
There's never a final
for Pauli Murray.
But she came up with this
term of human rights instead
of civil rights.
So these are all words that
we can use to describe her.
But we also have to
remember that these
are, in fact, our words
that we use in the present
to describe her.
Because in fact, none of these
terms really capture her.
Because she was a person
for whom boundaries
between these kinds of
things didn't really matter,
or the boundaries were the
problem, not the solution.
So I came to a conclusion
my own research
that it was the
problem of boundaries
that led to her most
important personal struggles
and to her most
important contributions
to the larger world.
So yeah, it's really,
really hard to describe her.
And that's the challenge.
Now, I first encountered
her-- it was probably 1994.
It was my first of graduate
school at Princeton.
There was this book by
someone named Evelyn Brooks
Higginbotham either about to
come out or had just come out.
I can't remember.
I was in the basement
of Firestone Library.
And I was looking at all
these books on black lawyers.
And there was a book called
Song in a Weary Throat
by somebody named Pauli
Murray, who I'd never heard of.
You could see
immediately that there
was something different
about her just in the book.
And then the book--
as Professor Bell-Scott
and Professor Rosenberg,
and I'm sure Professor Cooper--
will just tell the public
she hid all these things
in her autobiography.
But you could still see them.
She had short hair.
She was really thin.
And she had this way of
looking, and she seemed
to be looking directly at you.
But my agenda was elsewhere.
So I knew she was interesting.
I read her autobiography.
But I went on to write about
black lawyers and black women
lawyers.
I didn't have access to
an archive at that time
about Pauli Murray.
And I wound up writing a lot
about the prior generation
of black women lawyers
before Pauli Murray
and in particular, about
a woman in Philadelphia--
a black woman lawyer
named Sadie Alexander.
And I was trying to figure
out an old question, which
is, what does it mean to say
that the legal profession is
a masculine profession, as
historian Michael Grossberg has
argued in a classic essay.
And I was writing this
book called, Representing
the Race, which was
really about what it meant
to be a lawyer of
American society
and what it meant to be
a racial representative.
And I probably would never
have written about Pauli Murray
except for this coincidence that
I have this job at Harvard Law
School, and the
Schlesinger Library
was right across the street.
So I was writing
about black lawyers.
And you've got this archive
that's right across the street.
So you've got to go.
That was the easy part.
The hard part was what I found
when I went through her papers.
I found all these
things that she did.
And also, I found
all these things
that she was, I was just
going to make her story--
I wound up writing a chapter
about her in my book.
But I was just going
to write 10 pages.
I needed to end the story
about these black women lawyers
of the previous generation.
And Pauli Murray seemed to be
this nice transition point.
It seemed like it
was generational.
10 pages on Pauli
Murray, and I'd be done.
Well, whoever can do that--
soon I had 50 pages
on Pauli Murray.
You could write a book.
You could write a series of
books and still not be done.
So I had to stop at my 50
pages and condense them down
and decide that I was done.
And I also decided that
I wasn't quite satisfied
with what other
people said about her
up until that time,
which was before actually
Professor Rosenberg and
Professor Bell-Scott's books
had come out.
A lot of the early
writing about her really
trying to reduce her to a type.
She was either a
Cold War conformist,
some people said she
was a prophetic voice
to the workplace
discrimination movement.
Some people said she
was a representative
of this Depression-era
Southern Left.
Some people said
she was an advocate
of democratic theology.
[INAUDIBLE] event or a
sex discrimination law,
or even a precursor
to the transgendered.
And something seemed wrong about
that way of thinking about her.
So I picked one particular
thing to write about.
What do you write
about with this person
who is so complicated, it's
very hard to write about her?
So I came up with this idea.
I just decided I'd
try to figure out
how she came up with Jane Crow.
And again, the
years 1941 to 1944
were really large in this story.
So I had to decide.
I decided that what
was most important
was her struggle
against boundaries.
And then I wrote this
chapter about Pauli Murray.
And then the book came out.
And people kept telling me that
it was their favorite chapter
in the book.
It really wasn't
supposed to be a chapter.
It was supposed to be 10 pages.
David Garrow reviewed it
in the Washington Post.
The loved the Pauli
Murray chapter.
You know David.
He's a critical guy.
But he at least
liked that thing.
And I'd like to think
that some of that
was due to my own efforts.
But I think it was due to the
richness of Pauli Murray's
story.
And if you try to grapple
with that richness,
you've got a great story,
no matter how you write it.
So to return to this question
about needing a diversity
of skills to capture her life.
Yes, absolutely.
That's the key.
I think hers is the
life that exists
beyond all the boundaries.
We're academics.
To be an academic is
to be a specialist.
You know your set of things.
But the problem is, she's
beyond all the sets of things
that we know.
So just to give two examples--
her signature poem is this
poem called, "Dark Testament."
She wrote poetry-- a lot of it.
And it was really important
to understanding who she was.
I'm not a literary scholar.
Or her deep-seated
Christian faith.
She was, at various times,
a Christian socialist.
She was devoted to the Episcopal
church for her entire life.
She became a priest
at a time where
she was never sure she was
even going to be ordained.
How does one assemble
the set of skills
to write about all this stuff?
Well I just got to give props to
Professor Bell-Scott, Professor
Rosenberg, and Professor
Cooper for taking
this on because I think
it was too intimidating
a task for me to try to take
over as a book length project.
So I just did a
chapter about her.
And what I decided
I'd write about
was law-- about her legal
theory of Jane Crow.
And even that
required me to arrange
through topics
that I didn't know
a lot about, like the
history of sexuality,
the history of leftist
activism, the history
of the black middle
class in Durham,
and so on, and so on, and so on.
So I think I'm right about
my conclusions in my chapter.
And I tried to write a
lot about law because that
was a thing I knew about.
And I wrote a lot
about Howard Law School
because that was a thing
I knew a whole lot about.
And I wrote a lot about her
early life of the 1930s.
But I'd say that even that was
a daunting project to take on.
And the others on
this panel have
taken on even more
daunting projects
and executed them beautifully.
And the answer to
your question is yes.
It's impossible to
really capture her story.
And there's so much
more work to be done.
- Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
- So now I'd like to ask you--
and just follow one
behind the other.
When you think about your
work with Pauli Murray, what
was it that was most
memorable, or most striking,
or something that
just got to you?
I'd like to know what
that experience was.
- What fascinates me
most, and stays with me,
and gives me energy,
and still puzzles me,
and keeps me going--
I feel like I'm not
done with Pauli.
And it is this particular issue
that I'm still feeding off of,
is the use of writing,
particularly personal writing,
as a vehicle for
coming to know herself,
as a way of dealing with
most issues of conflict,
as self-affirmation.
Just in general, the
role of writing, and it's
really important to
me because I think
in this particular moment,
where much of the attention
she is getting by
institutions, your alma mater
will give her an
honorary doctorate--
it should have done this
a long time ago-- in May,
at graduation.
- Wonderful I might have
to go to graduation.
- Yeah, you might have
to go to graduation.
Much of that is
about her activisim,
about her legal work, and the
piece I feel is getting lost,
in terms of contributions,
is her writing.
I think Proud Shoes is one
of the earliest and most
important examples of what we
now call literary nonfiction.
It is a model for
contemporary memoirs
when I look at what my
colleagues in creative writing
programs are trying
to teach people to do.
Her poetry is out of print.
But I hear that that
collection may see light again.
So I am very interested in
how important writing was
to her health, to her advocacy.
And I wanted to
share two examples.
One example is from
a letter that's
frequently quoted as of late.
It's written during
the-- here we
go to that period
of 1941 to 1944,
when she's working
through a lot of issues.
She has just come from
being hospitalized.
And this is after she has really
been ostracized and treated
very badly by her
peers and the faculty.
And it has to do with
her crush on a sophomore.
And she is just distraught
because this is a relationship
that is not going to work.
And I'm just going to
read just brief excerpts.
And I think what you'll see
is her working through things
but also her writing as
a form of resistance.
This is one of the things
she says in this letter.
It's a letter to
her Aunt Pauline.
"This little
boy-girl personality,
as you jokingly call
it, Aunt Pauline,
sometimes gets me into trouble.
And I'm no further
along to adjustment
than I was in the summer of
1935, when I was at home."
She regularly keeps
notes when she's
in hospitals of what she's
feeling, what she's thinking,
what she's saying to doctors.
And this is what she writes.
"I got caught between
certain medical rivalries.
And the particular
doctor threatened
to have me sent to
Gallagher Hospital
for mental observations.
And I, of course,
might have been put out
of commission for a long time
on the basis of family history
alone if that had
been carried out."
She doesn't write about her
family history of mental health
problems.
There's a history in the family.
And that's not in
the autobiography.
And then she also
says, "I have done
nothing of which to be
ashamed of outside the rules
of society.
And yet if it had not been
for people like Dr. Ransom--
these are her mentors--
my whole career for
two years at Howard
would have gone up in smoke."
"Mother, you've been
so understanding,
both you and Aunt Sally.
But where you and a
few people understand,
the world does not understand
or accept my pattern of life.
And to try to live by
society's standards always
causes me such inner
conflict that at times, it's
almost unbearable.
I don't know whether I'm
right or whether society
or some medical
authority is right.
I only know how I feel
and what makes me happy.
This conflict rises up to
kick me down at every apex
I reach in my career, and
because the laws of society
do not protect me, I am exposed
to any person or enemy who may
or may not want to hurt me."
So very clarifying ideas of
where the boundaries are,
who's for her, who's against
her, what's fair, what's not--
but clear about what she needs
and where she would like to go.
And another example
I'd like to share
comes from a period
when she's really
upset about not being able to
go to the University of North
Carolina.
They rejected her on
racial grounds in 1939.
And she was [INAUDIBLE].
She really thought
that she might
be able to be admitted because
of a recent court ruling.
And it involved a young
man, Lloyd Gaines,
who the court said
deserved to be
admitted to the University
of Missouri Law School.
But before he could
enroll, he disappeared.
And he was never found again.
He was believed to
be murdered or--
so Pauli was just outraged.
And I share this because
this is one sentence, which
shows you the energy that comes
to her in moments like this.
And this is what she's writing
because there's been a prize
fight in the black community.
People were really
excited about this.
And the title of
this hot article
is called, "Who is to Blame
for the Disappearance of Lloyd
Gaines?"
This is the final paragraph.
She writes, "We Negroes can
throng the streets 300,000
strong, break bottles over
resisting heads, stop traffic,
commandeer buses and
other public vehicles,
and show unprecedented
aggressiveness, joy,
and hilarity when a Joe Lewis
knocks out a single white
opponent by appointment,
but when a Lloyd Gaines
single-handedly comes up against
the whole region of the country
with its hidebound folkways
of white supremacy,
with its lynching parties, and
with the great majority of its
population disenfranchised
and disinherited--
when he battles his way
to the Supreme Court
and back again
facing the insults,
the butts of criticism, the
uncertainties, the threats,
the inner great struggle between
idealism and personal safety--
when he does all this
alone with scarcely more
than his own conscience
and a few loyal friends
to reassure him, not a
single mass demonstration
is held anywhere in the country,
in spite of this biting call."
She concludes this by
saying, "Find Lloyd Gaines
if he can be found.
If not, finish the job
he left uncompleted."
One sentence is all that.
That's how much she cared.
- So a couple of
things really strike me
and that stick with
me about Pauli Murray.
Because I care a lot about black
women's intellectual history
I'm just struck by the breadth
of how many intellectual
interventions she is
at the forefront of--
whether we're talking about
feminist theory, critical race
theory.
Her thesis in Divinity
School was a comparison
between black liberation
theology and feminist theology.
So that's the precursor
to what we come
to know as womanist theology.
You actually can't start it if
you don't look at her thesis.
And so she really
invents and helps
to create a context for many
of the major intellectual
interventions that come
out of black studies
and feminist thought in
the 20th and 21st century.
And I hope that
she will continue
to get credit for that.
On a more narrow note,
in 1969, Dr. Murray
is a professor of American
Studies at Brandeis.
And it's happening
at the same time
that black students
take over the campus.
They are demanding the
founding of black studies.
And so she's brought in.
She works on the
administration there.
And want her to help keep
these black students in line.
It's in line with
institutional practices today.
Black students act up.
And then folks say, who can we
bring to help them feel better?
But Murray was
conflicted because she
was very ambivalent about
this new turn to Blackness.
By this point in her
life she had really
embraced a multiracial
perspective of herself.
She preferred to be called
Negro with a capital N.
And she said that quote,
"The rhetoric of Black Power"
quote "grated upon
her sensibilities"
because she felt that she was
quote "living in a world turned
upside down with a complete
reversal of the goals
that had fired her
own student activism."
So she saw the Black Power
Movement, who she derisively
called The Apostles
of Black Consciousness
as deeply masculinist
and patriarchal, which
is a fair critique.
But because of that, it
made her particularly
resistant to the all-consuming
power of Blackness.
And at that same moment,
she loves these students.
And she's deeply
committed to them.
Patricia Hill Collins
is one of her students,
who she talks about briefly in
a line of her autobiography.
And she says, I had this
wonderful senior student who
walks out of the class yelling,
"black solidarity" one day,
"Black power".
And it was Patricia
Hill Collins.
And I emailed Dr. Collins.
I said, was this you?
And she said yes.
This was my professor.
And so there's also these
different genealogies
of black feminist thought.
But the thing that I
wonder in this moment
of the movement for Black
Lives, is how Dr. Murray
might think about it.
Because I think she would be
deeply resistant to the embrace
of the primacy of
Blackness and this analysis
of anti-Blackness.
And I think it would make
her very uncomfortable.
But I think the
challenge for her
would be that it is the
movement for Black Lives
that has been at the forefront
of saying that we will center.
And we will prioritize black
gender nonconforming and trans
people--
that their lives
matter, that they have
to be a political priority.
And so I think her resistance
to the analytic of Blackness
was because she saw
it as bespeaking
particular analogical
limitations on gender.
So the moves that she could
make around gender and sexuality
in her lifetime, her history
allowed her to make those moves
in terms of race.
So she couldn't be a sexual
person the way that she wanted.
But she could be multiracial
because it was her background.
And so I think that
she saw Blackness
as really limiting and
putting her in another box.
And yet in this moment, the
fervor around young people
of color's ability to be gender
nonconforming unapologetically
and to say that that is
a part of black politics,
has happened on the backs of
a new Black Power Movement.
So I think it would create
real conflict for her.
And I'm just reminded,
then, of a question
that she asked I found in
the archives when I was here.
She wrote this piece
in 1942 called,
"Negro Youth's Dilemma."
And it was about all
of the angst and anger
of her generation
around World War II.
But in 1969, she
pulled out a copy
of "Negro Youth's Dilemma."
And she just scribbled
on the bottom
of it, "Postscript 1969--
Another war, another
generation of angry youth.
How do slash shall
we answer them?"
- I never experienced
an epiphany.
It was more a slow dawning.
Eleanor Roosevelt paved
the way by giving me
my first big break as a writer.
I interviewed her in 1960
when I was 14 years old.
She was spending the
winter at the Arizona Inn.
We talked about
the Soviet Union,
the value of learning
Russian, and the importance
of getting to know people
different from ourselves.
I published the story in my
Tucson high school newspaper.
It was my very first story.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
continued my education.
When I reached Columbia as an
assistant professor in 1974,
Columbia Law School's first
tenured female professor,
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, made me
aware of Pauli Murray, whose
name she had
included with her own
on her first brief in the case
called Reed v. Reed, which
the Supreme Court
recognized gender
as an arbitrary classification.
But at the time, I
didn't fully understand
how pivotal Murray was.
Not until I read
Murray's autobiography,
Song in a Weary Throat,
in 1987 that I finally
appreciate Murray's
pioneering role
in civil rights,
modern feminism,
and in the shaping of
modern jurisprudence.
I included her as a transitional
figure in my history of women
in the 20th century, which
I called Divided Lives.
Pauli Murray linked Eleanor
Roosevelt and Ruth Bader
Ginsburg.
But it was only
in the mid 1990s,
after the Schlesinger
Library made Murray's papers
available to researchers, that
Murray's importance finally
dawned on me.
I was struck, especially, by her
long-term struggle over gender
identity, as I've said,
and its connection
to her campaign against
what she called, Jane Crow.
As many researchers
have found, box 4
was particularly striking.
Reading Pauli Murray's
notes to her herself--
and as a parenthetical,
one reason
I became a 20th
century historian
was because I had
so much difficulty
with people's handwriting.
In the 20th century, people
start using the typewriter.
Pauli Murray had the
typewriter with her
in the hospitals she either
voluntarily entered or was
consigned to.
These notes are typewritten--
not the letter to Aunt
Pauline but the letters
from the hospitals.
And they were
incredibly powerful.
The clarity of her conviction
that she was inwardly male--
a pseudohermaphrodite,
as she said;
how hard she fought with doctors
to help her change her outward
appearance to align
with her inner self--
how poignant to read
about that at a time
when there was no social
movement to support her.
That was very,
very moving to me.
These notes end in the 1950s.
By then, she'd
given up on the idea
that she was a
pseudohermaphrodite.
But later letters
and diary entries
made clear that she never
abandoned her belief
in her maleness, especially
in her years as a priest.
She came to think
of God as having
made her a person in between--
male on the inside,
female on the outside--
to serve as a bridge,
to help others
overcome the socially
imposed divisions
of male and female, black
and white, North and South,
rich and poor.
That goal of hers
of reconciliation
that she pursued
in the priesthood
was what I found
most moving and what
made me want to tell her story.
- Well, what really struck
me about researching
Pauli Murray was I think,
basically, everything.
By that I mean, every time
you go to research something,
the story winds up being
a lot more complicated
than you imagined it to be.
So I'll just give you
a couple of examples.
I decided that I needed to learn
a little bit about Durham's
black community
and her growing up.
And what did that mean?
And I read a whole lot about it.
And then I read Proud Shoes.
And I was just going
to skim Proud Shoes.
But you start reading
it, and you actually
wind up having to read it
because it's so well written.
- It's a great book.
- And the story she tells
is just fascinating.
I was like, OK, she's
from a black middle class
community in Durham.
E. Franklin Frazier wrote this
wonderful essay, "Durham--
Capital of the
Black Middle Class".
Lots of the people have
written about Durham.
Turns out that her family--
they're both in,
and they're not in.
That's the key to that
part of Proud Shoes.
They don't live in West
Durham, which is where
most of the black people live.
They live out of town.
There's this little marsh in
the story that's a metaphor.
It's between her house and the
rest of the black community.
And she talks about encountering
all these other people
who are on the other
side of the marsh
and how that's so
difficult and complicated.
You start to think,
well you have
to learn about the black
middle class in Durham
to understand her and
where she comes from.
But it turns out that
she's on the other side
of this boundary, which she
writes about in Proud Shoes.
And the boundary is
really complicated.
And what does it mean?
It means a bunch of
different things.
But that's like every
story about Murray.
The Howard Law School story,
which we've all written about.
And I read it in
her autobiography.
And I thought I knew
what was going on.
But the more I delved
into it, the harder
it was to understand
what was going on.
Leon Ransom is her mentor.
He's the Howard law
professor who encourages
her to apply to law school.
And she credits him
with saving her.
But he's also one of
these sexist professors
that convinces her that
something's really wrong.
And she's got to put
a better name to it.
So everything about
Howard is ambiguous.
She loves being there.
She loves being
part of that group
of African-American male
civil rights lawyers.
But she's also not
part of it as well.
And I think the
relationship with Ransom
is a metaphor for
the whole thing.
Ransom is both a
sexist and the person
who, when she has this failed
affection for this Howard
undergraduate, she credits
him as the person who
really stood up for her
when nobody else would.
So every story about
Murray is like that.
You think you know the story.
And you think you
know the boundaries.
But then the boundaries
aren't clear.
And she's outside of them.
And the last example
I give is this,
how to think about
Murray in the present.
And I've gone on record about
this about my skepticism
about making present
[INAUDIBLE] to Murray.
But I don't know.
In 2013, President Obama gives
his second inaugural address.
And he's talking about the
Declaration of Independence,
the Civil Rights Movement.
All of a sudden, he's talking
about gays and lesbians.
And everyone's saying, oh,
what a wonderful thing it is.
And so I write an op-ed
about Pauli Murray
and about how she's this
little-known progenitor
of this move that
Obama finally did.
And it's funny, I caught myself
doing what everybody does--
you mobilize in Murray
to deal with the present.
And is that right?
Is that not right?
I think it is right
because I think--
my own thesis about Murray was
that it was the boundaries,
that she didn't like
being classified
as a particular thing, as being
part of a particular group.
She did, and she didn't.
She was very proud
of being a Negro.
She's very proud of things
to the end of her life.
But am I right to say that
when we think about things
like bathroom bills
and things like that,
do I know which side
Murray would be on?
Yeah, I think I am right.
Because she was really
about these boundaries.
I don't know which way she
would classify herself.
Her story's always
more complicated
than we make it out to be.
But the one thing
that was constant
was this questioning
of boundaries
and always seeing [INAUDIBLE]
complicated things
both helpful to her and harmful
to her at the same time.
And I think that was the most
surprising thing and the most
unsettling thing
that I found when I
was researching Murray's story.
- Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
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