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brilyahntpeacenotes-blog · 10 days ago

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Notes on Autobiography of Pauli Murray

The name of this text is Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet formerly title Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage. This is the 3rd paperback edition printed in 1997

The following notes are mainly quotes from the book related to specific subjects. Pauli Murray was a Black, queer, likely trans person who left an indelible mark on this world and greatly influenced the Civil Rights and Human Rights movements in the USA and beyond. She or they (there is controversy about what pronouns Pauli may have used in this day and age) were a courageous trailblazer. I would say, Pauli Murray is one of my heroes. I cry reading their words and hearing about their story.

I am currently on chapter 13 of 35 and will add quotes and notes as I continue.

The quotes are separated by subject as I have determined.

On gender and queerness

"My talents never included handicraft...the divisions of labor in our household was such that I did not cook. I would have enjoyed working with a hammer and tools, but cooking and sewing seemed beyond me..." (p 22)

"At home...[my] duties were to split and stack endless loads of wood and kindling, keep all the rooms supplied with scuttles of coal...feed the chickens...clean wicks and chimneys...scrub the outhouse, white wash the trees and fences...hoe the garden, cut down weeds..." (p 22)

For pay PM would clean her aunts house for 25¢. Pm also had a newspaper rout earning up to $1.30

On disability

"Grandfather's blindness did not prevent him from contributing to the family enterprises...In the springtime he would prune the grapevines so that each new crop of grapes would be large and juice." (p 21)

"My initial assignment was a teacher on the WPA Remedial Reading Project...Remedial reading was then a new concept...I had only 2 or 3 children in my classroom at any one time. Each child was tested for his or her particular reading disabilities, and then I constructed a set of reading materials for that child's individual use...the children did not have to compete with each other, only with their own records." (p 100 - 101)

This sounds like an early version of Special Education programs and individualized education plans

PM noted many educator did not fund value in the program or used it as a way to get rid of "discipline" problems....The latter is something echoed today especially with students labeled under EBD

PM mentioned feeling isolated from professional collegues in part because of the program goals (helping students with reading disabilities) and in part because it was a WPA project...likely similar to "professional educators" today response to Teach For America or similar programs.

On protest/resistance/rebellion

"My aunts were "Race women" of their time. They took pride in every acheivment of "the race" and agonized over every lynching..." (p 30)

"I carried on my own private protest. I walked almost everywhere to stay off the Jim Crow streetcars and I would not go downtrown to the theaters because that meant climbing the back stairs to the colored "peanut gallery". (p 32)

Pauli Murray reflects on their childhood in Durham, NC and the ways they avoided subjecting themselves to the humiliations of segregation and Jim Crow laws and policies.

"I had cast my first vote in the election of 1932, and it was a vote of protest. Since I would not vote Republican and, having lived under the apartheid of Democratic rule in the "solid South, could not bring myself to vote for a Democrat, I had voted for the Socialist candidate, Norman Thomas." (p 93)

"For all my bravado, deeply engrained notions of respectability filled me with distress. It was one thing to ride freights anonymously or sleep in jails in strange towns where I was unknown. It was quite another to carry a picket sign in the heart of Harlem, where many people knew me. I felt as if I had been asked to parade in public undressed..." (p 99)

This quote is a reflection of PM's first picket line. Joined in support of friend, Ted Poston, who was picketing a Black weekly paper, New York Amsterdam News. Ted and others had organized a local unit of the American Newspaper Guild. He had been arrested previously for picketing. PM was arrested at this picket line but the judge dismissed their case.

Labor protest at this time are in line with history I have studied in Minneapolis about Black labor movements during this era.

"Pee Wee had an amazing sense of her own worth, and she feared no one. Her strong convictions about civic responsibilities lef her to write long letters to public officials [over social concerns]...I owe Pee Wee's example my later habit of writing to newspapers and public figures on social issues, letters I came to call "confrontation by typewriter." (p 96

On the nearness of Slavery

"Racial lines, which had been blurred to some extent during Reconstruction, were now being drawn ighter by the wave of segregation laws enacted by southern states in the wake of the 1896 Plessy decision, which validated the doctrine of "separate but equal." (p. 14)

"On the all [in Pauli's childhood home in Durham, North Carolina] above the cross hung Miss Mary Ruffin Smith's painting of a mother of pearl fountain cascading from a silver basic. Grandmother Cornelia gave this painting an honored place in our household as a testimony to the strong bond of affection that had existed between her and the antebellum who had been both her blood relative and legal owner." (p. 19)

"...but Grandfather's tiny pension from his Civil War service was little more than enough to keep up the taxes." (p. 21)

Pauli's childhood home included her grandparents and Aunt Pauline and was owned by her Grandparents

"The preservation of the Negro cultural heritage was another important aspect of WPA activity. Interviews conducted with many former slaves preserved their firsthand stories before they passed from the scene." (p. 100)

Pauli is discussing her recollection of Works Progress Administration program that was focused on collecting and recording the history of living formerly enslaved people.

When Pauli Murray (PM) was 5 years old they participated in a play called "Fifty Years of Freedom" put on by an organization her aunts, who were race women, participated in. Later, they (PM) found an earlier version of the play titled "Thirty Years of Freedom" likely put on in 1890.

"In our segregated world, we had a sense of identity and a sense of racial pride, fragile though they might be. We were close to the roots of our immediate past because many elderly people still alive who had been born in slavery." (p 31)

[Pauli Murray's Grandmother Cornelia]

On passing

"...Pauline Fitzgerald [Aunt Pauline] married young, blond, blue eyed Charles Morton Dame, fresh from Howard University Law School but they had not reckoned with the formidable barriers to the success practice of law by a colored man...The best young Dame could do was to earn a few dollars...writing wills and deeds for white attorneys, income supplemented by his wife's meager earnings as a teacher...

Some of the white men for whom he worked told him flatly that he would never get anywhere as a colored lawyer..."You're as white as any white man...and you'll have a better chance if you cross the line..."

...the temptation to end a grubbing existence finally overpowered Charles Dame. He told his wife what he had decided to do and tried to persuade her to join him. She, too, looked indistinguishable from a Caucasian, and the two of them would have had little difficulty fading into the white background. Aunt Pauline's refusal brought an end to their marriage." (p 14 - 15)

Aunt Pauline was married around 1899

"During the first half century after Emancipation, thousands of near whites exercised this option to escape racial oppression..." (p 15)

"Once when a fair skinned form the North came to visit and took me to town one day for company, she made me stand outside while she went into the stores on Main Street. She said they would give her better service if they did not know she was colored. (p 32)

Pauli, like many Black Americans*, is of a mixed, multiracial, multiethnic background. This included African, European and Native American heritage. Their relatives, like many Black Americans, had relatives who ranged in skin color from deep, dark skin to fair, pale skin.

Pauli's Aunt Pauline, who is also her namesake and legal guardian, was greatly offended by this relative's actions and did not allow Pauli to interact with them privately moving forward.

*Black Americans on this blog refers to people of African descent who survived USA chattel slavery, the maafa and have lived in the USA for the last several hundred years.

"It was no secret that my fairer-skinned relatives indulged in casual "passing"...in their pragmatic view it was not disloyalty to "the race"...Curiously enough, my relatives from the South did not bother to pass where segregation was most oppressive, but sometimes did in the North, where they were unknown and jobs were at stake. (p 34)

PM mentions a story where her Aunt Marie/Maria passed in the North for higher wages, but did not pass in the South and lived as a negro while working in the colored county schools (p 34)

"Some girls married Italian men and disappeared completely from the colored race. Others "passed" sporadically, working white collared jobs..." (p 35)

PM talks of a cousin who would bleach his hair blonde and another who wore wigs to cover his "kinky coils" (and was eventually found out by a white woman caller)

PM also tells the story of Amos Burton, who they name as the first Negro professional baseball player, was known to be colored in his hometown but known nationally (p 35)

On segregation

"College graduates were hit hard as other groups...the New York Times reported an estimated 10,000 unemployed college graduates in New York City...One could spot several women on any floor at Macy's wearing the Hunter College ring -- that is, if they were white. Negroes were limited to elevator and cleaning jobs whether they had a degree or not." (p 92)

When Pauli intially visited NYC as a child/teen they commented on how free it felt compared to Durham, NC. Their experiences after moving there quickly highlight that the colorline was still in place if more liberal...This highlights that segregation, though not always enshrined in law in Northern states and cities, was still a firm practice

"[Great Uncle Richard] had defied custom and bought the property in the face of fierce opposition from white people. It was said in the family that a white businessman named Tom Walker had fallen out with some of his asociates and settled his grudge by selling his home to a colored man." (p 29)

"It was confusing to me because I was both related to white people and alienated from them." (p 31)

"While this discriminating assessment of he whie population prevented me from developing a blanket hatred of all white people, there was a threshold reserve which applied to the white world generally." (p. 31)

"white aristocrats" were cool to PM's family, they were "nice white people"

"mean, prejudiced white republicans" which Pm compares to the contemporary (at the time the book was written) "whitey" and "honkie"

PM did not/was not allowed to greet white people on their porch even their neighbors

"My meager contact with white people was paradoxical, since the two races lived close together, and, within the limits of the strict racial code...My family prederred never to cross the gulf that separated us from white people unless we could do so without lsing our dignity and pride." (p 34)

"It was a straitjacket existence, which became more oppressive as I grew older." (p 34)

"The only hope for me to go to college, it seemed, was to matriculate at the North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham. Since I was determined not to attend a segregated college, this prospect prompted my first overt stand against racial segregation. " (p 65)

"...the overriding purpose of segregation was to humiliate and degrade colored people." (p 109)

"During [FDR's] 6 years he had been in the White House, I had become increasingly dismayed over his apparent coziness with white supremacy in the South, his silence on civil rights and his refusal to speak out for a federal antilynching bill, which the NAACP had modestly proposed." (p 111)

#pauli murray #black history #queer history #autobiography #brilyahnt peace notes #brilyahnt peace

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