This post is part of the Breathing is Brilliant reprise of the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus for Black History Month 2019.

“Give me a song of hope and a world where I can sing it,” is a both a demand and prayer from Pauli Murray’s poem “Dark Testament.”  In “Dark Testament” Pauli Murray, calls for the United States to be transformed by the freedom dreams and healing wisdom of enslaved and indigenous ancestors.  Pauli Murray followed up on that demand with righteous letters to newspaper editors almost every single day, and a stunning career as a Civil Rights lawyer.  Pauli was the legal mind behind the Brown vs. Board of Education strategy and the first person to fully document the legal intersections of racism and sexism in every state of the union.

And Pauli Murray’s relationship to institutions was deep.  As a Civil Rights lawyer, Pauli Murray worked to undo the enslaving legal system that Pauli’s own white slave-holding ancestors had helped build in the state of North Carolina.  Pauli Murray sought entrance to UNC Chapel Hill, the university those same enslaving ancestors helped to found, and was denied because of the persistence of segregation laws that those same ancestors used to protect their power and enshrine their right to extract labor and abusive pleasure from Pauli’s Black ancestors, including her great-grandmother who was “owned” by these lustful white legal minds and survived multiple rapes within the same family right here in Chapel Hill. How could any of this ever lead us to a “song of hope”?

Pauli Murray tested institutions decade after decade as the only woman at Howard Law, granted a full scholarship to Harvard for a PhD that went unclaimed because Harvard would not admit a woman, riding in “the wrong” car on segregated trains while dressed as a man, establishing love relationships with white women and advocating from a mental institution for hormone replacement therapy before there was even a name for HRT, Pauli Murray’s persistence didn’t come without a cost.  Pauli was committed to mental institutions multiple times, usually after a break-up with a woman, a particularly horrifying fate for Pauli in particular whose father was murdered by a guard in a mental institution when Pauli was a young child.   Is this a world worth singing about?

Later in life Pauli Murray would refer to this song as “a song in a weary throat.” Pauli Murray spoke out again and again and struggled with blatant exclusion on multiple fronts, while somehow also maintaining a multi-decade friendship with one of the most privileged women of the time, Eleanor Roosevelt, and post-humously being canonized as an Episcopal saint.  What does Pauli Murray’s life have to teach us about a transgressive relationship to institutions, including the institutions of religion, family, slavery, education, law and asylum?

For me, Pauli Murray’s constant interventions remind me that there are lessons to be gleaned and truths to be told at the limits of every institution.  And within any institution that has existed more than one generation there are cycles to be broken and violence to account for.  Pauli Murray’s poetry is intergenerational, it speaks to the experiences of Black and indigenous people since before colonization.  Pauli Murray’s investment in the law is also about its intergenerational scale.  New precedents became possible because of the barriers Pauli tested in almost every area of political, spiritual and social life.  That’s why when we drive by the murals of Pauli Murray (created through a process led by Brett Cook) all over Durham we shout THANK YOU PAULI!  It is why LGBT ally and NC hip-hop preacher Rashad created the album “A Conversation with Pauli Murray.”  It is why we partnered with the Pauli Murray Project a few months ago to hold Dark Testament Oracle: Sermons of Black Trans Divinity at Pauli Murray’s old elementary school.

Patricia Bell-Scott, historian of Pauli Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt’s friendship and co-editor with Akasha Gloria Hull and Barbara Smith of the foundational anthology All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies recalls getting a letter from Pauli Murray upon the publication of the book where Pauli said “some of my lost causes are being found,” as an affirmation to the work of Black feminists a generation later and what would happen beyond Pauli’s lifetime.

What if some of your most major contributions will be your “losses”? How might multiple generations benefit from the fights you lose, the institutions you fail to transform, the claims you make that aren’t even recognized as claims yet? Ask yourself, in the spirit of Pauli Murray, what are you willing to risk, to lose, to be excluded from for the sake of an intergenerational possibility?  

We are offering this meditation as an invocation of Pauli Murray’s intergenerational song request. Give me a song of hope and world where I can sing it.

To learn more about Pauli Murray’s life and impact read Pauli’s books Proud Shoes, Song in a Weary Throat and Dark Testament.

Or read the recent work of historians including Jane Crow by Rosalind Rosenberg, The Firebrand and the First Lady by Patricia Bell-Scott and Beyond Respectability by Brittney Cooper.  Or visit the website for the Pauli Murray Center in Durham, NC.

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And here are links if you want to support the Black Feminist Bookmobile Project and the ongoing work of the Mobile Homecoming Trust Living Library and Archive.

Loving you with every breath (because breathing is brilliant,)

       Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs