The Pauli Murray imperative
Ninety-two years ago this fall, a determined young African-American woman named Pauline Murray enrolled at Hunter College, then a tuition-free all-women’s school. She had graduated with honors from Richmond Hill High School in Queens, but there was far more to her unique past — not to mention her extraordinary future.
Destined, as Pauli Murray, to break new ground as an activist-theorist for civil rights, women’s rights and LGBTQI rights, she has been too long relegated to the margins of American history — though she is at last entering the forefront thanks to the new Amazon documentary, “My Name is Pauli Murray,” directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West.
Born in poverty in Baltimore, raised by her mother’s family in North Carolina, Pauline moved to New York City on her own at age 16 to pursue her education. Originally, she aspired to attend Columbia, then learned it did not admit women. Its sister school, Barnard, was too expensive. Hunter, as former Daily News writer Karen Hunter has noted, “held no admission bias on race, gender or economic status.” Moreover, it was located “in the New York” of Pauline’s “dreams.”
From the first, Pauli’s professors recognized something special about her. Her English teachers encouraged her to pursue her gift for writing, awarding her an “A” for a paper about her grandmother that she eventually expanded into a 1956 memoir, “Proud Shoes.” For all her struggles with racial and gender identity, she found a haven at the college. As she put it in her freshman year, Hunter “was a diminutive society whose citizens had equal chance to rise to the top” — a “natural training ground for feminism.” When she graduated in 1933, she was one of only four women of color to receive a diploma.
And Pauli had yet to meet the extraordinary woman who lived just down the block from Hunter’s Manhattan campus: Eleanor Roosevelt. (The building is now Hunter’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute.) But their paths were soon to cross — or, one might say, collide. Eleanor moved to the White House. And Pauli, with few job opportunities even for college grads during the Depression, entered Camp Tera, a New Deal outpost at Bear Mountain, one of several that Mrs. Roosevelt had fought to establish as women’s alternatives to the all-male Civilian Conservation Corps. There, in 1934, the two came face to face.
When Eleanor arrived for an inspection tour, campers rose to greet the First Lady. Pauli remained conspicuously seated. That encounter unexpectedly began an extraordinary friendship.
“I was the girl who did not stand up when you passed through the
Social Hall of Camp Tera,” Pauli wrote ER with typical frankness. The camp’s business manager “criticized me afterward, but I thought and still feel that you are the sort of person who prefers to be accepted as a human being and not a human paragon.” Pauli was right. Eleanor did not mind; she thought Camp Tera “too strict.”
Over the next quarter-century, Eleanor befriended and mentored the Hunter alumna, and Pauli served ER as an unofficial adviser and conscience, demanding that the Roosevelt administration “dramatize the fascist-like nature of lynching, segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and the comparable stupidities of racial supremacy.” As the saying goes: “You can always tell a Hunter girl, but you can’t tell her much.”
With Eleanor’s encouragement, Pauli began a lifetime of activism. After being arrested for sitting down in the whites-only section of a segregated Petersburg, Va., bus, she enrolled at Howard University Law School, where she graduated first — and the only woman — in her class. When Harvard, based on her gender, denied her entrance to pursue further studies, she memorably dubbed the school’s restrictive admissions policies “Jane Crow,” and got a post-graduate degree from Yale instead.
Pauli Murray went on to author “States’ Laws on Race and Color,” a book Thurgood Marshall dubbed the “bible” of the Civil Rights Movement; served on the first Presidential Commission on the Status of Women (appointed by JFK); and co-founded the National Organization for Women. She taught at colleges in the U.S. and Africa, then left academia for the church, becoming in 1977 the first-ever Black female Episcopal priest.
Long deserving of greater acknowledgment for her life’s work, Pauli also symbolizes the opportunities that Hunter and the entire City University have long offered students questing for a share of the American dream.
From Rosalyn Yalow and Bella Abzug to Audre Lorde and Ruby Dee to Martina Arroyo and Antonia Pantoja, students of all backgrounds have found at Hunter a launching pad to unrestricted futures.
This fall and winter, as New York State commences its annual budget process, one can only hope that support for CUNY can be restored to the robust levels of the past — levels that once helped students like Pauli Murray, denied access to elite or restrictive colleges, find inspiration and possibility building their lives, and eventually enhancing ours.
Raab is president of Hunter College.