Song in a Weary Throat

Pauli captioned this photo:  "The Imp!"

This is the text of the sermon I delivered to the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Sunday, June 18, 2017.

“I have never been able to accept what I believe to be an injustice. Perhaps it is because of this I am America’s problem child ...”

“America’s problem child.”  That’s the way – one of the ways – that the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray saw herself … and not without some reason.  Pauli was one of the founders of the Congress of Racial Equality, and she encouraged Betty Friedan to create what she called an “N.A.A.C.P. for women.”  (Pauli was one of the original 28 women who founded the National Organization for Women.)  She was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a bus when instructed to do so by the driver … 20 years before Rosa Parks in Montgomery.   She organized sit-ins that successfully desegregated restaurants in Washington, D.C. decades before the demonstrations at that Woolworth’s counter in Greensboror; and she anticipated the Freedom Summer of 1964 in urging her white classmates from law school to head south to fight for civil rights, wondering how to “attract young white graduates of the great universities to come down and join with us.”  She was a problem child.

While a law school student – the only woman in her school – Pauli suggested that the way to overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine enshrined in Plessy v. Ferguson was not to attack the “equal” part, which had been the strategy for roughly the previous 50 years.  She proposed instead that you could attack the “separate” part, and in her final paper she laid out the arguments to do so.  Although her classmates and teachers laughed at her, Thurgood Marshall is known to have made use of that paper when he was preparing for Brown v. Board of Education.  Pauli also wrote a paper that Ruth Bader Ginsberg would later use to develop her argument that the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment should be recognized as extending to women, too. Pauli was a problem child for the American status quo.  Yet for years Pauli was relatively unknown.  In her article about Pauli for The New Yorker, “The Many Lives of Pauli Murray,” Kathryn Schulz sums up her life by saying that it was Pauli’s fate “to be both ahead of the time and behind the scenes.” 

Pauli Murray lived an incredible life.  She wrote what Thurgood Marshall called “the Bible” for civil rights lawyers, States’ Laws on Race and Color, as well as a book of her poetry, Dark Testament (from which Arthur read an excerpt a moment ago.) She was the first African American to receive a J.S.D from Yale.  President Kennedy picked her to serve on his Commission on the Status of Women, and, while working as a senior lecturer at the Ghana School of Law, she was part of the team that drafted Ghana’s new Constitution.  (She put her own life in jeopardy while doing this because of her insistence that the Constitution included guarantees of freedom.) In 1947, Mademoiselle magazine declared her “Woman of the Year.”   

She knew Langston Hughes; had a decades long friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt; worked with Bayard Rustin, A. Phillip Randolph, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; and hung out at the Harlem nightclub Jock’s Place with … my mother.  (That’s why I’ve been feeling comfortable calling her Pauli, she was always “Pauli” in our family.) Shortly after Pauli died my mom wrote in her journal:

I thought her one of the most extraordinary people I’d met in my life then; I feel the same about her now.

The freedom of her spirit to dream daringly and then to accomplish those dreams was the most wonderful thing about her.

She began as a poet who became a lawyer and then an Episcopal priest.  But, always she was a poet, who observed people with compassion and humor, who reacted to the world with passion.

Earthbound and pedantic in contrast, I thank God I had the imagination to establish and maintain a relationship with her, because it was a nourishing relationship.  One of the most important in my life.

But this isn’t a sermon about the wonderfully extraordinary life of Saint Pauli (yes, the Episcopal Church has named her a saint).  None of these successes did not come easy.

When Pauli – then Anna Pauline – was three years old her mother died in front of her from a cerebral hemorrhage.  Her father then sent her to live with her maternal Aunt, for whom she’d been named, Pauline Fitzgerald.  There were no other children in the house, only her Aunt Pauline, and her parents, Cornelia and Robert.  Cornelia, Pauli’s grandmother, had been born in slavery.  Cornelia’s mother – Pauli’s great-grandmother – was a part-Cherokee slave named Harriet, and Pauli’s great-grandfather was the son of Harriet’s owner, and Harriet’s frequent rapist.

When Pauli was about six, her father was committed to the Crownsville State Hospital for the Negro Insane, suffering from the effects of grief, anxiety, poverty, and illness.  Some years later, a racist guard dragged her father into the basement of the hospital, where he beat him to death with a baseball bat. Pauli was only 12.  She once said that “the most important fact about [her] childhood is that [she] was an orphan.”

Pauli described herself as a, “a thin, wiry, ravenous child.”  She taught herself to read by the age of five.  By the time she graduated high school -- at fifteen -- she was the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, the president of the literary society, class secretary, a member of the debate club, the top student … and a forward on the basketball team.

She could have easily gotten into the North Carolina College for Negroes, but she had already been resisting racist segregation from her earliest years. She’d walked wherever she could, because she refused to ride in the segregated streetcars, and she wouldn't go to the movies because she wouldn't be told that she had to sit in the Colored section in the balcony. She wasn't any more interested in being told that she had to go to a segregated college. Tired of the South’s blatant segregation, she decided that she wanted to head north, and declared that she was going to go to Columbia University in New York.

When she and Aunt Pauline went to visit the school, she discovered that race wasn't the only kind of segregation.  Columbia didn't accept women; Barnard did, but she couldn't afford the cost of tuition.  Gender and class would also be battlegrounds for this “problem child.”  She found out that she could go to Hunter College for free if she was a New York resident, which wouldn't be hard – she could live with a cousin in Queens.  But Hunter told her that her high school education had been incomplete, so she re-enrolled in high school, Richmond Hill High School … where she was the only African-American among four thousand students.

Some time later, she decided to return to North Carolina, applying to the University of North Carolina’s graduate program in sociology.  But, the University of North Carolina’s graduate program in sociology didn’t accept African Americans.  Pauli knew this, of course.  She also knew that two of her slave-owning relatives had attended the school, another had served on its board of trustees, and yet another had created a permanent scholarship for its students – all of this made her a legacy applicant.  U.N.C didn't see it that way, and her application was denied. 

She went to Howard Law School with, as she said, “the single-minded intention of destroying Jim Crow,” and where, as I’ve said, she was the only woman – student or faculty.  On her first day, one of her professors said that he couldn’t imagine why a woman would want to go to law school.  Not only did she find this humiliating – as it was intended – but it also fired her determination to become the top of her class.  Which she did. 

The usual “reward” for graduating from Howard in this position was a prestigious fellowship to further study at Harvard.  So, she applied, but was told, “You are not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School,” to which she responded, in perfect “problem child” fashion:

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?

By this time Pauli had already established a friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt – a story for another time – so her request for admission was supported by no one less than F.D.R. himself (who, besides being President of the United States was a Harvard alum), yet even that was apparently not enough to get the good “gentlemen” of Harvard to change their minds.  To her commitment to ending Jim Crow she now added a determination to bring to an end what she’d come to call, “Jane Crow.”

She applied for a teaching position at Cornell, and was turned down because the people she used as references were considered “too radical.”  (For the record, they were Phillip Randolph, Thurgood Marshall, and Eleanor Roosevelt.)  It might seem as though Pauli was everywhere, involved in everything, but her story also includes a whole lot of places she was told she could not go.

Yet time and time again, Pauli was “the first” – the first African American, the first woman, the first African American woman – and she had to face all that went with that.  And nearly forty years before Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality,” Pauli insisted that her various identities could not be separated – she was of mixed race; she was a woman; she had known real poverty (and despite her many degrees and accomplishments, remained close to it throughout her life).  In recent years scholars have noted that this extremely private person was a lesbian, and sometimes called herself a “boy-girl,” who wondered if her attraction to women was because she was really a man in a woman’s body.  (She never used the word “transgender,” or, for that matter, “lesbian,” but she knew these identities and knew that the were as inseparable as any of her others.)  After helping to found the Congress of Racial Equality, she chided the civil rights movement for excluding women; after helping to found the National Organization for Women, she criticized it for being, “the N.A.A.C.P. for white women.”

Can you see why she might see hope as a “song in a weary throat?”  Why she’d see hope not as Dickinson’s bright and fluttery “thing with feathers,” but as, “a crushed stalk / Between clenched fingers / … a bird’s wing / Broken by a stone”?  Pauli had struggled, had had to struggle, and from the experiences of her grandmother and great-grandmother, her mother, her father, and her own near-constant battle to be who she was and who she was capable of being, Pauli knew firsthand how fragile hope can be.

In our own ways, many of us do, too.  In the last several months I have talked with two congregants who’ve told me that they really can’t see any reason for going on, and see no hope of finding any.  I’m sure there are others.  And when a loved one dies or is given a terminal diagnosis, when we come up against our own mortality, when we feel stuck in a job that’s killing us or a deadly relationship, when we have to choose between paying a bill or buying some food, when we feel that despite our best efforts the planet will become uninhabitable and that white supremacy will never be dismantled, when our depression makes everything seem bleak, when any of a thousand things like these are going on in our lives … we, too, might see hope as a bird with a broken wing.  So … what are we to do?

In the life of Pauli Murray I see a call to tenacity.  Hope might have been for her “a song in a weary throat,” a “tuneless ditty,” but she never stopped singing it, nonetheless.  That “freedom of her spirit to dream daringly and then to accomplish those dreams.” As I noted earlier, after a long and distinguished career, at the age of 62 she left the security of her position in academia (she was by then a professor at Brandeis University), and entered seminary to become an Episcopal priest.  This was 1973, and the Episcopal Church didn’t ordain women as priests.  A problem child once again.  While Pauli was not among the first group of women ordained by the Church, she was the first African American woman in Episcopal Church history to become a priest.  And even if, as some biographers have suggested, she was driven toward the priesthood in part because she’d been told she couldn’t go there, her call to ordained ministry was also a sign of deep and abiding commitment to hope.

I’m going to conclude with letting Pauli speak for herself about her ability to find hope even in the realities that crushed that stalk and broke that wing.  I am not suggesting that we all need to become Episcopal priests, as she did. I'm not even suggesting that we all need to believe in God, as clearly important as that was for her. I am saying that in Pauli Murray’s life we can see a model of how to look through the times of hopelessness to see the hope on the other side.  This is from the end of her autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage [which has since been re-titled], where she describes how, at the end, “all the strands of [her] life had come together.”

“I traveled to North Carolina to celebrate my first Holy Communion – also the first Eucharist to be celebrated by a woman in that state – at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill. …

On Sunday, February 13, in the little chapel where my Grandmother Cornelia had been baptized more than a century earlier as one of ‘Five Servant Children Belonging to Miss Mary Ruffin Smith,’ I read the gospel from an ornate lectern engraved with the name of that slave-owning woman who had left part of her wealth to the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina.  A thoroughly integrated congregation crowded the chapel, and many more stood outside until they could enter to kneel at the altar rail and receive Communion.  There was a great irony in the fact that the first woman priest to preside at the altar of the church to which Marry Ruffin Smith had given her deepest devotion should be the granddaughter of the little girl she had sent to the balcony reserved for slaves.  But more than irony marked that moment.  Whatever future ministry I might has a priest, it was given to me that day to be a symbol of healing

All the strands of my life had come together.  Descendent of slave and slave owner, I had already been called poet, lawyer, teacher, and friend.  Now I was empowered to minister the sacrament of One in whom there is no north or south, no black or white, no male or female – only the spirit of love and reconciliation drawing us all toward the goal of human wholeness.

This is the entire text of my mother's journal entry on hearing of the death of her friend.

The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray died Monday, July 1.

A friend for about 40 years.

I met her through Lou Jefferson at Jock’s Place in Harlem.

I thought her one of the most extraordinary people I’d met in my life then; I feel the same about her now.

The freedom of her spirit to dream daringly and then to accomplish those dreams was the most wonderful thing about her.

She began as a poet who became a lawyer and then an Episcopal priest.  But, always she was a poet who observed people with compassion and humor, who reacted to the world with passion.

Earthbound and pedantic in contrast I thank God I had the imagination to establish and maintain a relationship with her because it was nourishing relationship.  One of the most important in my life.

Se never saw Paul again after the Christening ceremony at the Broadway Tabernacle but her interest in him, and his brothers, was real and caring.

The shock of the Wikstroms that day was memorable.  The mischievous part of me treasures the moment, and I know that Pauli was amused, too.

Pauli, who classified people in ice cream flavors – strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. She refused to adopt the language of the feminists even though she was one of the NOW organizers.  And she would not adopt the berm “black,” preferring “Negro” as having authenticity ethnically and, therefore, greater dignity.  Oh how the leaders in the peer groups closest to her fought with her on these issues. 

When she was in Ghana as a law professor helping to write that country’s new constitution she put her life in danger by insisting upon inclusion of guarantees of freedom.  Her letters during that period were cautiously worded because she knew they wee being read by the authorities.  When she was scheduled for a Paris vacation friends advised she make the trip not planning to return cause there was a plot to kill her.

We named Paul after a most courageous person.  Someone who at 66 because one of the first women to be ordained by the Episcopal church.  [She was one of the first women, and was the first African American woman to be ordained.]

I am grateful for her friendship.

This is the text of a section of Pauli's epic poem, "Dark Testament."

Dark Testament, Verse 8

Hope is a crushed stalk
Between clenched fingers
Hope is a bird’s wing
Broken by a stone.
Hope is a word in a tuneless ditty –
A word whispered with the wind,
A dream of forty acres and a mule,
A cabin of one’s own and a moment to rest,
A name and place for one’s children
And children’s children at last . . .
Hope is a song in a weary throat.

Give me a song of hope
And a world where I can sing it.
Give me a song of faith
And a people to believe in it.
Give me a song of kindliness
And a country where I can live it.
Give me a song of hope and love
And a brown girl’s heart to sing it

While doing research for the sermon I discovered that the raper RaShad cut an album earlier this year titled, A Conversation with Pauli Murray.  To be honest, it's a little uneven, in my humble opinion, yet here are two cuts from it -- the second one includes something of her story, the first actually includes her voice!

The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray  (November 20, 1910 -- July 1, 1985)

Junteenth: a sermon

This is the sermon I delivered on Sunday, June 19, 2016 at the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist.  You listen to it if you'd prefer.

I am embarrassed to say that I had never heard of “Juneteenth” until relatively recently.  I keep discovering just how much American history I never learned and, perhaps even more disturbingly, that no one ever thought important enough to try to teach me – all that history that gets lifted up each February, for instance, as though Black history and American history are not the same thing.  We don’t have a White history month, or a Straight, Cisgender Male history month, because as far as the wider society goes, that is American history.  Everything else is relegated to appendices and footnotes.

So:  “Juneteenth” is a fusing of “June” and “Nineteenth,” because it was on June 19, 1865 that Union General Gordon Granger stood on the balcony of a prominent building in Galveston, Texas and read aloud “General Order No. 3,” which said, in part:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.

Can you imagine what that would have felt like for the, now, formerly enslaved population of Galveston?  They hadn’t yet heard about President Lincoln’s Proclamation of their freedom some three and a half years earlier, so this was a day that would cry out to be memorialized.  Juneteenth celebrations became annual events throughout Texas and, eventually, throughout the United States.  By 2008, nearly half of US states observed the holiday.  As of May of last year, 45 of the 50 states (and the District of Columbia) have formally and officially recognized the observance of Juneteenth, even here in Virginia.

Juneteenth is a really big thing, and I had never even heard of it.  Maybe this is new to some of you, too.  I would ask how that is possible, but we all know the answer, don’t we?  The dominant culture in which we live, the dominant narrative that defines us as a country, does not have time, or energy, or focus, or interest, really, in anything other than itself.  That’s why we have Black History Month in February, and Women’s History Month in March, and LGBT History Month in October, and Transgender Awareness Month in November (just to name a few).  This is one way that our culture – and by “our culture” I am referring to the dominant culture made by, for, and about people who look more or less like me – can recognize the undeniable fact that ours is not a homogeneous society while simultaneously reinforcing the “otherness” of everybody who … doesn’t look more or less like me.

One dimension of this dominant culture’s narrative is a mindset of what I’ll call “been there, done that, cross it off the list.”  Here are two examples of I mean by that:

·       Slavery was terrible, awful, heinous, but we fought and won the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation put an end to slavery.  Been there, done that, cross it off the list.

·       The Jim Crow era was terrible, awful, heinous, but the Civil Rights battles of the 50s and 60s won equality for all.  I mean look, today we even have a Black President!  Been there, done that, cross it off the list.

But that’s not how it works, of course.  The truth is that there is a river of pain that runs through our nation’s history, a river of torment and torture, a river of separation and segregation and dehumanization and demonization, a river that has never stopped flowing.  Ever.  We – and right now I’m really talking to people, like me, who’ve been raised to think of ourselves as White – we would like to think that at least it has gone underground, or slowed to a trickle, but it hasn’t, except, perhaps, in our own mind’s eye.  But we need to think this, we need to believe this, because if we didn’t we wouldn’t be able to go to sleep at night, so wet would our sheets be from all our tears.  Yet we – and here I do mean “we,” inclusively and collectively, meaning “we” as in “all of us” – we need to see together the truth of things as they really are.  We need to see those things that some of us try so hard not to see and some of us are so continually forced to see.  Here’s one such thing that seems appropriate to see on Juneteenth 2016:

The slaves weren’t freed when Lincoln declared their emancipation, nor when General Granger stood on that balcony, nor when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, nor when Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44^th President of the same United States in which his wife’s ancestors had been enslaved.  Certain freedoms, yes, have been grudgingly conceded, but real freedom?  The freedom to be and be seen as whole, as the individual you are and as part of the human family?  The freedom to have your value and worth affirmed and celebrated?  That has not yet been won, not yet wrested from the slaver’s fist. Not been there, not done that yet, nothing to cross off the list.

The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray is one of the largely unknown and unsung heroes of the struggles for African American rights, and LGBT rights, and women’s rights.  She was the first female African American Episcopal priest, the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School, a civil rights activist (fighting against both Jim Crow and what she called “Jane Crow”), a poet of profundity and power, and a friend of my mom’s.  She referred to herself as, “America’s problem child.”  (“I have never been able to accept what I believe to be an injustice,” she wrote. “Perhaps it is because of this I am America’s problem child, and will continue to be.”)  In many of her poems Pauli gave voice to the experience of what another great African American poet, Langston Hughes called, “a dream deferred,” this experience of the ongoing denial of the fundamental right to be seen as more than three-fifths of a person.  In the face of that, how can you keep on hoping for things to change?  What can hope mean when time and time again you have seen your hope whipped, and lynched, and set upon by dogs and firehoses, and denigrated and sneered at by what passes for politicians these days?  Here’s one of Pauli’s poems:

Hope is a crushed stalk

Between clenched fingers.

Hope is a bird’s wing

Broken by a stone.

Hope is a word in a tuneless ditty —

A word whispered with the wind,

A dream of forty acres and a mule,

A cabin of one’s own and a moment to rest,

A name and place for one’s children

And children’s children at last . . .

Hope is a song in a weary throat.

Give me a song of hope

And a world where I can sing it.

Give me a song of faith

And a people to believe in it.

Give me a song of kindliness

And a country where I can live it.

Give me a song of hope and love

And a brown girl’s heart to hear it.

This is the still unfulfilled promise of Junteenth – a song of hope, and a world in which it can be sung by everyone; a song of faith, and a people who will truly believe it; a song of kindliness and a country in which it can be lived out; and a song of hope and love without having to give up who and what we are.  Hope is a song in a weary throat.  [This, by the way, was the original title of Pauli's autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat.  Someone at the publishing house, no doubt, decided that for the second printing the title should be changed to Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet.  It might be more descriptive for people who'd never heard of her, but oh what poetry was lost!]                               

One year ago this past week Dylan Roof walked into a Bible Study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina and murdered 9 people, at least in part because he did not see African Americans as fully human, at least not in the way he saw himself.  He apparently had not heard about the “absolute equality” affirmed by General Granger in Galveston one hundred and fifty-one years ago today, or he’d heard but didn’t believe it, and so he could believe that murdering these people was a justified and acceptable act.

This past week Omar Mateen walked into the nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida and murdered 49 people (wounding an additional 53), at least in part because he did not see people in the LGBTQ community, or the Latino community as fully human, at least not in the way he saw himself.  And whether it was this blind and blinding hatred, or the distortions and perversions of a twisted religious ideology, Mateen was able to believe that his murdering these people was a justified and acceptable act.

When you can deny the fundamental humanity of someone, you can justify doing just about anything to them.  It doesn’t count if they don’t count.  Fifty-three years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all […] are created equal” to be a “promissory note” that had not yet been made good on.  It still hasn’t.  And so the weary throat must keep singing.

Someone else who knew and beautifully expressed that song was the poet-queen Maya Angelou.  She speaks of it in one of her most well-known and oft-quoted poems, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,”

The free bird leaps

On the back of the wind

And floats downstream

And dips his wings

In the orange sun rays

And dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks

Down his narrow cage

Can seldom see through

His bars of rage

His wings are clipped

And his feet are tied

So he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings

With a fearful trill

Of the things unknown

But longed for still

And his tune is heard

On the distant hill

For the caged bird sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze

And the trade winds soft through the sighing trees

And the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn

And he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams

His shadow shouts on a nightmare scream

His wings are clipped and his feet are tied

So he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings

With a fearful trill

Of the things unknown

But longed for still

And his tune is heard

On the distant hill

For the caged bird sings of freedom.

Oh the throats that sing this song may indeed by weary, yet the song remains strong.  This song has many variations, yet still it is one song – the song of freedom and a long-ago made promise fulfilled.  But here’s some good news:  Dylan Roof didn’t silence it; Omar Pateen didn’t stop its steady beat; Donald Trump and his crowds can’t drown it out. 

But there’s work to be done.  We – those of us who have been taught that we are White – need to take it up, add our voices to those who have been singing so long that their throats are weary – oh so weary – of singing this song that should never have had to be sung.

the song of hope, and a world in which it can be sung by everyone; the song of faith, and a people who will truly believe it; the song of kindliness and a country in which it can be lived out; the song of hope and love without having to give up who and what we are to sing it. 

May it be so.

Pax tecum,

RevWik