Dr. Anna Pauline Murray, or Pauli, was a civil rights organizer, feminist, poet and priest. She did so much it was hard to decide what to include here.

Born in 1910 Murray was raised by relatives in Durham after her mother died when she was just 3.  Murray credited her family with giving her social justice values and an appreciation of education, however at 15 she turned down a scholarship to study at Wilberforce University in Ohio because she was opposed to segregated education. Moving to New York, Murray supported herself to attend the non-segregated Hunter College instead, completing a degree in English in 1933. She stayed on in NY for several years during the Depression; teaching and publishing her first book Angel of the Dessert.

After returning to Carolina in the late 30’s, three events shaped Murrays’ future politics.

First, in 1938 she was refused entry to the University of North Carolina law school due to her race, then refused again on appeal. In 1940, she was then arrested for breach of segregation statutes and public disturbance while traveling by Greyhound bus with a cousin, and met with lawyers from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NACCP] who suggested that she keep pursing law, after seeing her competence organizing her own case.  Finally she was an organizer for the Workers Defense League in the case of an African American sharecropper, Ordell Waller, who was sentenced to death for the murder of a white farmer. When he lost, Murray committed to become a  civil rights lawyer.

After finishing a law degree at Howard University first in her year, Murray was awarded a fellowship at Harvard. Harvard refused her admission though on grounds of gender. She graduated with a Masters in Law from the University of California Berkeley instead, writing her thesis on The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment.

In 1942, she co-founded the Congress For Racial Equality [CORE]. CORE was a pacifist group influenced by  Ghandian non-violence, the close connections between it’s members including Murray and Bayrnard Rustion and Dr. Martin Luther King influenced the use of civil disobedience in the movement.

Murray returned to NY to work with the NAACP publishing the “bible for civil rights lawyers” States Laws on Race and Colour in 1951, and contributing to the famous 1954  Brown vs the Board of Education case which ended racial segregation in schools.

She also wrote a successful biography Proud Shoes:the Story of an American Family about her Southern Family in 1956, was appointed to President Kennedy’s Commitee on the Status of Women in 1961 and became the first African American to be awarded a law doctorate from Yale in 1965.

She also campaigned to have sex discrimination in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. When it was passed, she wrote a famous legal article Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII making links between sex discrimination and Jim Crow laws. Then in 1966, she co-founded NOW, the National Organization of Women after convincing Betty Friedan that the US needed a “NAACP for women”

Eventually in 1977, having turned away from the “militancy” of political organizing, she was ordained a Protestant Episcopal Priest.  She was able to celebrate her first service at the church in North Carolina where her grandmother had been baptised, as a slave, in 1864.

Photo from Dr. Martin Luther King’s memorial service, 1968, displayed at the Muhammad Ali Center, Louisville, KY. The Supremes at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s memorial service in 1968.

secretarysbreakroom:

abbyjean:

“American Gothic,” considered to be Parks’s signature image, was taken in Washington, D.C., in 1942, during the photographer’s fellowship with the Farm Security Administration, a government agency set up by President Roosevelt to aid farmers in despair. “It’s the first professional image I ever made,” Parks says, “created on my first day in Washington.” Roy Stryker, who led the FSA’s very best documentary photographers—Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, etc.—told Parks to go out and get acquainted with the city. Parks was amazed by the amount of bigotry and discrimination he encountered on his very first day. “White restaurants made me enter through the back door, white theaters wouldn’t even let me in the door, and as the day went on things just went from bad to worse.” Stryker told Parks to go talk with some older black people who had lived their entire lives in Washington and see how they had coped. “That’s how I met Ella,” Parks explains.

Ella Watson was a black charwoman who mopped floors in the FSA building. Parks asked her about her life, which she divulged as having been full of misery, bigotry and despair. Parks’s simple question, “Would you let me photograph you?” and Ella’s affirmative response, led to the photographer’s most recognizable image of all time. “Two days later Stryker saw the image and told me I’d gotten the right idea but was going to get all the FSA photogs fired, that my image of Ella was ‘an indictment of America.’ I thought the image had been killed but one day there it was, on the front page of The Washington Post .” At the time, Parks couldn’t have realized that the image would go on to become the symbol of the pre-civil rights era’s treatment of minorities. (PDN)

On this day, this woman represents my aunts and foremothers and co-workers who clean(ed) offices and homes. This is the dignity that NY’s legal system is trying to snatch from DSK’s accuser.

awesome-everyday:

coolchicksfromhistory:

Freedom Rider and student leader Lucretia Collins, 1961.

Lucretia Collins was a senior at Tennessee A&I when she decided to take part in the Freedom Rides.  She was one of the few Freedom Riders who opted to be bailed out, although several other riders were also seniors in college.  She received her degree the day after this photo was taken.  

Lucretia moved to Ghana in the mid-60s and by 1969 had “ceased to believe in non-violence as a tactic or anything else.”

I require this outfit/hairstyle.

Consciousness-raising was birthed as a mass-organizing tool for the liberation of women in 1968 when the country and the world were seething with freedom movements. The women who started the Women’s Liberation Movement, several of whom had experienced the Southern Civil Rights Movement firsthand, were convinced it would take a similar mass movement that went beyond lobbying for legal reforms (as NOW and some other groups were doing) to get to the roots of male supremacy and end women’s oppression.

Consciousness-raising was a way to use our own lives—our combined experiences—to understand concretely how we are oppressed and who was actually doing the oppressing. We regarded this knowledge as necessary for building such a movement. Consciousness-raising as a deliberate program was sparked in a New York Radical Women meeting early in 1968 when Anne Forer remarked that she had only begun thinking about women as an oppressed group and that we needed to “raise our consciousness.” Anne went on to list a number of things women had to do to make themselves attractive to men, like not wearing our glasses, playing dumb, doing all kinds of painful things to our bodies, wearing uncomfortable clothing and shoes, going on diets—all because “people don’t find the real self of a woman attractive.”

Carol Hanish in On the Issues Magazine

Feminist history minus the drama for breakfast! Hanish is the feminist who invented the feminist slogan that “The Personal is Political”. 

If you’ve ever wondered why some feminists flip at women using that slogan to describe discriminatory actions as their “feminist personal choice”, click through for a breakdown of how it was meant to help women relate their personal experiences to broader womens’ rights as civil rights goals.

crossingborders:

ihatethismess:

“I was really, really involved. I didn’t realize at the time how dangerous the situation was. The only thing I was concerned with was that I wanted my freedom, I wanted to be able to go where I wanted, like everyone else did.”

— Dannela Bryant, Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History

“I was really, really involved..”