Pauli Murray

... and connected, for sure.

And there's another woman, Pau- Do you know Pauli Murray? P-A-U-L-I Murray.

Mm-hmm.

Oh, they are really interesting.

Like, you know, encompassed all these things.

Yeah.

Um, to put Pauli Murray in a box, I, uh...

I mean, they, they...

Oh, yeah.

Uh, Pauli Murray.

Yes, yes.

Right? Howard Thurman was not queer.

Pauli Murray was.

Mm-hmm.

Um, uh, Anna Pauline Murray, who chose Pauli instead of Pauline as an indication of kind of what in her era and time was not known as trans or queer, um, inquiring, but clearly if, if she were with us today, I think she would be naming that.

But she was someone who, I mean, again, how many of you...

Hortense Spillers and Angela Davis.

Hortense Spillers, Pauli Murray, Angela Davis, as you just said, Anita Hill, um, Pat Hill Collins, who was at UMD.

Yeah.

Yes, here in Baltimore.

It really is.

This work reconstructs the 25-year friendship between Pauli Murray, a brilliant, relentless writer, legal scholar, and activist, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady of the United States.

I really wanna pause on that duration for a second.

25 years.

You have Eleanor Roosevelt born into immense wealth, this patrician upbringing, highly insulated by the political realities of her husband's administration.

Right.

And on the other side of the desk, you have Pauli Murray, a Black, queer, working class intellectual who is living the daily visceral life or death realities of American segregation.

And that gap, that massive gap in lived experience, is precisely what makes their correspondence one of the most vital historical records we have.

And they had all these amazing connections.

They were the first people to publish Pauli Murray, first people to give Pauli Murray a paycheck.

They were the ones that helped her get a Rosenwald Fellowship that enabled her to stay in law school and become the great lawyer that she became.

And so this was, you know, really something extraordinary and also something very, you know, put her in the path of violence and death threats.

Who we can thank for birthright citizenship.

Lawyers like Pauli Murray.

Who made it the nation's business to take both racial and gender equality seriously.

And everyday people.

You're still missing it.

Pauli Murray, without debate, is one of the greatest lawyers and ministers that Thurgood Marshall had to study, and now her work is being studied by everybody in the legal defense fund.

You're still missing it.

Alvin Ailey is without a doubt the greatest choreographer in America, but he would be excluded from

We've covered everyone from Sarah Bartman to Yasin Tawa to Ida B.

Wells, Pauli Murray, Lorraine Hansberry, Osceola McCarty.

Those are some names that maybe people on here, the United States may be aware of.

But then there are others.

Especially the sexual stuff, right? I mean, the fact that she wasn't lynched herself over some of this is kind of crazy.

And she had a long and great relationship with Howard University and Pauli Murray.

And so I love hearing that story.

But yeah, it's like in Killers of the Dream, for people that don't know, she writes about these three ghost relationships that she calls them.