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First published posthumously in 1987, Pauli Murray’s Song in a
Weary Throat was critically lauded, winning the Robert F. Kennedy
Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award among other
distinctions. Yet Murray’s name and extraordinary influence
receded from view in the intervening years; now they are once again
entering the public discourse. At last, with the republication of
this “beautifully crafted” memoir, Song in a Weary Throat takes
its rightful place among the great civil rights autobiographies of
the twentieth century. In a voice that is energetic, wry, and
direct, Murray tells of a childhood dramatically altered by the
sudden loss of her spirited, hard-working parents. Orphaned at age
four, she was sent from Baltimore to segregated Durham, North
Carolina, to live with her unflappable Aunt Pauline, who, while
strict, was liberal-minded in accepting the tomboy Pauli as “my
little boy-girl.” In fact, throughout her life, Murray would
struggle with feelings of sexual “in-betweenness”—she tried
unsuccessfully to get her doctors to give her testosterone—that
today we would recognize as a transgendered identity. We then
follow Murray north at the age of seventeen to New York City’s
Hunter College, to her embrace of Gandhi’s
Satyagraha—nonviolent resistance—and south again, where she
experienced Jim Crow firsthand. An early Freedom Rider, she was
arrested in 1940, fifteen years before Rosa Parks’ disobedience,
for sitting in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus.
Murray’s activism led to relationships with Thurgood Marshall and
Eleanor Roosevelt—who respectfully referred to Murray as a
“firebrand”—and propelled her to a Howard University law
degree and a lifelong fight against "Jane Crow" sexism. We also
read Betty Friedan’s enthusiastic response to Murray’s call for
an NAACP for Women—the origins of NOW. Murray sets these
thrilling high-water marks against the backdrop of uncertain
finances, chronic fatigue, and tragic losses both private and
public, as Patricia Bell-Scott’s engaging introduction brings to
life. Now, more than thirty years after her death in 1985,
Murray—poet, memoirist, lawyer, activist, and Episcopal
priest—gains long-deserved recognition through a rediscovered
memoir that serves as a “powerful witness” (Brittney Cooper) to
a pivotal era in the American twentieth century.
Life Notes is the first collection devoted exclusively to writings
from the journals, diaries, and personal notebooks of contemporary
black women. These intensely personal testimonies illuminate the
complexities of black women's lives, offering unique reflections
about self, family, intimacy, work, politics, life transitions, and
recovery. Author lectures.
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