Item Information
Title
Newspaper article entitled "Someday a Poet Will Rise to Sing You..." detailing Pauli Murray's refusal of an honorary degree from UNC-CH
Description
Content warning: This article contains racial slurs.
Creator
Marlowe, Gene
Source
Office of Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Nelson Ferebee Taylor Records,1972-1980, University Archives (#40023)
Date
July 13, 1978
Type
Text
Text
Winston-Salem Journal
SECTION C
Sunday, July 23,1978
Opinion
TV Listings
Books
Arts
‘Someday a Poet Will Rise to Sing You
By Gene Marlowe
Journal Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - “There was no way I could do it,” Pauli Murray said, shaking her head sadly.
Pauli Murray, a small 67-year-old black woman, was invited by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last winter to receive an honorary degree this spring.
But on graduation day when the honorary degrees were handed out, Pauli Murray was not there.
She had called up in tears weeks earlier and begged out.
It was one more irony in a long history of ironies involving UNC and Pauli Murray and her family.
During the spring the university began a bitter fight against efforts of the federal government to force steps to increase enrollment of black youngsters at the state’s formerly all-white campuses.
It was the wrong time for her to be in Chapel Hill accepting an honorary degree, Pauli Murray said during a recent inter- view in her book-lined apartment in a Washington suburb.
“If it were anyone else but me . . .,” Pauli Murray recalled telling UNC Chancellor Ferebee Taylor in an emotional phone call.
Forty years ago as a young woman, Pauli Murray applied for admission to the University of North Carolina. The university said no. State law barred enrollment of Negroes at the university.
The irony then was that Pauli Murray and her coffee-and-cream colored relatives are the only descendants of a white 19th century congressman whose money helped reopen the university after the Civil War.
That early rejection helped spur Pauli Murray on to become one of the few women leaders in the civil rights movement --as a writer and lecturer, for years as a member of a highly respected New York law firm and today as a minister.
Pauli Murray attracted national attention early last year when she became the country’s first black female Episcopal priest.
Charles Kuralt’s “On the Road” program featured her when she officiated at her first Eucharist, performed at Chapel Hill’s Chapel of the Cross, the church where her grandmother, a slave, was baptized 122 years earlier.
Pauli Murray probably will attract even more attention this fall when Harper & Row reissues a book she wrote in the 1950s about her complex black-white genealogy. Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family was first published in 1956 much too early to catch the rising interest in the heritage of racial minorities that made Alex Haley’s Roots a best seller.
This time, however, Miss Murray and the publisher think the book may be right on target to prompt public acknowledgement of the fact that many Americans’ roots are neither wholly white nor black.
“The acceptance of the possibility of relatedness would do much to defuse the highly charged discussions on race,” Pauli Murray wrote in a preface for the new edition of her book. “Ultimately, it might help ease the transition to a more humane
society.”
Several years ago, Proud Shoes was rediscovered by students at UNC who were intrigued with its true story of miscegenation in a socially prominent white family right in the university’s backyard. A movement started among the university’s faculty to give Pauli Murray a belated honorary degree.
This year, the 40th anniversary of Miss Murray’s rejection by the university, seemed to be an appropriate time to make amends. Last winter when officials at Chapel Hill offered Miss Murray an honorary degree, she accepted.
“She wanted it very, very badly,” one faculty member said.
The invitation held special significance for Pauli Murray: it recognized her life’s work as a civil rights leader, it repaid an old debt the university owed her ancestors, and it was an admission of the personal injustice committed against her when she was a young woman.
However, in the months that followed, the university became embroiled in a desegregation fight with the federal government, hiring lawyers to prepare a court case that had the potential of undoing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
"An honorary degree means you are sort of in favor of what a college has done,”’ she said. “The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I couldn’t accept it.”
She explained her feelings in several letters and a phone call to Chancellor Taylor, suggesting that the honor be postponed to another year.
Then, by chance, a university secretary who had called Miss Murray to request a photo for the commencement program —just in case she changed her mind — mentioned that Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. would give the commencement speech.
“There’s no way I can keep my integrity and be seen on the platform with Gov. Hunt,” Miss Murray said during the interview. “Can you imagine me sitting there in the face of his refusal to pardon the Wilmington 10? Sitting there, passive, unable to make a response?”
Pauli Murray, though gentle, has never been passive; though soft-spoken, she’s never been quiet. '
The university learned that when it rejected her application in 1938.
Franklin D. Roosevelt had spoken at Chapel Hill, calling the university the light of liberalism in the South, just 12 days before UNC rejected Miss Murray’s application.
Pauli Murray fired off a public letter to Roosevelt and UNC President Frank Porter Graham, raising what was then considered by many to be an outrageously preposterous question: “Does the concept of democracy include equal rights for minority groups?”
It created a furor in the state and on campus that lasted for three months. “There were some who said they would lynch any nigger that came on campus,” Miss Murray recalled.
“I was the first one to raise public discussion of Negroes attending the university,” she said.
The headlines and debate of 1938 and 1939 were forerunners of the brewing civil rights movement that blossomed a decade later. The first black student wasn’t admitted to the University of North Carolina until 1951.
Pauli Murray was already destined to make a mark in the world when she applied to UNC. She had grown up in the home of her grandmother in Durham.
“My grandfather, Robert Fitzgerald, was a Union soldier who gave his eye for the liberation of his race,” Pauli Murray said. “As soon as the war was over, he went to North Carolina under the Freedmen’s Bureau to establish schools and educate the newly freed Negroes.”
In Proud Shoes, Pauli Murray describes how she learned to read as a small girl by reading the Durham newspaper to her blind grandfather as he sat on the front porch in a rocker. She spelled out the words she couldn’t read and her grandfather told her what they were. She was raised to never forget she was the grand- daughter of a soldier. “No one could admit defeat in his house,” she said.
Her grandmother was an octoroon —seven-eighths white — the illegitimate child of a brutal rape of a mulatto slave by Sidney Smith, the son of Congressman James Strudwick Smith of Hillsborough. Neither Congressman Smith’s two sons nor daughter married, and as the Smith household filled up with mulatto children, the Smiths moved from Hillsborough to
SECTION C
Sunday, July 23,1978
Opinion
TV Listings
Books
Arts
‘Someday a Poet Will Rise to Sing You
By Gene Marlowe
Journal Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - “There was no way I could do it,” Pauli Murray said, shaking her head sadly.
Pauli Murray, a small 67-year-old black woman, was invited by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last winter to receive an honorary degree this spring.
But on graduation day when the honorary degrees were handed out, Pauli Murray was not there.
She had called up in tears weeks earlier and begged out.
It was one more irony in a long history of ironies involving UNC and Pauli Murray and her family.
During the spring the university began a bitter fight against efforts of the federal government to force steps to increase enrollment of black youngsters at the state’s formerly all-white campuses.
It was the wrong time for her to be in Chapel Hill accepting an honorary degree, Pauli Murray said during a recent inter- view in her book-lined apartment in a Washington suburb.
“If it were anyone else but me . . .,” Pauli Murray recalled telling UNC Chancellor Ferebee Taylor in an emotional phone call.
Forty years ago as a young woman, Pauli Murray applied for admission to the University of North Carolina. The university said no. State law barred enrollment of Negroes at the university.
The irony then was that Pauli Murray and her coffee-and-cream colored relatives are the only descendants of a white 19th century congressman whose money helped reopen the university after the Civil War.
That early rejection helped spur Pauli Murray on to become one of the few women leaders in the civil rights movement --as a writer and lecturer, for years as a member of a highly respected New York law firm and today as a minister.
Pauli Murray attracted national attention early last year when she became the country’s first black female Episcopal priest.
Charles Kuralt’s “On the Road” program featured her when she officiated at her first Eucharist, performed at Chapel Hill’s Chapel of the Cross, the church where her grandmother, a slave, was baptized 122 years earlier.
Pauli Murray probably will attract even more attention this fall when Harper & Row reissues a book she wrote in the 1950s about her complex black-white genealogy. Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family was first published in 1956 much too early to catch the rising interest in the heritage of racial minorities that made Alex Haley’s Roots a best seller.
This time, however, Miss Murray and the publisher think the book may be right on target to prompt public acknowledgement of the fact that many Americans’ roots are neither wholly white nor black.
“The acceptance of the possibility of relatedness would do much to defuse the highly charged discussions on race,” Pauli Murray wrote in a preface for the new edition of her book. “Ultimately, it might help ease the transition to a more humane
society.”
Several years ago, Proud Shoes was rediscovered by students at UNC who were intrigued with its true story of miscegenation in a socially prominent white family right in the university’s backyard. A movement started among the university’s faculty to give Pauli Murray a belated honorary degree.
This year, the 40th anniversary of Miss Murray’s rejection by the university, seemed to be an appropriate time to make amends. Last winter when officials at Chapel Hill offered Miss Murray an honorary degree, she accepted.
“She wanted it very, very badly,” one faculty member said.
The invitation held special significance for Pauli Murray: it recognized her life’s work as a civil rights leader, it repaid an old debt the university owed her ancestors, and it was an admission of the personal injustice committed against her when she was a young woman.
However, in the months that followed, the university became embroiled in a desegregation fight with the federal government, hiring lawyers to prepare a court case that had the potential of undoing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
"An honorary degree means you are sort of in favor of what a college has done,”’ she said. “The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I couldn’t accept it.”
She explained her feelings in several letters and a phone call to Chancellor Taylor, suggesting that the honor be postponed to another year.
Then, by chance, a university secretary who had called Miss Murray to request a photo for the commencement program —just in case she changed her mind — mentioned that Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. would give the commencement speech.
“There’s no way I can keep my integrity and be seen on the platform with Gov. Hunt,” Miss Murray said during the interview. “Can you imagine me sitting there in the face of his refusal to pardon the Wilmington 10? Sitting there, passive, unable to make a response?”
Pauli Murray, though gentle, has never been passive; though soft-spoken, she’s never been quiet. '
The university learned that when it rejected her application in 1938.
Franklin D. Roosevelt had spoken at Chapel Hill, calling the university the light of liberalism in the South, just 12 days before UNC rejected Miss Murray’s application.
Pauli Murray fired off a public letter to Roosevelt and UNC President Frank Porter Graham, raising what was then considered by many to be an outrageously preposterous question: “Does the concept of democracy include equal rights for minority groups?”
It created a furor in the state and on campus that lasted for three months. “There were some who said they would lynch any nigger that came on campus,” Miss Murray recalled.
“I was the first one to raise public discussion of Negroes attending the university,” she said.
The headlines and debate of 1938 and 1939 were forerunners of the brewing civil rights movement that blossomed a decade later. The first black student wasn’t admitted to the University of North Carolina until 1951.
Pauli Murray was already destined to make a mark in the world when she applied to UNC. She had grown up in the home of her grandmother in Durham.
“My grandfather, Robert Fitzgerald, was a Union soldier who gave his eye for the liberation of his race,” Pauli Murray said. “As soon as the war was over, he went to North Carolina under the Freedmen’s Bureau to establish schools and educate the newly freed Negroes.”
In Proud Shoes, Pauli Murray describes how she learned to read as a small girl by reading the Durham newspaper to her blind grandfather as he sat on the front porch in a rocker. She spelled out the words she couldn’t read and her grandfather told her what they were. She was raised to never forget she was the grand- daughter of a soldier. “No one could admit defeat in his house,” she said.
Her grandmother was an octoroon —seven-eighths white — the illegitimate child of a brutal rape of a mulatto slave by Sidney Smith, the son of Congressman James Strudwick Smith of Hillsborough. Neither Congressman Smith’s two sons nor daughter married, and as the Smith household filled up with mulatto children, the Smiths moved from Hillsborough to