Book: Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray by Rosalind Rosenberg
Genre: Biography
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication date: 2017

Source: Purchased paperback

Summary: Pauli Murray was a lawyer, academic, and Episcopal priest who made tremendous contributions to civil rights and women’s rights in the 20th-century — all of which goes unremarked in US history books.

When she was three years old, Pauli Murray’s mother died. She was raised by her Aunt Pauline in Durham, North Carolina. She became the third generation to live in the house that her grandfather built. He took the privilege of his Northern upbringing and went south after the Civil War to teach his fellow black citizens.

Unable to get enough high school education at her segregated North Carolina school to qualify for college, Pauli moved in with another relative in New York to complete her preparation before enrolling in Hunter College in New York. The bachelor’s degree that she earned in 1933, in the midst of the Depression, was only the first of her degrees, including a law degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C. and, many years later when more educational opportunities opened to women, a Doctor of Juridical Science from Yale.

Even with education, her opportunities in life were limited by her sex and her race, a concept that she labeled “Jane Crow.” Her experiences led her to research and write many seminal papers and letters that influenced how civil rights and women’s rights were perceived and fought for in the mid-20th century.

Her friends and associates included Eleanor Roosevelt, James Baldwin, Stephen Vincent Benét, Betty Friedan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Thurgood Marshall, and many others. She influenced and was influenced by these people in the arenas of law and academia and, late in life, theology.

Thoughts: I first learned about Pauli Murray last year when I researched Washington, D.C. in 1943 and learned that she led sit-ins to integrate lunch counters while she was in law school at Howard University.

I learned so much from this book and not just about Pauli Murray.

Satyagraha. That is the Sanskrit word for the nonviolent resistance practiced by Ghandi. My education led me to believe that it was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who brought that concept to the Civil Rights movement in the US. In fact, the concept had been discussed in the 1920s, before either King or Murray participated.

Poll taxes. I learned about poll taxes, of course, as a way of preventing black people from voting. I did not understand the larger implications for the country.

The narrowing of the field of potential voters gave a small group of southern Democrats extraordinary power not only in states like Virginia, but over the rest of the country. Because the South was a one-party region, congressmen and senators, once victorious in all-white, privately organized primaries, faced no more than token opposition in general elections. As a result, they could expect to hold onto their seats indefinitely. Because Congress ran on a seniority system, southern senators and congressman had come to chair most important committees. If southern committee chairmen did not like a proposed piece of legislation they either bottled it up in committee or rewrote it to suit their views. (p. 98)

As I wrote in my post on Sunday, I also learned about the deeply sexist notions behind the term “black matriarchy” and surrounding the March on Washington.

Lest we all think of this as ancient history, I learned about the Reed vs. Reed case in 1971. A mother expected to be named administrator of her son’s estate. Instead, the court awarded the position to her abusive ex-husband, who owned the gun that killed her son. She…

…lost in Idaho’s Supreme Court, which declared, “men are better qualified to act as an administrator than are women:” and “nature itself had established this distinction.” (p. 341)

I was seven in 1971 and was told that I was smart and could do anything I wanted. Apparently, not everyone believed that. Fortunately, Sally Reed won in the US Supreme Court. Her case was built, partially, on ideas put forth by Pauli Murray.

Appeal: Jane Crow is for anyone who believes themselves well-educated in US History. This is the latest of many books that I’ve read with the Community for Understanding and Hope Book Group that taught me that I was not well-served by my history classes. As one of our participants explained last night — we learn the history of white middle-class men. Other topics show up only when they intersect their timeline. To get a broader and more accurate sense of US History, we need to educate ourselves.