"They had known better times..." Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes (pp. 267), 1956
Dear Friends:
A few days ago, I gathered with trustees and staff for the Pauli Murray Center Board of Directors retreat. We celebrated our accomplishments and evolution during my tenure as chief steward of the PMC. We envisioned the future of our work, and mapped our path forward. And we considered the requirements and risks of operating in our current landscape.
Our time together was grounded in a series of values and goals, texts by Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, and questions and points of curiosity I offered, including this one:
What if we considered the era that we are living through as expected instead of exceptional?
This question arose from Murray's own description of how her family experienced the onset of the era of legal segregation known as Jim Crow. In Proud Shoes, Murray describes how their Aunt Pauline was born into the promise, excitement, and violence of the Reconstruction Era. By the time Pauline reached her mid- to late-thirties, "...the first law requiring separation on trains and streetcars appeared in North Carolina. [She] regarded these laws disdainfully as a temporary evil, perhaps, and often ignored them, but [she was] never crushed by them. [Murray's family] had known better times..." Murray would later dedicate their life to creating a vision for the U.S. in particular, in which all people could live with wholly and with dignity, unbound by discrimination and segregation.
Societies collapse. The social order changes. Regression typically follows progress. The law is manipulated to oppress peoples. These, I think, are matters of fact. Therefore, how do we move from disbelief and despair to acceptance; and from acceptance to imagination? Responding to this exercise, my board found, was liberatory. It enabled us to concretize our work, and imagine our future with new clarity; reconsider how we serve and nurture our communities of accountability; think expansively about resource mobilization; reground in our values, and clearly establish our "redlines"; and create new ways of working together.
As you consider my prompts, I'll leave you with Rev. Dr. Murray's "Prophecy" (1976):
I sing of a new American
Seperate from all others,
Yet enlarged and diminished by all others.
I am the child of kings and serfs, freemen and slaves,
Having neither superiors nor inferiors,
Progeny of all colors, all cultures, all systems, all beliefs.
I have been enslaved, yet my spirit is unbound.
I have been cast aside, but I sparkle in the darkness.
I have been slain but live on in the rivers of history.
I seek no conquest, no wealth, no pwoer, no revenge;
I seek only discovery
Of the illimitable heights and depths of my own being.
Onward,
Angela Thorpe Mason
Executive Director
Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice
