Dear Friends:

Last week, I was privileged to offer inspiration to an illustrious group of leaders during the League of Women Voters of Wake County's annual Women's Equality Day Celebration. During my keynote address, I shared the "Three C's" that Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray leveraged to expand her work: creativity, curiosity, and connection.

Murray held a lifelong aspiration to be a writer and reinforced that creativity was a form of activism. One of Murray's foremost challenges is rooted in creativity: “One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement". In other words, all that is required is you, plus a typewriter (or pen, laptop, or cell phone) to spark change.

The creative - the written word - is a tool that showed up in Murray’s daily work, whether through activism, law, or the priesthood. We can incorporate creativity into our daily practice, whatever our vocation. We can also use creativity as a strategy to form innovative solutions for our communities.

Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray was also a curious person, and she leveraged that trait as a powerful tool to grow her impact. Murray's efforts to dismantle both racism and sexism legally were fueled by curiosity, and flourished in educational spaces like Howard University School of Law and Yale Law School. Murray's penchant for chipping away at massive issues, curiously, led to the victories we revere her for today: shaping the Brown v. Board argument, her contributions to Title VII, founding the National Organization for Women, and more.

Murray reminds us to remain curious, and maintain a posture of learning. This is foundational to how we invoke change.

Lastly, Murray maintained important connections with others to ground her, keep her whole, and keep her human. She did not work in isolation.

Murray invested in relationships with her family, her lovers, and her closest friends. Her commitment to gathering with people to debate, exchange ideas, and be challenged led her to form the Congress of Racial Equality alongside early civil rights leaders, grow her consciousness around human rights, and advance feminism in the Episcopal Church. Towards the end of her life, Murray was compelled to foster reconciliation and healing between communities as a means to cultivate lasting social, legal, and political change. Is that not connection? Connection was paramount to Pauli: to family, friends, and lovers; to people who agreed with her, and those who didn’t.

Isolation is what awaits us on the pathway to defeat. Connection is what will sustain us. We too can be a little like Pauli, so long as we leverage our "Three C’s": creativity, curiosity, and connection...with a great deal of courage.

Onward,

Angela Thorpe Mason
Executive Director
The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice