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This chapter examines Murray's coming of age politically in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. By examining her poetry, short stories, and political essays, it traces Murray's emerging concerns around race, gender, and sexuality and the historic disfranchisement of black Americans. It shows how the themes of identity, history, and democratic eschatology emerge in her early writing.

This chapter describes landmark legal arguments Murray made about equal protection in the 1960s. Using the category of “Jane Crow,” she demanded that the law be responsive to the synthetic nature of identity. In so doing, Murray placed African American women's experiences at the center of democratic consideration. Despite her attempts to build coalitions, she found herself increasingly at odds with leaders of the feminist and Black Freedom movements.

This chapter discusses Murray's transition in the 1970s and 1980s from a career focused on the law to one devoted primarily to what she called “moral and spiritual problems.” It offers a systematic reading of the themes of salvation, suffering, and the coming kingdom that animated Murray's sermons and places her theological program in conversation with contemporary womanist and black feminist scholars.

This chapter covers Murray's career and writings as a young lawyer in the late 1940s through the 1950s. It explores her development of a new kind of American history and an account of black American identity as integral to her democratic thought. In response to McCarthyist insinuations that she is disloyal, she published a family memoir that portrayed her multiracial family and the history of violence against which it was formed. In the late 1950s, Murray left the United States for Ghana in search for a sense of home, but ultimately concluded that her racial identity and history made her irrevocably American.

This chapter concludes that Pauli Murray's critical attentions to identity, history, and her articulation of a democratic eschatology provide readers with resources for contemporary discussions of Christianity and American democracy. It considers Murray's project in conversation with the work of Jean Bethke Elshtain and Cornel West, two contemporary theorists who aim to inform democratic theory with Christian theological imagination and commitments.

King’s radicalism was hard to see or remember after he was assassinated and a campaign for a King Holiday transpired. It became hard to remember that he was the most hated person in America during his lifetime. The black social gospel became more institutional and conventionally political after the King era; liberation theology grew out of the Black Power movement; and womanist theology grew out of black theology.

This introductory chapter sets out the main purposes of the book. It traces the development of Pauli Murray's democratic and theological criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s. Ranging from Murray's theologically rich democratic criticism of the 1930s to her democratically inflected sermons of the 1980s, this study proclaims Murray to be a significant 20th-century African American intellectual who grounded her calls for democratic transformation in Christian concepts of reconciliation and of the coming kingdom. While investigating her remarkable career and contributions to major political, social, and theological debates of her time, this book demonstrates how Murray articulated a theologically grounded democratic criticism that employs theological norms to interrogate democratic practices and democratic norms to interrogate religious practices. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Pauli Murray was one of the young activists that Mary Church Terrell mentored. In the 1940s, Murray enrolled at Howard University Law School and went on to graduate as the only woman and top student in her class. In the 1930s, the convergence of several important Black male intellectuals at Howard University, including Abram Harris, E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, had cemented a new formal model of the academically trained Black male public intellectual. When Murray enrolled in the 1940s, she experienced great sexism from these Black male intellectuals. She termed their treatment of her, “Jane Crow.” While she went on to have a storied career as a legal expert, Episcopal priest, poet, and writer, all of which place her firmly in the tradition of the race woman, her identity as both a woman and queer person in the 1940s and 1950s collided with the Howard model of public intellectual work. This chapter brings together Murray’s time and training at Howard, her archives, and an examination of her two autobiographies to suggest that her concept of Jane Crow grew out of the collision of race-based sexual politics and limited ideas among Black men about who could provide intellectual leadership for Black people. Moreover, Jane Crow exposed the heterosexist proclivities of Black public leadership traditions, and offers a framework for thinking about how Black women negotiated gender and sexual politics even as they devoted their lives to theorizing new strategies for racial uplift.

This chapter discusses the lives of two remarkable women who shared a good many characteristics in spite of their great difference in early experience and in style. It explains that Lina Ware came from a family of New England Unitarians with a long tradition of social concern as well as attachment to Harvard University. On the other hand, Pauli Murray's heritage was a mix of black and white; she was a child of a nurse and a public school teacher, and was adopted by the schoolteacher aunt for whom she was named. Caroline Farrar Ware, white, born in 1899, raised in Massachusetts, and Pauli Murray, black, born in 1910, raised in segregated North Carolina, developed a most unusual friendship and threw light on some of the major issues of the middle decades of the twentieth century, particularly those touching on questions of racial discrimination and civil rights.

Azaransky analyzes the political activism of lawyer, author, and advocate for civil rights and women’s rights Pauli Murray. Azaransky mines her sermons, journals, lectures, published writings, and ecclesial leadership as sources of, and indeed model examples of, deep, disciplined, engaged reflection on God and God’s relation to the world. Azaransky demonstrates how lived theology’s singular commitments prompt a series of pressing theological, historiographical, and methodological questions. These include, what counts as theological reflection? Can activism and organizing for social justice be appropriated as theological material? And what kind of a hermeneutic do we need to accurately read practices as theological texts?

This chapter describes Pauli Murray's teaching job in the newly independent nation of Ghana at the new University of Ghana Law School, and tells of Murray's traumatic experiences in Ghana, where she almost felt homesick: the tropics were bad for her collection of health problems, and she suffered from culture shock. It notes that after the initial adjustment, Murray worked hard at teaching and at learning about Ghana, but was always at the edge of depression.

This chapter details the friendship and correspondence between Pauli Murray and Lina Ware, which started when the country was at war in 1942 under President Roosevelt. It notes that their friendship began as something of a teacher–student relationship until they became well acquainted. The chapter points out that Murray drew Ware into the student protest movement she had helped to organize, seeking to end segregation in Washington, D.C., while Ware served on the National Defense Advisory Commission, wrote The Consumer Goes to War, worked in her garden, and taught history to soldiers-in-the-making. It also notes that Murray, whose focus was on the struggle for human rights, was engaged in active protest and in the study of law, while Ware, like most professional women of her generation, was deeply involved in the work of several volunteer associations; The American Association of University Women was her longest-running volunteer base.

Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, and Pauli Murray developed a black Christian pacifism inspired by Gandhian nonviolence. Their activist projects in the 1940s, including sit-ins, freedom rides, and multicity marches, became mainstays of the later civil rights movement. While working with majority-white organizations like the Fellowship of Reconciliation and interracial organizations like the Congress of Racial Equality, Murray, Rustin, and Farmer nevertheless developed what Farmer called “the race logic of pacifism,” the idea that black Americans had a particular aptitude for nonviolent direct action because of their experiences of white racism. In the midst of a majority-white Christian peace movement, these three black activists devised a religious pacifism that was also distinctly black. Their early activism illuminates, furthermore, questions about the role of gender and sexuality in the black freedom movement.

In 1927, Austin purchased the Carolina Times and transformed the newspaper in to a vital part of the black freedom struggle in North Carolina. He prioritized printing the truth and giving a voice to the black community in Durham and throughout the state. He never focused on the newspaper as a moneymaking enterprise, as he attacked any one, who, he believed, stood in the way of freedom and equality for all people. As a result, black and white businesses often withdrew advertisements from the paper, leaving the paper in precarious financial condition. In 1933, Austin helped bring the Hocutt case, the first legal attempt to integrate southern higher public education. He also co-founded the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs in 1935, which sought to increase black political participation and improve black life in Durham. Austin was elected justice of the peace in 1934, a victory that was hailed by the Pittsburgh Courier as the beginning of the New Deal in the South. He helped expand black voter registration and moved blacks from the Republican to the Democratic Party, a strategic move to increase black political influence in the one-party state.

This chapter chronicles the student newspaper’s evolution to an on-campus daily publication in the 1920s, and how it rapidly professionalized and became both a critical laboratory for aspiring journalists, and helped to push for the creation of a school of journalism at UNC. The chapter also discusses causes the paper fought for or against, including defeat of the 1925 anti-evolution teaching bill in the state legislature, promotion of labor unions and rights in North Carolina’s mills and factories, and freedom for the students to have speakers on campus of all political persuasions. The chapter examines the universities growing reputation as a liberal institution, both in the classical sense and politically, and the beginnings of state politicians and media to question these issues, most notably David Clark. The first attempt to racially integrate the school, by Pauli Murray, is examined. Other topics covered include the Great Depression, the major university cheating scandal of 1936, the burning of all issues of a campus humor magazine considered indecent in 1939, and the anti-war sentiment at UNC, 1939-1941.

This chapter discusses the expressions of faith in the works of several black American writers and thinkers. These figures—Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Pauli Murray, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X—practiced a faith that strove toward the infinite while also respecting the pluralism inherent in individual experience and contingent historical conditions. Instead of imagining the transcendent and the worldly as either separated by an infinite expanse of empty time and space, or as one and the same thing, they saw them as always running parallel to each other and sometimes converging in a moment of action in the here and now.