[Durham INC] Editorial: Pauli Murray's legacy valuable to city (Herald-Sun)

[John Schelp]

Editorial: Murray's legacy valuable to city
Herald-Sun, 11 Aug 2009

Durham's complex racial history is a key part of the nature of our community today. 

We have struggled with the effects of centuries of slavery and Jim Crow laws, yet we have benefited with a unique blend of circumstances that have resulted in an African-American middle and upper class that has energized the community in important ways. 

That's not to say our path through change has been smooth -- anything but. Nonetheless, our struggles have produced some truly remarkable leaders in the realm of politics, civic endeavor and social change. 

One of these was Pauli Murray, who grew up in Durham as the great-grandchild of slaves and the progeny of a family that reflected the racial mixture more common than often acknowledged in our region. 

Murray was the first African American female to graduate from Howard University's School of Law. Rejected at Harvard Law despite impeccable credentials, she earned a masters of law degree at UC-Berkeley. Rejected at Cornell University, she went on to get a doctorate from Yale. 

Her personal memoir, "Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family," published in 1956, helped to illuminate the South's demographic changes while helping outsiders understand the debilitating nature of racism. 

The resistance to change, the idealization of the past, is not a new phenomenon for North Carolina and the South. 

But it does help to define us. 

But so, frankly, does the embrace of change and the willingness to risk much to jettison the legacy of the "peculiar institution" that stunted our region for decades. 

Murray's legacy is getting considerable local attention thanks to the Pauli Murray Project, part of the Duke Human Rights Center at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. 

The Pauli Murray project aims, in the words of documentary studies leader Barbara Lau, "to introduce her and her ideas to Durham." Lau is director of the project and hopes it will inspire Durhamites to read and discuss "Proud Shoes.". 

Murray is a favorite daughter who, while occupying a special place in our history, is too little known and appreciated for all that she accomplished. We'll all benefit from the effort to bring those accomplishments to greater light.