a founding member of the National Organization
for Women in 1966. As Eleanor Holmes Norton
notes in the introduction to Murray’s award-win-
ning autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat (1987;
republished as Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of
a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet
[1989]); “If Pauli did not become everything she
wanted to be, she surely became everything it was
possible for her to be” (ix).
Personal history was always a priority for Mur-
ray, who was orphaned by age four. She was ad-
opted and raised by a loving aunt, Aunt Pauline,
who “had the unerring intuition of a great teacher
and a master artisan” (Murray, 16). Aunt Pauline
kept the family genealogy ever present before the
young Pauline, and Proud Shoes: The Story of an
American Family (1956), Murray’s first published
text, chronicles the story of the slave past of her
maternal grandfather, Robert G. Fitzgerald, a vet-
eran of the Civil War, a teacher, and an adminis-
trator. Murray’s wealthy great granduncle, Richard
Fitzgerald was a successful businessman who was
instrumental in helping to organize Durham,
North Carolina’s first black-owned bank, the Me-
chanics and Farmers Bank (29).
Although she knew firsthand what it meant to
ride in a Jim Crow railroad car, attend segregated
public schools, be defined as “colored” or Negro,
and be made to feel invisible by teachers who in-
tentionally erased her history as an African-Amer-
ican from their lectures, Murray, who later became
a Gandhian nonviolent civil rights activist and
developed a special friendship with Eleanor Roos-
evelt, never relinquished the pride she inherited
from Aunt Pauline and her family. This is clearly
registered in the title, Proud Shoes, of the book that
details her family history.
While attending Hunter College, Murray, who
had grown up reading and being deeply influenced
by the poetry of PAU L LAURENCE DUNBAR, was in-
troduced to the works of HARLEM RENAISSANCE
writers CLAUDE MCKAY, COUNTEE CULLEN, and
LANGSTON HUGHES. She would later meet Hughes,
Cullen, DOROTHY WEST, WALLACE THURMAN, STER-
LING BROWN, and ROBERT HAYDEN. Murray, who
had spent a year working as a field representative
for OPPORTUNITY magazine, published her first
poem, “Song of the Highway,” in Nancy Cunard’s
anthology Color (1934). Describing her as “an oc-
casional poet,” ARNA BONTEMPS included two of
Murray’s poems in his anthology American Negro
Poetry (1963), as did Arnold Adoff in his Poetry of
Black America (1973). In 1970 Murray published
her only collection of poetry, Dark Testament and
Other Poems, including poems composed between
1933 and 1969.
The title poem, “Dark Testament,” which Ste-
phen Vincent Benét encouraged her to write, re-
sounds with the determination of Hughes’s speaker
in “I, Too” and the militancy of McKay’s speaker in
“If We Must Die.”Of us who darkly stand
Bared to the spittle of every curse,
Nor left the dignity of beast,
Let none say,
“Those were not men but cowards all”
(Bontemps, 107)Murray’s commitment to political activism and
social change is registered in “Mr. Roosevelt Re-
grets,” in which she critiques President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt’s failure to actively and aggres-
sively speak out against racism after several major
race riots broke out in 1943, particularly in De-
troit. To President Roosevelt’s response, “I am sure
that every true American regrets this [national
fragmentation],” Murray wrote in a militant tone:What do you get, black boy
When they knocked you down in the gutter...
What’d the top Man say, black boy?
“Mr. Roosevelt regrets... .”
(Pauli Murray 212)The CRISIS magazine published this poem in its
August 1943 issue. Eleanor Roosevelt quickly re-
sponded, upon receiving a copy of the poem that
Murray had sent her, “I am sorry but I understand”
(Murray, 212). Although, as poet, Murray sang in
a minor key throughout the 20th century, her re-
frain championing race, gender, and class issues,Murray, Pauli 379