Proud Shoes (Pauli Murray)
Pauli Murray (1910-1985) is one of those people I wish I'd learned about earlier. I've lived in her hometown much of my life now, but she was dead before I moved here. A current view of her seems to be that she was fifteen or twenty years ahead of everyone on almost every civil rights issue: she attempted as a young black woman to enroll in Chapel Hill, still segregated in the 1930s; in the 1940s, she was arrested for refusing to sit at the back of the bus and organized her friends to attempt to integrate segregated restaurants; she earned a law degree and conducted a thorough legal analysis of Jim Crow (which Thurgood Marshall later described as the "Bible for civil rights lawyers"
. In the mid-1940s, she became California's first black deputy attorney general. In the 1970s, she became an Episcopal priest. I should perhaps add she preferred relationships with women
Proud Shoes was Murray's 1956 attempt to unravel her family history. It is well worth the read. One of her grandfathers seems a genuine unsung hero in my eyes