Two decades before the civil-rights movement of the nineteen-sixties, Murray was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a bus in Richmond, Virginia organized sit-ins that successfully desegregated restaurants in Washington, D.C. This was Murray’s lifelong fate: to be both ahead of her time and behind the scenes. Along the way, she articulated the intellectual foundations of two of the most important social-justice movements of the twentieth century: first, when she made her argument for overturning Plessy, and, later, when she co-wrote a law-review article subsequently used by a rising star at the A.C.L.U.-one Ruth Bader Ginsburg-to convince the Supreme Court that the Equal Protection Clause applies to women.
A poet, writer, activist, labor organizer, legal theorist, and Episcopal priest, Murray palled around in her youth with Langston Hughes, joined James Baldwin at the MacDowell Colony the first year it admitted African-Americans, maintained a twenty-three-year friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, and helped Betty Friedan found the National Organization for Women. Board of Education.īy the time Murray learned of her contribution, she was nearing fifty, two-thirds of the way through a life as remarkable for its range as for its influence. Some years later, when Robinson joined with Thurgood Marshall and others to try to end Jim Crow, he remembered Murray’s paper, fished it out of his files, and presented it to his colleagues-the team that, in 1954, successfully argued Brown v. In her final law-school paper, Murray had formalized the idea she’d hatched in class that day, arguing that segregation violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. Plessy was overturned in a decade-and, when it was, Robinson owed her a lot more than ten dollars. Then, with the whole class as her witness, she made a bet with her professor, a man named Spottswood Robinson: ten bucks said Plessy would be overturned within twenty-five years. Undeterred, Murray told them they were wrong. Her idea was both impractical and reckless, they told her any challenge to Plessy would result in the Supreme Court affirming it instead. Her law-school peers were accustomed to being startled by her-she was the only woman among them and first in the class-but that day they laughed out loud.
Fed up with the limited and incremental results, one student in the class proposed a radical alternative: why not challenge the “separate” part instead? Ferguson, lawyers had been chipping away at segregation by questioning the “equal” part of the “separate but equal” doctrine-arguing that, say, a specific black school was not truly equivalent to its white counterpart. It was 1944, and the law students of Howard University were discussing how best to bring an end to Jim Crow. Photograph courtesy Schlesinger Library / Radcliffe Institute / Harvard University It didn’t look good.It was Pauli Murray’s fate to be both ahead of her time and behind the scenes. The two were scheduled to wed this month, but earlier this year Charlie was diagnosed with a brain tumor. They’d moved across the country together, from New York State to Colorado, trained for marathons together, and moved in with her now-husband, James Garvin.
Says O’Connell’s wedding photographer, “They really wanted him in the wedding, because that’s the bride’s - that’s like her soul dog.”Īccording to a heart-wrenching story in the The Washington Post, Kelly hadn’t been looking for a dog when she met Charlie, but ever since she picked him up that winter’s day, she’s never looked back. When he got sick, she was hoping he’d last long enough to be at her wedding to a fellow veterinarian, and somehow Charlie found a way to power through. The veterinarian rescued the twelve-week-old pup from a shopping cart one winter and they’d been inseparable ever since. Kelly O’Connell and her 15-year-old dog Charlie Bear had been through a lot together. A woman’s beloved dog survives just long enough to be at her wedding
0 kommentar(er)
