Pauli Murray by Troy R. Saxby

Author:Troy R. Saxby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2020-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

Murray was prescient in her reading of the evolution of Supreme Court rulings. She also believed she had played a role in Brown, through the publication of States’ Laws and her Howard University Law School final paper on Plessy. Years later, while Murray was visiting Howard Law School, she spoke with Spotswood Robinson, who told her that he had reread her paper while preparing for the Brown case. “In fact,” she recalled him saying, “it was very helpful to us. We were able to use your paper in the Brown briefs.”155

Following the decision, the New York Times published one of Murray’s letters. The letter briefly mentioned her own damaging experience of segregated public schooling and likened her feelings about the decision to how her enslaved great-grandfather must have felt on hearing news of the Emancipation Proclamation. Otherwise, the letter was an impersonal tribute to Justice John M. Harlan, who provided the only dissenting opinion in the 1883 Civil Rights Cases and the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision.156 The Times also published a joint letter by Aunts Pauline and Sallie, imploring that Black teachers in the South not be overlooked during the integration process.157 Beginning with Grandfather Robert’s efforts to establish a Black school in the post–Civil War South, Murray’s maternal family alone could count nearly a century of teaching experience in Black schools.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.