Pauli Murray will not be erased

Dear friends,

During the most isolating part of the Covid-19 lockdown, I used to walk past Pauli Murray’s childhood home in Durham almost every day. Just seeing it brought me comfort. Murray—civil-rights attorney, Episcopal priest and saint, author, feminist pioneer, Black queer person—knew how to play the long game. Her law-school scholarship laid down a theory that proved critical to the desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education. Her writing planted the seed for Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed job discrimination on the basis of sex. Her legal arguments informed some of the current protections against anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination.

I wrote about Murray back in 2020 for the Carolina Alumni Review. It’s some of my proudest work. I want to re-up the article today. You can read it in as a PDF:

https://barryyeoman.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/paulimurray.pdf.

Here’s why I’m re-upping it: Last month, the Trump administration removed a National Park Service web page about Murray. It’s part of a larger effort to erase LGBTQ+ people, and especially trans people, from public memory. The Park Service web page mentioned a historian who believed “that Murray identified as a transgender man but did not have the information or acceptance available during her lifetime to describe it.”

This is part of the same effort that erased trans women from the National Park Service web page about the 1969 Stonewall uprising.

But nothing disappears fully from the Internet. Here’s an archived link to the disappeared page.

For now, the Trump administration has not removed the main page for the Pauli Murray family home. But just in case, here’s a permanent link for that, too.

Hope, not optimism

I have trouble considering myself an elder, but others seem to view me that way, including my former students. They’ve asked me where I find the hope to keep doing this work at a time of mounting authoritarianism.

Over the decades, I’ve often turned to the words of Václav Havel, the Czech playwright, dissident, and political prisoner who eventually became his country’s president. (He died in 2011.) In 1990,  journalist Karel Hvížd̕ala asked him, “Do you see a grain of hope anywhere in the 1980s?” Here is Havel’s response:

I should probably say first that the kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it's a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and it is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons….

Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out....

It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.

Plus, articles I’ve been reading:

•  Writer Kevin Sieff and photographer Ofir Berman, spending a week with the most famous “Arab team” in the Israeli Premier League; 

• Nasrin Nawa on Nebraska’s 1,200 Afghan refugees, living in fear of deportation;

• Elliott Woods, traveling through Mexico and Guatemala to track down relatives of the 53 migrants who died in an unrefrigerated truck in San Antonio;

• Emily Davies on a Trump voter who was betting on free IVF treatment and didn’t expect her job would be on the line;

• Robert Samuels, a political reporter who also covers figure skating, on the plane crash that killed 28 people associated with the sport;

• Kim Severson on the fight over Dirt Candy;

• Thomas Dai on growing up Chinese-American in Knoxville;

• Writer Melissa Sanchez and photographer Benjamin Rasmussen on the boxes that Nicaraguans who milk the cows on Wisconsin's dairy farms, wash dishes at its restaurants and fill lines on its factory floors are packing to send home;

• Emily Witt on the fallacy that blue states are safe for trans kids; and

• Timothy White on how his pastor dad reconciled his God and his gay son.

 And what I’ve been listening to:

Ted Genoways on the Haitians who moved to Colorado on the promise of a good meatpacking job and a place to stay—only to be mistreated and potentially deported.

 Some of the above recommendations come from non-profit journalism organizations: Flatwater Free Press, ProPublica, The Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Food & Environment Reporting Network. These newsrooms are critical to our democracy. Please consider supporting them. 

All best,
Barry Yeoman