The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (53 page)

Pauli Murray, age sixty-six, at her ordination, Washington National Cathedral, January 8, 1977. No path or training had been as arduous for her.
(Associated Press)

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“The Missing Element…Is Theological”

M
urray took a series of actions in 1973 that baffled her friends and colleagues. She resigned from
Brandeis, deposited a substantial portion of her
personal papers at the
Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at
Radcliffe College, moved back to
New York City, and enrolled at the
General Theological Seminary to study for holy orders. That she would leave the security of a tenured professorship in her sixties to prepare for the priesthood when the
Episcopal Church had not approved the
ordination of women seemed ill-advised and “
self-destructive” to some of her
supporters. For Murray, on the other hand, it was an act of faith and part of a lifelong quest for “
authentic selfhood.”

The seemingly abrupt decision to enter the seminary was not sudden at all.
Murray’s religious education had begun in childhood with family Bible readings, watching
Aunts Pauline and Sallie serve as “
prime movers” in
St. Titus, their home church in
Durham, and visits to church missions with her uncle the Reverend John Small. She was nine years old when the Right Reverend
Henry B. Delany, the first African American bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of
North Carolina, confirmed her. When she was seventeen and Delaney was on his deathbed, he blessed her and pronounced her “
a child of destiny.” Murray had come to believe that his words were “
prophetic.”

Before Murray could articulate a philosophy of
human rights, she was channeling her thoughts and emotions into poetry and prose. She became an activist, and this had led to a career in law. But years of working as an attorney and, more recently, as a professor had not satisfied her desire to tackle the moral foundation of inequality. “
The missing element in my training and experience,” she announced to family and friends, “is theological.”

Murray was fully aware of the roadblocks to priesthood. She had once stopped going to church for a year to protest its treatment of women. Unable to abandon an institution that had been central to her life, she returned to work with Renee Barlow and others for the inclusion of women in all church roles.

Despite decades of study and debate, the Episcopal Church had not sanctioned the ordination of women. Yet Murray had ministered the last rites to Aunt Pauline, technically violating church tenet. Murray would assume a ministerial role again in the weeks before Renee Barlow’s death, on the morning of February 21, 1973.

On January 10, Renee was admitted to
Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, suffering from paralysis on her right side, blurred vision, and slurred speech. She had had a radical mastectomy seven years earlier. This time, doctors diagnosed an inoperable brain tumor. Renee was fifty-nine.

On learning that the prescribed steroid and cobalt treatments might permanently impair her sight, mobility, and mental functions, Renee gave Pauli power of attorney. Renee’s physical decline proved to be as rapid as her cognitive deterioration. Pauli did her best to lift Renee’s spirits, manage her affairs, and keep friends and family informed. The competence and grace with which Pauli performed her duties camouflaged her heartache. Her only refuge was often a hospital closet, where
she could drop her cheerful countenance and her “
uncontrollable sobs” were out of earshot. Pauli sat at Renee’s bedside for sixteen days, “
talking to Renee as if she were fully present.” The night before Renee passed, Pauli read the Twenty-third Psalm to her, urged her to rest, and “
kissed her goodbye.”

A private service was held at
Frank E. Campbell’s Funeral Home on Saturday, February 24. Renee’s oak coffin was draped in a purple pall and “
flanked on each end by a tall vase of spring flowers.”
The public memorial took place on February 27 at
Calvary Church, where Eleanor Roosevelt had been
christened.
Lloyd Garrison, who represented the law firm where Renee and Pauli had worked, and
Beatrice Worthy, an African American who represented women personnel professionals in New York City, gave eulogies. The service closed with a stirring rendition of
“We Shall Overcome” by the local choir. Because the officiating priest was available only for the public memorial, Pauli stood in his place, organizing both services and caring for family and friends from out of town.

Since the deaths of
Aunts Pauline and Sallie and Eleanor Roosevelt, Renee had been “
the closest person” in Pauli’s life. Renee’s passing meant the loss of “a Christian partnership of nearly seventeen years,” in which Pauli “was never rejected.” The death, eleven weeks later, of Renee’s ninety-three-year-old mother, Mary Jane, whom Pauli regarded as extended kin, compounded her grief.
Pauli’s efforts to quiet her longing and anxiety by listening to recordings of
Robert Schumann’s
Piano Concerto in A Minor and
Arnold Schoenberg’s
Transfigured Night
, which Renee had given her and loved, proved unsuccessful.

Pauli and Renee had worked side by side in the Episcopal Church, and it was to this institution that Pauli turned for consolation. God had brought them “
together to comfort and help one another when each needed it most,” and now that Renee was gone, Pauli felt compelled to continue the work they had begun. Until now, Pauli had not seriously considered the priesthood.
However, the call to the ministry seemed insuppressible in Renee’s absence.

· · ·

RENEE HAD DESIGNATED PAULI
as coequal beneficiary of her $10,000 life insurance policy. With the money bequeathed her, Pauli entered the General Theological Seminary in the fall of 1973. GTS was the first school of religious education established by the Episcopal Church in the United States.
Murray was the oldest seminarian, the only African American woman in her class, and senior to many of her professors in age and
professional standing. Undaunted by what some may have viewed as her advanced age or the fact that she would be “
in limbo” until church policy changed, she brimmed with optimism. At the end of the first term, Murray gave the Right Reverend
Paul Moore, bishop of New York, a copy of
Dark Testament and Other Poems
as a Christmas gift. Her hopeful inscription read, “
With the prayer that someday you may be able to ordain me a Priest in our Church.”

An undiagnosed hearing problem and Murray’s background as a lawyer fueled the perception that she was “
abrasive.” After a fellow woman seminarian identified Murray’s hearing problem and Murray acquired a hearing aid, she no longer interrupted others in class. Rumors of her impoliteness faded.
However, Murray’s calls for diversity in the student body and curriculum led to the charge that her interests were political rather than theological.

To one male seminarian, who complained that all the talk about discrimination dominated too much class time, Murray responded, “
If you have to live with anger, I have to live with pain. I’ll trade you both my pain, my sex, my race and my age—and see how you deport yourself in such circumstances. Barring that,” she continued, “try to imagine for 24 hours what it must be like to be a Negro in a predominantly white seminary, a woman in an institution dominated by men and for the convenience of men, some of whom radiate hostility even though they do not say a word, who are patronizing and kindly as long as I do not get out of my place, but who feel threatened by my intellect, my achievements, and my refusal to be suppressed.” Of their differences, Murray told him, “
If I can’t take your judgmental statements and your anger, I am in the wrong place. If you cannot take my methods of fighting for survival, then you have chosen the wrong vocation.”

“
Church politics,” Murray wrote to
Patricia Roberts Harris, a fellow Episcopalian who would soon join President
Jimmy Carter’s cabinet as secretary of housing and urban development, “is probably the ultimate in politics—and dealing with Bishops is like something almost ‘out of this world.’ They speak in double entendre.”

The disapproval of her peers did not dampen the delight Murray took in the GTS experience. She excelled in her courses. For pastoral care training, she ministered to the sick and dying at
Bellevue
Hospital, where she had briefly been a psychiatric patient in 1940. She did her fieldwork at
St. Philip’s Chapel, the mission in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where her
uncle John had served as minister and where she, as a young girl, had played the organ for church services.

Murray would later recall her time at the seminary as “
the most rigorous discipline I had ever encountered, surpassing by far the rigors of my law school training.” It also proved to be a period of personal growth and healing, during which she would examine her “fears, insecurities, and unresolved problems.” Through dialogue with others, intense study, and “constant self-examination,” she grew in self-acceptance and came to terms with her childhood loss of her parents.

No matter what criticism came Murray’s way, she sensed that Grandmother
Cornelia, mother
Agnes,
Aunts Pauline and Sallie, Renee, and ER “
were happy about all this.” Murray imagined they were smiling the morning she donned her clerical collar, orange kente cloth stole, and Renee’s crucifix. The night before Murray assisted with Communion for the first time, she dreamt she had given ER “
some information she needed and she was very grateful for it.” This dream had come on July 8, close to the fourteenth anniversary of Murray’s July 14 visit with ER at
Val-Kill, she
noted in her journal.

Murray graduated from GTS with honors in 1976.
Her
master’s thesis,
“Black
Theology and Feminist Theology: A Comparative Study,” was a critical examination of two emerging theologies. Because black theologians ignored or dismissed
women’s contributions and concerns, while feminist theologians overlooked or brushed aside issues of race and class, Murray challenged both viewpoints. As one who had endured multiple oppressions, she argued that a theology of universal liberation and reconciliation was the only acceptable alternative.

· · ·

ON SEPTEMBER 16, 1976
, the 65th
General Convention of the Episcopal Church officially approved the
ordination of women.
On January 8, 1977, Murray, dressed in a white robe that covered all but a few inches of her pants and thick-soled lace-ups, walked into
Washington National Cathedral with fellow ordinands
Carole Anne Crumley,
Elizabeth Phenix Wiesner,
Rayford W. Ellis,
Joel A. Gibson, and
John Leslie Rabb. Reverends
Eleanor Lee McGee and
Elizabeth Powell, who had been ordained before the change in church policy, were present and would be affirmed as well. This ceremony, witnessed by approximately two thousand congregants, marked “
the end of a long series of firsts” for Murray, who was a seventh-generation Episcopalian.

Neither the snow nor the fifteen protesters outside the cathedral distributing circulars and holding placards condemning the “
priestesses” deterred the jubilation inside. Murray was the last candidate to
be consecrated. When Bishop
William Creighton laid his hands on her forehead, “
the sun broke through the clouds outside and sent shafts of rainbow-colored light down through the stained-glass windows.” In that moment, she had become the first African American woman priest in the history of the Episcopal Church.

The warm ceremony and favorable press did not silence the opposition.
The
Coalition for the Apostolic Ministry, which insisted that Christian texts and traditions called exclusively for male priests and bishops, filed a complaint with Murray’s local diocese. She also learned that
John Thomas Walker, designated to succeed Creighton as the first African American bishop of the Diocese of Washington, was making insidious remarks about her sexuality behind her back. He was ready to accept women into the priesthood, but homosexuals were another matter. It mattered not that homosexuality had been removed from the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
. As far as the church was concerned, it was sin.

Although Walker’s behavior upset Murray, it is not known if she ever confronted him directly. In an unsent letter dated March 14, 1977, she took him to task for his bias and the insinuation that there was a link between her sexuality and her mental health. “
What do you really know about sexuality—heterosexuality, bi-sexuality, homosexuality, transexuality, unisexuality?” she asked. “What do you know about metabolic imbalance? Endocrine imbalance? The varieties of approach to mental health?”

After years of discrimination because of her race, gender, and sexuality, and after living through the nightmare of the McCarthy hearings, Murray leaned toward public embrace of who she was.
She increasingly mentioned homosexual rights in her sermons, speeches, and other writings. To church friends, Murray said, “
We bring our total selves to God, our sexuality, our joyousness, our foolishness, etc. etc.”

Armed with a progressive perspective on gender and sexuality, she made inclusiveness the hallmark of her ministry. She also reached out to a new generation of scholars and activists. After the
Feminist Press published the textbook
All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies
, in which the editors—Gloria T. [Akasha]
Hull,
Barbara Smith, and this author—called for the eradication of racism, anti-feminism, and homophobia in the academy and the larger society, Murray wrote to us on November 25, 1983. “
Dear Sisters,” she said, “if
Newsweek
[which had run a feature on women’s studies ignoring the contributions of black women] doesn’t see the value
of your work, here’s an ‘Old Timer’ who does. So be encouraged,
it can be done
.”

Notwithstanding the difficulties, Murray knew that her struggle paled in comparison to what others before her had faced. “
My ordination as a Negro woman priest comes some 172 years after the first Afro-American male priest was ordained in 1804 at the age of 58,” she wrote to friends. “I am only eight years older than he was at the time, and thankfully, my approval for admission to the priesthood has come one month after the absolute minimum of service required in the Diaconate.
Absalom Jones, our first Black priest, had to wait ten years. The Holy Spirit in our Church moves slowly at times, but it
does
move.”