Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family

by Pauli Murray

A black woman lawyer, civil-rights activist, and Episcopal priest comes to terms with her origins as she tells of the miscegenation, slavery, and struggles that are integral parts of her family's past

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Race, African American, Feminism

299 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

The Reverend Dr. Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray (November 20, 1910 – July 1, 1985) was an American civil rights activist, women's rights activist, lawyer, and author. She was also the first black woman ordained an Episcopal priest.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Murray was raised mostly by her maternal grandparents. At the age of sixteen, she moved to New York to attend Hunter College, graduating with a B.A. in English in 1933. In 1940, Murray was arrested with a friend for violating Virginia segregation laws after they sat in the whites-only section of a bus. This incident, and her subsequent involvement with the socialist Workers' Defense League, inspired her to become a civil rights lawyer, and she enrolled at Howard University. During her years at Howard, she became increasingly aware of sexism, which she called "Jane Crow", the sister of the Jim Crow racial segregation laws. Murray graduated first in her class, but was denied the chance to do further work at Harvard University because of her gender. In 1965 she became the first African American to receive a J.S.D. from Yale Law School.

As a lawyer, Murray argued for civil rights and women's rights. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall called Murray's 1950 book States' Laws on Race and Color the "bible" of the civil rights movement. Murray served on the 1961 Presidential Commission on the Status of Women and in 1966 was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women. Ruth Bader Ginsburg later named Murray a coauthor on a brief for Reed v. Reed in recognition of her pioneering work on gender discrimination. Murray held faculty or administrative positions at the Ghana School of Law, Benedict College, and Brandeis University.

In 1973, Murray left academia for the Episcopal Church, becoming a priest, and was named an Episcopal saint in 2012. Murray struggled with issues related to her sexual and gender identity, describing herself as having an "inverted sex instinct"; she had a brief, annulled marriage to a man and several relationships with women, and in her younger years, occasionally passed as a teenage boy. In addition to her legal and advocacy work, Murray published two well-reviewed autobiographies and a volume of poetry.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dr. Pauli Murray was my father's first cousin, so it was amazing to learn much of my family's history through her writing. Although I never knew her, she was an amazing woman and I'm so proud of the shoes she wore.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

RTC

[Bill on GR Sabbatical · Rating 3 out of 5]

None of Pauli Murray's remarkable life as a lawyer, writer, civil rights activist, co-founder of the National Organization for Women, and first female, African-Amercan, Episcopal priest is covered in this first of her autobiographical works, but their origins in her childhood are richly described.

Following her mother's death when she was only three, Murray was sent to Durham, N.C. to be raised by her mother's family. This is her memoir of her mother's parent's, Robert Fitzgerald, a free black from Pennsylvania who'd fought for the Union and moved to North Carolina after the Civil War to teach newly freed blacks, and Cornelia Smith, born to a white lawyer from a prominent Chapel Hill family and the slave he raped. The book is particularly insightful about the complexities of mixed-race life and 'passing' in the South from the antebellum era to World War I.

I found Robert's diary entry, commenting on an 1868 election in which he and other black men voted for the first time, to be especially poignant:

I heard a white man say today is the Black man's day. Tomorrow will be the white man's. I thought-Poor man-those days of distinction between colors is about over in this (now) free country.

Genealogical tables and maps would have greatly enhanced the reading experience, which can be slow going in some places, but the story was worth the effort.

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pauli Murray mural in her hometown of Durham, North Carolina

This book is a hidden gem: the biography of a mixed-race family around the time of the Civil War. It was published well before its time – in 1956 there wasn’t much interest in African-American family sagas – but it is well-written and fascinating in part because this isn’t a commonly-told story. Murray was a fascinating character in her own right – a prominent civil rights and women’s rights activist, a lawyer and finally a priest, genderqueer long before people knew what that was – but here she focuses on her family history, which is fascinating in its own right. The book is chiefly about her maternal grandfather, who grew up free in the North, joined one of the first black regiments to fight in the Civil War despite the fact that he was already going blind from an injury, and went south after the war to educate freed slaves in the face of white opposition. Murray’s grandmother’s story is quite different: she grew up a slave, though she didn’t feel like one, being the daughter of a son of the house and mostly treated as such. (Murray’s mother’s family would likely be seen as white today, though by the conventions of the time they were black no matter what they looked like.) All this is mixed in with Murray’s memories of being raised by her grandparents in the early 20th century.

Overall, I really enjoyed this biography/history/memoir and found it to be absorbing reading, though somewhat slow going. It is a good story and provides a little-known perspective on a well-known time in American history; unlike many books, which approach the time period through fiction, this one is based on family stories and documents and on historical research, and is more complex and authentic for it. I am definitely interested in reading more about Murray and her family.

[Sierra Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book impressed me for so many reasons but perhaps what struck me the most was just the fact that no one had ever mentioned it to me before during my study of US History. This is a must read, the way Murray covers the wide range of her family history is engaging and thought-provoking. I felt like I wanted to tab and annotate every page because the writing is so good and every detail matters. 10/10 would recommend to everyone I know!!!!!! Also, let it be known for the record that the last two chapters made me cry multiple times, such a good way to end the book.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am so glad to have read Proud Shoes! Pauli Murray came from a fascinating family. Their story sheds light on so many aspects of race in American history: pre- and post-Civil War race relations, tensions in boarder states, "passing" for white, "family" life for slaves, complex emotions surrounding children born of masters raping slaves, and high hopes following the Civil War fading with the advent of Jim Crow laws, just to name a few. The fact that much of it is set in Durham, my home town, within a mile or two of where my husband and I bought our first house, and across the street from where my grandparents are buried, only hightened the fascination for me. Even without the local connections, our book club agreed Proud Shoes should be required reading for Americans--it really is that rich, powerful, and informative. I was telling my Dad about it recently, and he recalled being on a panel with Pauli Murray a couple of years before her death, but he has never read the book. He is getting it for Christmas! I give it a 4 only because it was a little hard for me to slog through the Civil War military history, but that is a function of my knowledge base and interest level, not of the book itself. I would highly recommend it!

[Suzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pauli Murray was one of the many unsung heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, and this is her memoir.

[Tracy Triggs matthews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book! It's a great history of racism.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is mainly about the lives of the author's maternal grandparents. Murray does a wonderful job of weaving together her family's stories with extensive research to corroborate them and of the time period in general. It has accounts of her great-grandparents in the 1830s and 40s and moves through the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. It gave me a great sense of the time period in the locations described.

[Chet Makoski · Rating 5 out of 5]

This remarkable story is largely set in Chapel Hill and Hillsborough where I now live. I gained profound insights into black family life as slaves and free persons prior to the civil war, during that war, and afterwards during reconstruction and into the mid-20th century. Pauli Murray was a brilliant writer, story-teller, and a scholarly researcher uncovering her own family history. I love this book, honor this woman, and greatly admire her family for helping forge the America that I am confident this country is destined to become.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredible historical narrative about the side of a story you probably don't know, but should. This book is written by a person you also probably aren't familiar with, but should be. So well researched, and written in a wonderful narrative way that keeps you engaged. It's a picture of fortitude and grit in an extraordinary person, Pauli's grandfather. It's a reminder that there are so many stories we don't know about how America was built.

[Imani · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned a lot about the areas I grew up in. I appreciated a telling of the Civil War that was detailed and less focused on the “heroes” of the war. I cannot believe Grandfather did with poor eyesight! It makes a lot of sense why Pauli wanted to write about her family as an American family because they really reflect racial and class issues of the day

[Kit Longden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent.

[Jenny Yates · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve admired Pauli Murray for many years, and have wanted to read her memoir, published in 1956. Finally this year, I bought it from Charis Books. It didn’t disappoint. It’s beautifully written and thoroughly researched, and it feels almost like an eyewitness account of American history, even though Murray is mostly writing about events long before her own birth.

Pauli Murray’s mother died young, and so she was raised by her aunts and grandparents. The memoir begins with a vivid portrait of her grandmother, spitting mad as she quarrels with her neighbors. Then Murray goes backwards through the family history, starting with her great-grandparents. Most of the book is about her grandfather and grandmother, Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald. They lived through times of enormous change – from slavery days through the Southern Insurrection and the ups and downs of Reconstruction and then the Jim Crow era.

Both of Pauli Murray’s grandparents were mixed-race. Robert Fitzgerald was the child of a white woman and a Black man. Cornelia was the offspring of a white slave-owner and an enslaved woman, and was treated as a daughter of the house by her father’s sister. She was conflicted, proud of her father’s prominence but always trying to ignore the role played by slavery and illegitimacy.

Robert and Cornelia were light-skinned and educated, though not rich. Before the Civil War, they lived in Pennsylvania, where there were many other free Black and mixed families. When the war came, Robert fought zealously for the Union, although it was quite some time before the Union Army availed themselves of the large Black population that wanted to fight. When they finally did, the tide of the war turned. The book goes into a lot of detail about the war years, a bit more than I would’ve liked.

Robert was a very idealistic person. After the war ended, he saw a great need for the freed slaves to be taught to read, write, and figure, and so he moved south and dedicated himself to educating his people. Moving to North Carolina, he persuaded his parents and brothers to join him there, and worked as a farmer, brick-maker and tanner to supplement his meager teacher’s salary.

Pauli Murray does a wonderful job of describing the social and political atmosphere that surrounded her family in those tumultuous years of the mid-19th century. The descriptions of Black people in the impoverished South after the war – people who were given freedom but nothing with which to start a new life - is especially affecting. And we see the political gains of Reconstruction, and then all the different ways the former slave-owners tried to wrangle back their privilege – and often managed to do so.

Some quotes:

< For we lived in the evil shadow of the Confederacy although more than fifty years had intervened and two generations had come along since emancipation. There were still white people alive who had owned slaves in their youth and they refused to bury their Confederate corpse. Nothing pleased them more than to describe colored people as ex-slaves and nothing pleased us less. >

< I knew, of course, that Great-Grandmother Sarah Ann was a white woman of Swedish and French descent and that Grandfather Thomas was a half-Irish mulatto. This seemed natural to me, although our town rigidly enforced the separation of the races and had signs WHITE and COLORED everywhere to remind us stringently of this injunction. Before I was old enough to understand the full meaning of segregation, I knew there was something woefully wrong about these signs, since there could not possibly be anything wrong with my Fitzgerald great-grandparents! >

< In my great-grandparents’ day intermixture was so common that the states passed laws against miscegenation, but the law was like buying insurance after the house had burned down. There already existed such a large number of mixed bloods which defied identification that it was virtually impossible in some areas to draw any boundary lines between the races. One-third of Pennsylvania's people of color were near white and it was almost the same among the free colored people of northern Delaware. The law recognized this group as “Mulattoes” and sometimes favored them slightly more than the blacks. >

< From all I could find out about Great-Grandmother Sarah Ann, she had no Negro blood, but she simply refused to countenance race lines. This is not to say that she had an easy time of it. Wherever this blue-eyed red-faced women went in public with her copper-skinned husband, she was confronted by insinuations or repeated efforts to probe her identity. By the time she came south, she was an old hand at shutting people up. She neither admitted she was white nor denied that she was colored. She let folks think what they pleased, and as Aunt Pauline said, she didn’t give a hoot because she lived at home and boarded at the same place. She had a cryptic answer which made short shrift of meddlers and she passed it on to her near-white grandchildren growing up in the South. >

< A Negro was forever on trial, carrying always a heavy burden of proof that he was not by nature degraded or inferior, for he stood against the accumulated weight of words, laws, customs and the sanctity of judicial precedent. Slavery robbed him of the right to speak only for himself or be judged by individual merit. In every act or utterance, he must plead for millions of others. In a country where individual freedom was most idealized, he was charged not only with his own performance but with that of every other person of color of whatever character, ability or station. >

< Well, that was one way of getting around all the humbug about not letting colored men fight as soldiers. Pennsylvania, with her twenty thousand mulattoes, was a natural breeding ground for this sort of thing. Before the war was many weeks old thousands of mixed bloods were entering white regiments. Some never recrossed the line and others were not known in the official records as Negroes until many years later when they applied for their pensions. An incredible number of patriotic “Indians”, curly-haired “Mexicans”, swarthy “Italians”, and dingy “Irish” began showing up at the recruiting places. Local officers weren’t too particular how they filled their quotas as long as no fuss was made, and a man who could pass for anything but colored was readily accepted. >

< Grandfather had seen them appear wherever the federal armies encamped. They came singly, by twos and threes, and sometimes with their families, little children in their arms and small bundles of rags on their backs. They came in rickety wagons, on spavined horses and half-starved mules. They came driving steers and oxen or carrying chickens and turkeys for the Yankee soldiers. Shadowy figures slipped from the swamps; exhausted swimmers crawled up river banks; desperate horsemen galloped through Rebel picket lines in a dash for Union outposts. They swarmed into the camps with small gifts of food and valuable information. >

< Few in those times could fully appreciate the vast release of pent-up emotions among four million people when they realized that at last they were their own masters. They had not owned their bodies and at times doubted that they owned their souls. The accumulated restlessness of a lifetime of unnatural restraints now propelled them in all directions at once. It was a time for casting off every obligation, for turning one’s back on the sorrows of the old life and reveling in this new-found thing they had prayed for and which was now more compelling to experience than food or water. >

< In this restless movement were those for whom freedom meant an unending quest for loved ones. Years before, they had been parted; wives sold one way and husbands another, children separated from their parents and aged separated from their children. When the parting came, each had carried with him an image of his loved one and the place where he had left him. All his remaining years he would be inquiring of people if they had heard of a slave called “Black Cato” or “Yellow Sam” or “Sally,” and trying to get to that place where they had been separated. He would describe the loved one in the intimate way he had remembered him – a charm worn about the neck, a dimple in the cheek, a certain manner of walking or smiling. It did not matter that children had grown up and lost childish features or that parents had grown old and white haired. >

[Thor]

This is an absolutely fascinating family history, thoroughly researched and presented with great skill. The time is a few decades after the Civil War, in the early 1900's. It's mostly the story of Murray's grandmother, who had been a slave (and a mistress of the household at the same time), and her grandfather, a scholar and teacher and Civil War veteran. These are persons of very high character, and they are on a life-long mission to overcome the bizarre racism of those times and even today.

To make things even more fun, the locale where Pauli grew up with her grandparents is in Durham, right next to the Maplewood cemetary. My great-grandfather had been laid to rest there some time before. And by now quite a few more relatives have joined him as neighbors to Pauli Murray's childhood home.

This is truly a great book. It came out in 1956, at which time nobody paid it much attention. Now it is cast as part of the genre of black women overcoming stuff, but it's way beyond that.

[Chalida · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a powerful book that gives you a different lens of Civil Rights history and told from the eyes of Pauli Murray recounting her great grandparents' histories. Published in 1956, Murray has really interesting stories of race and the very mixed history of her family and many others which was the norm and not divided into these concepts of purely black and white. The second half of the book focuses on her grandfather's desperation to prove himself by fighting in the Civil War and it gets very tedious, but the first half is super-interesting and deepens my understanding of families during this period.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reverend Dr. Pauli Murray was an American civil rights advocate, feminist, lawyer and ordained priest. She is best known for furthering the civil rights and feminist causes.

Pauli Murray's heritage is a complicated one (slaves, slave owners) but in Proud Shoes she lays out all she could trace back of her family in great detail. Of course, along with her story are real accounts of the injustices of America that remind us that some things have changed and some things have only shifted.

[Jenai Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed reading this. The war commentary was a bit heavy for me but overall the story was engaging. It was interesting because a lot of the issues that were written about are still relevant and important today. It was eye opening to see how some things never change and how history does in fact repeat itself.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memoir of Pauli Murray's grandparents, from slavery to Jim Crow. Especially powerful reading about her grandfather fighting in the Civil War and then going south to teach former slaves.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very slow-paced, especially in the middle, but I learned a good bit especially about North Carolina history in the late 1800s.

This quote about the common human longing for freedom, dignity, and self-determination vs practical manifestations of having the privilege to access them in 1860s America really struck me-

"Freedom was not something you could hold in your hands and look at. It was something inside you which refused to die, a feeling, an urge, an impelling force; but it was other things, too, things you did not have and you had to have tools to get them. Few freedmen had tools in 1865; only the feeling, the urge." (page 168)


And this one about the KKK harassing one of the main characters and then beating someone else up was hard to read-

"For a while the Ku-Klux Klan disrupted Grandfather's new home. He and Grandmother lived in the cottage and slept in the main house. Night after night the men sat up with their guns in their hands as the masked Klansmen thundered past on the road. In the mornings they found the ground almost cut to pieces from horses' hoofs where the Ku-Kluxers had ridden round and round the empty little cottage and the schoolhouse. [...]

"Whether it was prayer or whether it was the rumor that the Fitzgeralds were good shots, nobody knows, but after awhile the Klan left them alone. [...] In adjoining Alamance County that November, four masked men attacked Alonzo B. Corliss, a lame teacher employed by the Friends Freedman's Association. They went to his hole, dragged him out of bed in his nightclothes and out of the house without his crutches. His clothing was torn from his body as they pulled him through the bushes. When they got him to the woods, they flogged his naked body with raw cowhide and green hickory sticks - thirty lashes. Then they cut off the hair from one side of his head and painted half of his face and shorn head black. They kicked him in the side and left him lying unconscious in the cold November night air. He lay there for three hours before he came to and tried to crawl home. A colored man brought him his clothes and his wife met him with his crutches and together they helped him to his house. But when his wife fainted at his bedside, his colored students, braving threats of the Klan, slipped in and dressed his wounds. When he had asked his tormentors what harm he had done they told him, 'Teaching n*ggers.'" (pages 221-223)


An enraging history lesson about public education in NC-

"It was a time when the idea of a public school system supported by taxes was not popular in North Carolina. Half the population was illiterate and at least a third was strongly opposed to paying taxes for education. The system of free schools guaranteed by the Constitution of 1868 was just getting started. Local officials in charge of selecting teachers, fixing salaries, choosing textbooks and maintaining school buildings were often indifferent or downright dishonest. The minimum term was four months a year, but it was widely ignored as a mandate and there was no way of enforcing it. Often a school term lasted only ten weeks.

"In the year of Aunt Pauline's birth [1870], only one out of every ten children of school age was enrolled. The Conservatives had wrested control of the state legislature from the Republicans that year, and systematically began to whittle down provisions for uniform education. The distribution of school funds was removed from control by the state board of education and placed in the hands of the legislature. The law which provided for allocation of funds among the counties in proportion to their school population was repealed.

"Without a proportional system, it was easy to starve the colored schools. The state superintendent of public instruction had no interest in Negro education and stated that he doubted 'any system of instruction will ever lift the African to high spheres of educated mind.'" (pages 233-234)

"When Grandfather came south to teach, the little Negro freedmen and the poor white children were more or less on an equal footing, shared an abysmal ignorance and went to log cabin schools. A half century later the crusade against starving the colored schools was a feeble whimper. Each morning I passed white children as poor as I going in the opposite direction on their way to school. We never had fights; I don't recall their ever having called me a single insulting name. It was worse than that. They passed me as is I weren't there! They looked through me and beyond me with unseeing eyes. Their school was a beautiful red-and-white brick building on a wide paved street. Its lawn was large and green and watered every day and flower beds were everywhere. Their playground, a wonderland of iron swings, sand slides, see-saws, crossbars and a basketball court, was barred from us by a strong eight-foot-high fence topped by barbed wire. We could only press our noses against the wire and watch them playing on the other side.

“I went to West End where Aunt Pauline taught, on Ferrell Street, a dirt road which began at a lumberyard and ended in a dump. On one side of this road were long low warehouses where huge barely of tobacco shavings and tobacco dust were stored. ll day long our nostrils sucked in the brows silt life find snuff in the air. West End looked more like a warehouse than a school. It was a dilapidated, rickety, two-story wooden building which creaked and swayed in the wind as if it might collapse. Outside it was scarred with peeling paint from many winters of rain and snow. Inside the floors were bare and splintery, the plumbing was leaky, the drinking fountains broken and the toilets in the basement smelly and constantly out of order. We’d have to wade through pools of foul water to get to them. At recess we herded into a yard of cracked clay, barren of tree or bush, and played what games we could improvise like hopscotch or springboard, which we contrived by pulling rotted palings off the wooden fence and placing them on brickbats.

“It was never the hardship which hurt so much as the contrast between what we had and what the white children had. We got the greasy, torn, dog-eared books; they got the news ones. They had field day in the city park; we had it on a furrowed stubbly hillside. They got wide mention in the newspaper; we got a paragraph at the bottom. The entire city officialdom from the mayor downturned out to review their pageantry; we got a solitary official.

“Our seedy run-down school told us that if we had any place at all in the scheme of things it was a separate place, marked off, proscribed and unwanted by the white people. We were bottled up and labeled and set aside - sent to the Jim Crow car, the back of the bus, the side door of the theater, the side window of a restaurant. We came to know that whatever we had was always inferior. We came to understand that no matter how neat and lea, how law abiding, submissive and polite, how studious in school, how churchgoing and moral, how scrupulous in paying our bills and taxes we were, it made no essential difference in our place." (pages 268-270)


On the obsession with color in the early 1900s-

“It seemed as if there were only two kinds of people in the world - They and We - White and Colored. The world revolved on color and variations in color. It pervaded the air I created. I learned it in hundreds of ways. I picked it up from grown folks around me. I heard it in the house, on the playground, in the streets, everywhere. The tide of color beat upon me ceaselessly, relentlessly.

“Always the same tune, played like a broken record, robbing one of personal identity. Always the shifting sands of color so that there was no solid ground under one’s feet. It was color, color, color all the time, color, features and hair. Folks were never just folks. They were white folks! Black folks! Poor white crackers! No-count n*ggers! Red necks! Drakes! Peckerwoods! Coons!

“Two shades lighter! Two shades darker! Dead white! Coal black! High yaller! Mariny! Good hair! Bad hair! Stringy hair! Nappy hair! Thin lips! Thick lips! Red lip! Liver lips! Blue veined! Straight nosed! Flat nosed!

“Brush your hair, child, don’t let it get kinky! Cold-cream your face, child, don’t let it get sunburned! Don’t suck your lips, child, you’ll make them too n*ggerish! Black is evil, don’t mix with mean n*ggers! Black is honest, you half-white bastard. I always said a little black and a little white sure do make a pretty sight! He’s black as sin and evil in the bargain. The blacker the berry, the sweet the juice!

“To hear people talk, color, features and hair were the most important things to know about a person, a yardstick by which everyone measured everybody else. From the looks of my family I could never tell where white folks left off and colored folks began.” (pages 270-271)


And one of my favorite passages, one of the most lyrical-

"I squashed a rotten persimmon between my toes and wondered what she had in the oven. The sunlight filtered through the persimmon boughs and little rainbows appeared on her coffee-brown face. I wondered why some people were called white and some called colored when there were so many colors and you couldn't tell where one left off and the other began." (page 260)

[Trudie Barreras · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is one that should be called both timely and timeless. I was profoundly moved by Murray’s description – completely honest and brilliantly written – of her grandfather Robert Fitzgerald’s experience during and following the Civil War. Likewise, although it was told only in vignettes through her eyes as a child, her description of how it felt to be a person of mixed race in the American South during the first half on the 20th Century is extraordinary and important.

At this point I need to explain how I discovered this book, which has had a profound effect on my own awareness of the realities of the racial situation in this country prior to my own experience of living and working in Tuskegee, AL, during the decade of most intense Civil Rights activity from 1966-1974. I am a committed fan of author Kittredge Cherry, whose novels “Jesus in Love” and “At the Cross” I have previously reviewed for Amazon. Cherry also has a blogspot, www.jesusinlove.blogspot.com, which is extremely valuable in bringing to awareness many vital personalities and issues that are of great concern to me. On July 9th, this blog featured a brief discussion of Pauli Murray’s life and accomplishments, and noted that the Episcopal Church was considering naming her as a Saint. The blog included mention of this book by Murray, which immediately motivated me to order it. It is a purchase I’m extremely delighted to have made.

Cherry’s blog also posted the update two days later:

Murray was approved for inclusion in the Episcopal Church’s book of saints, “Holy Women, Holy Men” in a vote late on July 11. She will be honored every July 1 on the church calendar.

If one believes, and I do, that the arc of history does in fact bend towards justice as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stated, then one must see this book as being part of that bending. First published in 1956, it was reissued in 1978, and the copy I have was printed in 1999. And yet, I only heard about it as a result of Cherry’s calling attention to the action of the Episcopal Church. Still, this book has become more rather than less relevant, and I hope that there will be others who, like me, will be awakened to a new sense of significance and purpose by reading it.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading Rosalind Rosenberg's Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray and being blown away by the amazing person named Pauli Murray, I decided to read the detailed history of their family in their own words, Proud Shoes. It is little surprise that Pauli was such a pivotal world changing person after reading her family history. Pauli's grandfather, Robert Fitzgerald, and his wife Cornelia, as well as his parents, siblings , and children lived their lives on the front line of the battle for equality, education and justice for every person. Although some of this story happened elsewhere, much of it transpired just a few miles from where we live, and transformed our community of Durham NC in the post Civil War years. It was again mind blowing to read the stories of these giants and be able to walk in the same spaces that they lived and walked. Proud Shoes is excellently written and researched, including written as well as rich oral history from Pauli's family. This is an amazing true story of an amazing family that embodied so much of what Durham has come to represent to the surrounding communities, the State of NC, and to our nation. This is on my must read list, a really special story. Please, read it.

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

In some ways it is hard to believe Proud Shoes was written nearly 70 years ago. Murray tells the story of her family's past and offers up such a current analysis of race, gender, change, faith, and plain hard work - it is at times stunning. It is also "beyond current" in that it is revealing of a much more complex and intertwined past than we generally acknowledge - Proud Shoes gives you real people and concrete reasons to celebrate the diverse American story. The description of the 1868 election rally and celebration in Hillsborough, North Carolina is just one example of an importantly illuminated slice of 'lost history'. A must read for anyone interested in the nuance, triumph, and tragedy of what race is in America - especially if you are interested in the realities of the Black experience in the pivotal pre-Civil War era through Reconstruction. Also, a tremendous journey into a localized family experience - if you are interested in North Carolina history, especially Orange and Durham counties in all of their complexity in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries please read Proud Shoes.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

This beautiful and haunting book made me very angry. It seems to me that anybody who denies the thorough racism of the US from its beginnings must work very hard to be ignorant. Murray's tale of her maternal grandparents' lives from the 1840s to the early 20th century exemplifies the lifelong struggles of black Americans. Using her grandfather's wartime diaries she gives an account of the end of the Civil War in Virginia and its aftermath that hums with immediacy. The efforts to deny black people the vote were ominously like what's happening today. Southern states created new regimes that refused to implement the 13th-15th amendments and nothing was done. Her grandfather left Pennsylvania on a mission to educate black people in North Carolina after the war and thus was engaged in the losing struggle for equal education resources. Although this book was first published in 1956 it is plenty timely for today and deserves to be better known. In 1865 the US survived as a country because the winners bent over backward to accommodate the losers. What will happen next time?

[Meredith Goldsmith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished _Proud Shoes_ and I continue to be incredibly impressed by Pauli Murray's writing and fascinating life story. Murray explores the multiple sides of her family history--the black and white, free and enslaved--with emotional depth and sympathy. Murray's grandfather was a free person of color from Chester County, Pennsylvania; her grandmother was the daughter of an enslaved woman and a scion of the white elite in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. For Murray, all history is local, and her meticulous research sheds new light on the history of race relations in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina (where, as it happens, I grew up). Her account of the aftermath of the Civil War and the impact of Radical Reconstruction, much of it told through her grandfather's eyes, is fascinating. This book deserves more readers, not only for its loving attention to detail, but for Murray's distinctive voice.

A great introduction to Pauli Murray can also be found here: https://www.amazon.com/My-Name-Pauli-....

[Barbara Barnett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently searched and found this book in the library after reading "The Firebrand and the First Lady" about Pauli Murray's friendship with Elenor Roosevelt. What a great book and so much history about the aftermath of the civil war. She told an intimate story based on writings from her grandfather's journal. His journal covered both his experiences as a soldier during the war and as a teacher in the south after the war. Most moving, to me, was how Pauli's grandfather and many other black teachers moved to the south to teach newly freed slaves to read. History, as written in the history books taught in the schools, does not covey the deep and moving yearning of the new black citizens to read; and, how threatened the white southern population was by the teachers who come south to teach them. This book is wonderful and worth the library search to find it. I would like to see it republished.

[Deb Aronson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Pauli Murray's family story is a remarkable, intimate look at our legacy of slavery and all its complexities. Her grandmother was proud of her heritage as part of a white family in the south. But her father wasa white slave owner who raped her mother (Murray's great grandmother), a slave. Murray's grandfather, who came to NC to help teach freedmen had such integrity and yet he faced the kind of resistance from the white school system that it gave me heart burn. And yet he persevered. There were moments in this book that made me despair; I often feel like we have not come very far from the days of the KKK attacking blacks, as well as whites who sought to help blacks.

This book, together with In The Warmth of Other Suns, are for me seminal works regarding our racist history and how much we have to still put right.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first learned about Pauli Murray from Patricia Bell-Scott’s book, The Firebrand and the First Lady, a biography focused on the friendship Murray forged with Eleanor Roosevelt after pestering ER for years about civil and women's rights, and then working together to advance them.

This book is a memoir Murray wrote for her nieces and nephews about their family history, it ends just as she reaches adulthood. Her family included enslaved people, free Black citizens, and white ancestors – both slaveholders and those with anti-slavery beliefs. It was hard to keep track of everyone, and I picked up and put down the book quite a few times before finishing (which definitely didn’t make it any easier to keep track of everyone). I wish I had diagramed a family tree as I read.

A remarkable family history, written by a remarkable woman.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a treasure of American history, following Pauli Murray's family through slavery and the Civil War and Reconstruction and Jim Crow, weaving in the complicated politics of this era and giving insights into the sheer grit that propelled the Fitzgeralds through everything that life threw at them. I especially liked the insights into the beginning of public education in the US and Grandfather Robert's zeal for educating everyone, no matter who they were. The contrast between his work and the neglect of segregated schools in the early 20th century was a very bitter comparison.

Murray's reflections on the ways that her family navigated the borders of race provide a lot of insight into her own relationship with gender. I wish more people would let these reflections speak for themselves instead of trying to fit them into their preferred queer theory labels and frameworks.

[Lois · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading that Pauli Murray's childhood home in Durham will be a National Historic Site, I realized that I needed to learn more about this woman. This is more the story of her grandparents than her own story, but it is filled with the drama of American history from the Cival War through the 1960's. Race is a huge factor, as is the difficulties of living in the South during those years.
Murray, who did remarkable things with her life, is an inspiration and this book shows her roots. I want to learn more about her life as a professional woman, how she lived with her her homosexuality, how she became a civil rights and women's rights lawyer and how she was drawn to become an Episcopal Priest.