Democracy, the Verb: Pauli Murray's Poetry as a Resource for Ongoing Freedom Struggles

Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray (1910-1985) receives no mention in the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. One professor of modern and contemporary literature put it succinctly: "I am not aware that her work is often taught in English departments anywhere." Indeed, beyond a cadre of committed expositors and scholars in the fields of twentieth-century American history and religious studies, Murray's vast and varied literary corpus receives limited attention.¹ Much of her work remains unanthologized.²

Pauli Murray was simultaneously a private person and a behind-the-scenes public figure. Snapshots of her life are iconic. Consider Murray in her multiple, overlapping incarnations: the young activist for economic, racial, and sexual justice, waiting in unemployment lines and seething at discrimination; the poet who watched Harlem burn in the early 1940s; the law student striving for educational integration on the basis of both race and sex; the lawyer whose work on segregation laws was crucial in the decade of the 1950s; the North Carolinian who migrated to New York City, ran for public office, worked at a corporate law firm, and embraced a quiet, long-term, same-sex relationship; and, late in life, the first black woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest, as well as the first woman to celebrate the Eucharist in the state of North Carolina.

The life and legacy of Pauli Murray ought not to be forgotten. Perhaps Murray and her remarkable contributions to poetry and polity will be rendered more visible as the result of her elevation to the status of saint in the US Episcopal Church at a time when the United States is socially and economically stratified in ways not seen for nearly a century. It is certainly worth considering Murray's relevance for present-day freedom struggles, for well within her long embrace stands the question of what ought to be sought in American democracy. This essay first situates Murray's work within twentieth-century American discourses regarding the relationship between poetry and democracy, drawing on the recent work of literary theorist Patrick Redding in order to demonstrate the particular character of discernment and struggle in some of Murray's more overtly political poems. Next, this essay identifies three key points of contact between the poetic legacy of Murray and the shape of contemporary democratic freedom struggles in the United States.

Poetry and Democracy in the Twentieth-Century United States

To situate Murray's poetic avocation, it is worth asking: What has poetry to do with democracy? Poets and writers are no strangers to political dissent, as even a brief litany of global literati makes clear—for example, Anna Ahkmatova, Zbigniew Herbert, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Václav Havel, Liao Yiwu, and Li Bifeng. But even short of censure or imprisonment, the poetic can be political. This claim may sound rather more like the daily bread of literary theory than the stuff of contemporary national debate. But as literary theorist Patrick Redding reminds us, theories of democratic poetics were hotly contested in public media and cultural outlets as well as more aristocratic repositories of literary taste from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. Murray lived and wrote during the latter portion of that time period.

Several sets of concerns were evident in that national conversation about democratic poetics. Would egalitarian poetry (that is, poetry created by and intelligible to a wide readership) lead to a downward leveling of quality? Cultural arbiters like George Santayana feared that democratic norms of equality would be refracted into literary judgments and would "[suppress] artistic quality in the name of political equality."³ Others were more optimistic. For example, Redding describes how, for philosophers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and John Dewey, "democracy names a minimal account of political equality out of which the forms of individuality can be given definition. On this account, the distinctive and idiosyncratic expressions of the individual imagination become the proof by which political equality justifies itself."⁴ On this view, the voices of the people are proper to both poetry and democracy.

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