Pauli Murray's Triadic Strategy of Engagement

Within these essays, there is clear consensus on two fundamental points: first, Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray has received limited intellectual attention over the past twenty-six years, and second, her thought and praxis merit greater consideration. Yet there is also divergence: each essay highlights for consideration a different dimension or different phase of her life.

Doreen Drury highlights the ontological and existential significance of Murray's personal narrative. An encounter with materials in Murray's archival collection at the Schlesinger Library generated questions for Drury concerning Murray's struggles with gender and sexuality in relation to the various identities and multiple social locations that inform Murray's self-understanding and public work. Most fascinating is the image of "The Imp!" used by Murray to capture a particularly robust and fluid-like component of her identity; a dimension of her being marked, as Drury puts it, "beyond the reach of sex, gender, race, and class categories of identity." It is the encompassing—the ambiguous—quality of "The Imp!" that marks it as a means by which to understand Murray and her activism, and positions it as a way of holding in creative tension the various elements of her culturally constructed self. The Imp frames both her materiality and her cultural selves in a way that dismisses efforts to easily distinguish masculinity and femininity, for example, as clear markers of undeniable difference. The Imp damages the ability of cultural categories of being to capture and hold individuals as fixed.

Assuming the significance of Murray's personal history for the development of her sociopolitical commitments and multiracial-committed activism, Azaransky highlights the significance of Murray's importance for our understanding of US jurisprudence. In particular, she is concerned with her conceptualization of Jane Crow and her effort to have "sex" addressed as part of the Civil Rights Act—both viewed through, as Azaransky puts it, the significance of "moral imagination," and spiritual need. In this manner, Murray works to address issues of injustice without turning embodied bodies into nothing more than "stuff" defined by sociopolitical and economic challenges. Instead, Murray champions bodies as having integrity. Through these contributions to legal discussions, Murray foreshadows contemporary conversation regarding a "thick" sense of the nature of subjectivity that does not allow for easy dismissal of any particular modality of injustice. From her perspective, effective policy and laws have to recognize the mutually dependent nature (and experiential realities) of various forms of injustice.

As Peppard points out, Murray held a deep interest in writing, and in fact was a poet. Yet Murray's public profile is marked most graphically through her religious and policy-related interventions. Nonetheless, in Murray's poems one might just find ways of envisioning public life so as to reshape its moral and ethical postures. The connection between poetry and politics, as Peppard notes, often is deep and consistent—albeit debated in terms of its impact and proper form. Framed by the personal and the political, Murray's poems provide an example of this art form cutting across style and historical moments. There are explicit and implicit ways in which Murray's approach to the art of the poem echoes the sentiment of figures who believe art should serve a political function by speaking to the historical moment and offering means by which to rethink our life conditions. Drawing on this sense of art as vocation, what Peppard highlights is the manner in which Murray uses the poetic to keep vital, flexible, and expansive her sense of injustice, democracy, and her demands for a robust public arena of debate and collective advancement. The poetic captures the quality of Murray's thinking and activism—the creativity and "flow" of her movement through the world—and marks the contours of hope.

Together, Drury, Azaransky, and Peppard provide a religiously articulated mapping of human engagement marked by three poles: the public impact of private relationships, the framings of justice work, and the poetic as grammar of life. Mindful of this cartography, I read in the three papers attention to a general posture adopted by Murray that helps define linkages...