Rev. Pauli Murray

Rev. Pauli Murray (1910-1985), lawyer, activist and priest. Anna Pauline Murray was born in Baltimore. Her mother died when she was three, and her grief-stricken father quickly succumbed to mental illness and was sent to a mental institution, where a white guard taunted him with racial slurs and beat him to death; one of her only memories of him was lying in a casket, his skull “split open like a melon and sewed together loosely with jagged stitches.” She was raised by her aunt and grandparents in Durham. “I had in effect three mothers,” she later recalled, “each trying to impress upon me those traits of character expected…stern devotion to duty, capacity for hard work, industry and thrift, and above all honor and courage in all three things.” Her aunt also accepted her habit of acting like a “little boy-girl,” wearing boy’s clothes and insisting on being called Paul and then Pauli. As a child, she walked long distances to avoid riding in segregated streetcars and developed her reading skills by reading the newspaper to her grandfather, a Civil War veteran who had operated a school for former slaves before going blind. IN high school she served as editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, president of the literary society, member of the debate team and basketball team, and valedictorian, She refused to attend a segregated university in the South and instead tried to enroll at Columbia University, but they turned her away because of her gender. She instead sought admission at Hunter College, also in New York, but the inferior quality of her segregated education in North Carolina meant that she had to attend high school in New York for two more years before finally starting college in 1929. The Great Depression shortly thereafter, and Murray was forced to live in tenement buildings, work multiple jobs, and eat so little that she suffered from malnutrition, but she graduated on time four years later while also becoming a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.

By then the Depression had reached its peak, with the unemployment rate for black New Yorkers over fifty percent. Murray worked at several jobs, including the Urban League and a woman’s camp run by the Works Progress Administration. She joined the Communist Party but quickly left because she “found party discipline irksome.” She also struggled with her same-sex, gender nonconforming identity in a time when society had little acceptance for this, suffering frequent mental breakdowns and asking doctors to give her male hormones and to perform surgery. She applied to the University of North Carolina School of Law but was turned away because of her race. In 1940, she was arrested in Petersburg, Virginia for refusing to give up her seat on an interstate bus, later recalling that the bus was her most hated of all segregated institutions because it “permitted the public humiliation of black people to be carried out in the presence of privileged white spectators, who witnessed our shame in silence or indifference.” Although she hoped that the charge of violating segregation laws would lead to legal action against segregation on interstate buses, Virginia prosecutors avoided this possibility by charging her with disorderly conduct. She spent several days in jail rather than paying the fine and decided to continue her education as a way of fighting for civil rights, later writing that “I felt I needed to have a skill that would enable me to fight more intelligently.” Before that could happen, she became involved in the case of Odell Waller, a Virginia sharecropper who had been sentenced to death by an all-white jury for shooting his landowner in self-defense; Murray helped raise money for his legal defense by giving speeches, and one of the people in the audience was a young attorney named Thurgood Marshall, who encouraged her to apply to Howard University College of Law, the only black law school in the country at that time. On the first day of class a professor remarked that he did not understand why women enrolled in law school at all, and in later semesters her classmates mocked her when she suggested legal strategies for overturning segregation. Nevertheless, she published articles such as “Negroes Are Fed Up”; co-founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); led protests at segregated Washington D.C. restaurants; and worked in legal defense for the poor. She was also elected to the highest student position in the school and graduated first in her class. Previous Howard law valedictorians were automatically given graduate school fellowships at Harvard, but she was denied this honor because of her gender, and not even a letter from President Franklin Roosevelt could reverse this decision. Harvard’s rejection letter simply stated “You are not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School,” to which she replied “Gentlemen, I would gladly change my sex to meet your requirements, but since the way to such change has not been revealed to me, I have no recourse but to appeal to you to change your minds on this subject. Are you to tell me that one is as difficult as the other?” These experiences helped inspire her term “Jane Crow” to refer to the ways that black women were discriminated against on the grounds of both race and gender. Murray earned a graduate degree from the University of California-Berkeley, then became the first African American deputy attorney general in California. When the United Methodist Church asked her to write a comprehensive, state-by-state analysis of segregation laws, she produced the 746-page work “State’s Laws on Race and Color.” This was quickly used by the NAACP in the Brown v. Board of Education case; Thurgood Marshall called it “the Bible for civil rights lawyers.” The strategy that she had been mocked for in law school was now the cornerstone of the desegregation movement. Murray then worked at a New York law firm but left after several years because she felt isolated as the only African American and one of only three women, taking a teaching position at the new Ghana School of Law.

She returned in the early 1960s and devoted her time to the fight for racial and gender equality. She served on several government commissions, including President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, and wrote articles such as “Jane Crow and the Law,” “The Liberation of Black Women,” and “The Negro Woman and the Quest for Equality,” which criticized sexism in the Civil Rights Movement, including the lack of women speakers at the March on Washington. In her 1965 article “Jane Crow and the Law,” she argued that the Equal Protection Clause in the 14^th Amendment should apply equally to race and gender. This became foundational to the work of women’s rights attorney and future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who included Murray as an honorary co-author in her brief for the groundbreaking 1971 Reed v. Reed case. Murray also authored many books, including a family history entitled Proud Shoes. In 1966, she helped to found the National Organization of Women, co-authoring its statement of purpose. A year earlier she had become the first African American to earn a Doctoral of Juridical Science from Yale. She taught and worked as an administrator at Brandeis University, Benedict College, and Ghana University Law School. Despite all of this, her work in the fight for equality was not widely known outside of academic circles because she was a lesbian. One scholar later wrote “The civil rights struggle demanded respectable performances of black manhood and womanhood, particularly from its heroes and heroines, and respectability meant being educated, heterosexual, married and Christian. Murray’s open lesbian relationships and her gender nonconforming identity disrupted the dictates of respectability, making it easier to erase her five decades of important intellectual and political contributions from our broader narrative of civil rights.” Another put this more bluntly: “It was Pauli Murray’s fate to be both ahead of her time and behind the scenes.” Even so, her personal life and multiple forms of activism and scholarship helped shape present-day understandings of intersectionality. Her presence at the death of a close friend pushed her to enter the ministry, and in 1977 she became the first black woman ordained as an Episcopalian priest. Her first performance of Communion took place in the same church where her enslaved grandmother had been baptized a century earlier. She served in this capacity until her death in 1985. In 2012, the Episcopal Church gave Pauli Murray its equivalent of sainthood, listing her among people “whose lives have exemplified what it means to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and make a difference in the world.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

George Floyd

George Floyd (1973-2020), ministry leader and security guard.  George Perry Floyd, Jr. was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina but grew up in the Cuney Homes housing project, nicknamed “the Bricks,” in Houston’s Third Ward. He used sports to cope with the poverty and crime of his neighborhood, playing on Yates High School’s varsity basketball team as a freshman and starting at tight end on a football team that made it to the state championship game in 1992. He then became the first of his six siblings to attend college, enrolling at South Florida Community College on a football scholarship, where he was also one of the leading scorers on the basketball team. After two years he transferred to Texas A&M University-Kingsville and played basketball there before leaving school and returning to Houston in 1995. Once back home, he worked as a car customizer. He also became part of the local hip hop scene at a time when southern hip hop was growing in national importance thanks in part to artists like the Geto Boys and DJ Screw, who was best known for his deejaying and production techniques on more than 350 mixtapes. Some of those mixtapes included “Big Floyd,” whose lyrics mostly focused on everyday life in the Third Ward, although in one song he foreshadowed future events with the line “Catch me on the TV nationwide.” In the late 1990s, though, Floyd unfortunately became caught in some of the same problems that had plagued the Third Ward and other underserved black communities for generations. He was arrested nine times between 1997 and 2007 for drug possession, theft, trespass, and aggravated robbery, and he served several years in prison. After being paroled in 2013, he went home with a new resolve to make a positive difference in his community. He became active at with the charity Angel by Nature and the church Resurrection Houston, using his own troubled past to connect to young people in the Bricks. Telling his pastor “The neighborhood need it, the community need it, and if y’all about God’s business, then that’s my business. Whatever y’all need, wherever y’all need to go, tell ‘em Floyd said y’all good,” Floyd connected with Christian rappers and helped the church host basketball tournaments, cookouts, Bible studies, community baptisms, and transporting residents to grocery stories and doctor’s appointments. One fellow church member stated “His faith was a heart for the Third Ward that was radically changed by the gospel,” while his pastor recalled that “George Floyd was a person of peace sent from the Lord that helped the gospel go forward in a place that I never lived in. The platform for us to reach that neighborhood and the hundreds of people we reached through that time and up to now was built on the backs of people like Floyd.” In one Twitter video, Floyd pleaded with young people to end shootings, saying “our young generation is clearly lost…You youngsters just going around just busting guns, in crowds, kids getting killed…Come on home, man. One day it’s going to be you and God; you going up, or you going down?”

In 2014 Floyd moved to Minneapolis as part of a church discipleship program, seeking to expand his ministry in a new urban community. Although Minnesota had a reputation for racial liberalism, it also had a long legacy of racial violence. Minneapolis began as Fort Snelling, a military base created in part to control the Sioux and other local Native Americans. Although slavery was banned in Minnesota, slaveholding military officers were allowed to bring their slaves with them; Dred and Harriet Scott were among those forced to live there. Minnesota was also the site of the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota Sioux men in Mankato in 1862, which was the largest mass execution in U.S. history, and of the 1920 lynching of three black men who had been falsely accused of raping a white teenager. More recently, Rickia Russell, Jamar Clark, Philando Castille, and other African Americans were killed or seriously injured by police in the Minneapolis area despite having posed no threat to the officers who attacked them; meanwhile, a Somali-American officer who killed a white woman was sent to prison. African Americans in Minneapolis were seven times more likely than whites to face violence from police officers, eight times more likely to be arrested for low-level violations such as loitering or using counterfeit money, and ten times more likely to be incarcerated. Some of this happened under the tenure of Minneapolis police union leader Bob Kroll, who has been demoted or suspended several times for excessive use of force, who wears a motorcycle jacket bearing a patch that has been associated with white supremacist groups, and who referred to then-U.S. Congressman and Muslim Keith Ellison as a terrorist. Floyd made a new home in this difficult climate by working as a truck driver, bouncer, and a security guard at the Salvation Army and the El Nuevo Rodeo restaurant/nightclub. One of his co-workers at the latter location was Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer who provided security outside the club while off duty. Although Floyd was well-liked by patrons and co-workers as a “gentle giant” who got along well with everyone and had a knack for defusing difficult situations peacefully, Chauvin earned a reputation for being excessively aggressive with black patrons. The club owner recalled “He would mace everyone instead of apprehending the people who were fighting. He would call backup. The next thing you know, there would be five or six squad cars…I told him, I thought this is unnecessary to be pepper-sprayed. The knee-jerk reaction of being afraid, it seemed overkill,” while one of his co-workers later theorized “I think he was afraid and intimidated” by African Americans.

In early 2020 Floyd lost his job at El Nuevo Rodeo due to COVID-19 shutdowns, and shortly thereafter he contracted the disease himself, although his case was relatively mild and he recovered in several weeks. On 25 May 2020, Floyd tried to buy cigarettes at a grocery store in the predominantly black and Latinx neighborhood of Powerhorn Park. The clerk noticed that the $20 bill he used was counterfeit and called the police when Floyd refused to return the cigarettes. The store owner later said “Most of the times when patrons give us a counterfeit bill they don’t even know it’s fake so when the police are called there is no crime being committed, just want to know where it came from, and that’s usually what takes place.” In this instance, two officers arrived, handcuffed Floyd, and sat him on the sidewalk, where he waited calmly. They then took him to their squad car, and he stated that he was not resisting but did not want to wait in the car because he was claustrophobic. Another car arrived with two more officers, including Derek Chauvin, who assumed command. Chauvin forced Floyd into the car, then pulled him back out, forced him to the ground, and pressed his knee to the back of Floyd’s neck while the other officers helped keep him down. Floyd remained in that position for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. He said “I can’t breathe” sixteen times, complained of being in pain, begged the officer to get off his neck, said “they’re going to kill me,” and called out for his mother in an increasingly weak voice. During the last three he was motionless and had no pulse, but Chauvin remained on his neck, and the officers made no effort to provide emergency medical care. A multiracial crowd of bystanders, including the store owner’s nephew, began filming the incident with their phones and demanded that Chauvin get off Floyd’s neck or at least check his pulse, to which one of the other officers replied “Don’t do drugs,” while Chauvin looked directly into one of the camera phones and maintained his position. the camera while he was being recorded on Floyd’s neck. This continued even after paramedics arrived. The unconscious man was finally taken away in an ambulance and pronounced dead in the emergency room an hour later. The official autopsy said that Floyd died due to cardiac arrests caused by being restrained, while the police issued a statement asserting that Floyd had resisted arrest and that the officers had been attentive to his medical distress. Within a few hours, though, video footage of the killing spread rapidly on social media and numerous news outlets, while Floyd’s family commissioned a second autopsy, which found that asphyxiation was the cause of death.

Police brutality against African Americans has been a problem since the days of slave patrollers and overseers, and in recent years and weeks a number of killings had received public attention, but Floyd’s death provoked an unprecedented international response. The existing climate of racial violence, concern about the COVID-19 Pandemic and the subsequent economic downturn, anger over the policies and comments of U.S. President Donald Trump, and the graphic nature of a video which showed a dying man pleading and gasping for his life while an officer indifferently kneeled on his neck sparked worldwide outrage and activism and forced long-overdue conversations about racial inequality. Hundreds of protests were held in thousands of cities and towns around the world, including many places that had few or no black residents. Some protests escalated into theft and violence, although many of these incidents were caused by opportunists uninvolved in the cause, by counter protesters seeking to disparage the protestors or to attack them, or by law enforcement officials. Protesters in places like France, Australia, Colombia, and Mexico linked Floyd’s murder to their own local history of violence against racial minorities, murals of Floyd were painted on a remnant of the Berlin Wall and in numerous other locations around the world, and Pope Francis proclaimed that “We cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism and exclusion in any form and yet claim to defend the sacredness of every human life.” A GoFundMe page created to raise money for Floyd’s five children and two grandchildren broke the site’s record for individual donations. Societal norms that previously seemed unchangeable now began rapidly changing. The Black Lives Matter movement had long been criticized by many white Americans for its activism against police brutality, but now it grew in support, with many people saying its slogans or displaying its imagery. NASCAR banned Confederate flags at its races after years of refusing to do so for fear of alienating its conservative white fans, and its only top-level black driver repainted his car with the words “Black Lives Matter.” The National Football League had driven out Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the national anthem in protest of police brutality, but it now stated that players would be allowed to kneel and admitted what it had done to Kaepernick. Statues that celebrated Confederate leaders, Spanish conquistadors, and other people with legacies of racial violence were taken down. Television and movie producers began reconsidering their content that gave inaccurate views of law enforcement. Social media was used to highlight black-owned businesses and black creative voices. Colleges and universities began reexamining their policies in admissions, student life, and curriculum, and at least eight created scholarships in Floyd’s name. Individuals and companies who made insensitive comments in response to Floyd’s death were faced with boycotts, termination, withdrawal of college admission, and other forms of backlash. Chauvin and the three other officers involved in his killing were fired and then charged with murder. The U.S. Congress and various states and cities began considering criminal justice reforms such as: banning knee restraints like the one that Chauvin used; banning no-knock warrants like the one that resulted in Breonna Taylor’s death in Louisville; creating a national database of police officers who engage in misconduct so that they can no longer move from one jurisdiction to another; enabling officers who engage in misconduct to be sued; and generally shifting policies and funding to create a greater emphasis on preventing and solving problems in a non-violent, non-punitive manner. It is also likely that Floyd's murder played a role in the 2020 presidential election, as many independent voters and even some conservatives were offended by Trump's underwhelming response to the killing and by his criticism of and violent reaction to the protests.

When Chauvin's trial began in March 2021, his attorneys argued that Floyd's death was caused by drug use, that Floyd had resisted arrest, and that the officer had been in a vulnerable position because of the nearby crowd. Even many of his fellow officers testified, though, that his actions had been inappropriate, thus breaking the "blue wall of silence" that usually denied justice to victims of police brutality by discouraging officers from criticizing each other. In April 2021, Chauvin was convicted of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter, with sentencing to follow in several months. At the time of Chauvin's conviction, the three other officers' trials had not yet begun. President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and numerous other public figures applauded the guilty verdict but also renewed their calls for further justice, especially in light of other high-profile police killings and assaults that took place or were publicized just before the jury rendered its decision. One journalist summarized much of this by writing “His legacy is the rich promise of social reform.” A widely circulated video of Floyd’s six-year-old daughter Gianna sitting on his shoulders before his death summarized the climate even more succinctly: “Daddy changed the world!”

 ©David Brodnax, Sr.