Saints known and unknown

November 1, 2019 Emma Collins

All Saints' Day is celebrated in honour of all saints, known and unknown. In Every Tribe we learn about saints from a wide range of backgrounds. Pauli Murray is one of them. She was canonized by the Episcopal Church in 2012. In this extract poet and teacher Rachel Laurence reflects on the legacy of this saint.

I am fascinated by those people, ancient and modern, who lived and worked among the messiness and complexity of the world and who often came from unpromising backgrounds to achieve much through God’s infinite grace. One such person is Pauli Murray, an African American priest and Civil Rights activist who was canonized by the Episcopal Church in 2012.

Pauli was brought up by her aunt and grandparents after the early death of her mother at only four years old. Her father also died a tragic and violent death in 1923 when she was just 13.

Not one to recoil from the challenges she faced as a black woman in the early decades of the twentieth century, she came up through college, working to support her studies before, due to the economic depression of the 1930s, abandoning them to go and work as a teacher in a remedial reading project in New York City. At this time, she also had articles and poems published in magazines. Through her work in the Civil Rights Movement she developed a lifelong friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. Around this time (1938), she campaigned to enter the all-white University of North Carolina, but it wasn’t until 1951 that the first black person was accepted.

She studied law at Howard University and at the same time helped to set up the Congress of Racial Equality, a pacifist organization advocating non-violent civil disobedience. After graduating from Howard University and being rejected on grounds of gender from Harvard, she eventually continued her studies at California Boalt School of Law.

An Episcopalian all her life, she contemplated ordination after promptings from various people, until she eventually entered the 1910–85 ordination process and in 1977 was the first black woman to be ordained in the Episcopal Church.

Throughout her life, Pauli Murray lived a faith that was not afraid to challenge the most powerful ideologies of her day. This faith informed the work she did through a deep concern for equality and inclusion. She faced discrimination of all kinds, mainly on grounds of race and gender, and also struggled with her own sexual identity and explored this with honesty, insight and integrity.

Pauli Murray died of cancer in Pittsburgh on 1 July 1985. Sara Azaransky, in her book The Dream Is Freedom: Pauli Murray and American Democratic Faith, which looks closely at Murray’s writings, states: ‘For Murray, salvation entailed the power and possibility of transforming the world and of restoring creation.’ Azaransky described Murray as a ‘significant twentieth-century African American intellectual who grounded her calls for democratic transformation in Christian concepts of reconciliation and of the coming kingdom’.

Every Tribe celebrates the true diversity of the saints, inspiring the church to become what it is meant to be: the rainbow people of God serving the diverse needs of a diverse world.

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