Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life by Troy R. Saxby

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life by Troy R. Saxby Erin D. Chapman Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life. By Troy R. Saxby. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xx, 353. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5492-8.) Troy R. Saxby distinguishes his biography of Pauli Murray from the many works on the legal scholar, priest, poet, and transgender icon by emphasizing the book’s focus on Murray’s inner life, personal relationships, and evolving political viewpoints. Whereas other works on Murray’s life and career address these topics while also providing a rich history of the social movements, organizations, and activists whose campaigns and insights influenced Murray’s own, Saxby’s Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life concentrates on the difficult personal journey Murray undertook in the effort to disprove the many voices—familial, social, and psychological—that doubted her worth. Saxby declares that his “focus is more tilted to how Murray felt, thought, and acted rather than how the world later interpreted, and benefited from, her work” (p. xvi). According to Saxby, Murray’s “crowning success” among a slew of accomplishments is the “collection of personal papers” she had the foresight to create and maintain for posterity. Although Murray chose not to publicly disclose her lifelong “conflict” with homosexual desire and gender nonconformity while she remained alive, she left a wealth of diaries, correspondence, and notes to aid the “future biographers” whose interest she anticipated (p. xvi). Saxby finds the origins of Murray’s crippling self-doubt, the tendency to overwork, quick temper, dedication to respectability, and gendered and sexual “conflict” in her childhood. She was a daughter of the proud but impoverished Black southern middle class, the darkest child in her extremely light-skinned family yet the lightest among her peers in the segregated school she attended in small-town North Carolina. When Murray was a child, her mother may have committed suicide, and her father lost his mind, for which he was incarcerated in a segregated mental hospital where he was murdered by an orderly. Constantly afraid she, too, might grow up to be mentally unstable, Murray doggedly pursued educational advancement and conventional success both to redeem her family’s tainted heritage and to counter the racism and sexism that plagued her. Persistently arguing that “human rights are indivisible,” Murray refused to prioritize the battle against racism over the battle against sexism (p. 211). In one chapter, Saxby discusses Murray’s many applications of this axiom through her legal scholarship for the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Alabama case White v. Crook (1966), and her collaboration with Betty Friedan and other cofounders of the National Organization for Women. However, Saxby declines to rehearse the nuances of the legal arguments and the complex history of the mid-twentieth-century U.S. women’s movement. Instead, Saxby directs readers to other works, such as Serena Mayeri’s Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2011) and Rosalind Rosenberg’s Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (New York, 2017). Addressing Murray’s perennial “conflict,” Saxby refrains from “applying current labels that Murray may or may not have welcomed” (p. 67). Whether out of compliance with the heteropatriarchy of her generation or refusal to [End Page 750] expose herself to further derogation and possible criminal prosecution, Murray presented and represented herself as a woman in her adult and professional life. Saxby respects that choice, referring to Murray using female pronouns throughout the book. However, in a biography purporting to explore the inner life of such a significant and complex person, a more robust analysis of Murray’s engagement with the contemporary psychological, medical, and popular literature on sexuality and sexual identity seems warranted. Saxby’s biography might have offered a detailed history of intersecting racial and sexual sociopolitical structures in the twentieth-century United States. Instead, Saxby emphasizes the diversity of the human experience, concluding, “Murray’s writings. . . assert that all people . . . have the right to occupy the historical record and that humanity benefits from recording all of these voices” (p. 294). Erin D. Chapman George...