Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware: Forty Years of Letters in Black and White. Ed. by Anne Firor Scott. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xvi, 194 pp. Cloth, $24.95, isbn 978-0-8078-3055-0. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-5928-5.)

Abstract

Whether we admit it or not, many historians pursue our vocation because we enjoy reading other people's mail. Reading Anne Firor Scott's labor of love, Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware, is nothing short of pleasure, and she revels openly in a practice many of us hide. She found herself with extra time one day while at the Schlesinger Library and stumbled upon a collection of letters in Pauli Murray's papers; Scott was hooked. She pursued this correspondence in part for personal reasons: Scott and Ware were friends for many years, and she has long admired Caroline Murray. But she also recognized the political value of this correspondence: Ware and Murray were “lifelong allies and personal friends” in “their different but overlapping struggles for justice” in post-World War II United States (p. x). These letters represent political debate between two women whose work is at the heart of postwar activism to make real the rhetoric of freedom and equality. Through this correspondence, readers discover that labor activism, feminism and women's liberation, black freedom, and global human rights need to be seen as inseparable (if distinct) movements if we are to understand post-1945 histories. For example, in 1944 Murray shared with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy her insistence that segregation is inherently unconstitutional; she shared with Ware her strategies for getting to Murphy: “Don't mind telling you I have been opportunist enough to use my press card to get these interviews, and my legal training—non-lawyer status to talk law with these ‘big guys’” and further suggests that she might be arguing Plessy v. Ferguson before the Court in five years (pp. 32–33). She did not, but Murray and Ware elaborated on how to strategize behind the scenes to create political change, and this correspondence gives readers a glimpse into this work. Whether discussing Murray's letter writing about the army's “‘jimcrow’ blood donor policy” in which blood donated from African Americans would go only to African American soldiers (p. 30), or Murray's teaching constitutional law in Ghana (p. 128), Ware and Murray worked individually and in concert within countless social justice organizations.