Jan. 5, 1939 

Pauli Murray applied to the University of North Carolina law school, sparking white outrage across the state. 

“The days immediately following the first press stories were anxious ones for me,” she recalled. “I had touched the raw nerve of white supremacy in the South.” 

A year later, she was jailed twice in Virginia for refusing to give her seat on a Greyhound bus. She graduated first in her class at Howard University School of Law, but Harvard University wouldn’t accept her because of her gender. (Harvard didn’t admit women until 1950.) Instead, she became the first Black student to receive Yale Law School’s most advanced degree. 

In 1942, she helped George Houser, James Farmer and Bayard Rustin form the Congress of Racial Equality, known as CORE. Four years later, she became a deputy attorney general in California. Thurgood Marshall described her 1951 book, “States’ Laws on Race and Color,” as the “bible” for civil rights lawyers. 

A year later, she lost her post at Cornell University because of McCarthyism. She left her law career to work on her writing at MacDowell Colony, a haven for artists and writers in New Hampshire, where she worked on her first memoir alongside James Baldwin. 

“Writing is my catharsis,” she said in an interview. “It saved my sanity. But you cannot sustain anger for years and years. It will kill you.” 

She researched her ancestry. “If you call me Black, it’s ridiculous physiologically, isn’t it? I’m probably 5/8 white, 2/8 Negro — repeat American Negro — and 1/8 American Indian,” she said. “I began years before Alex Haley did. I’m always ahead of my time.” 

She also penned a book of poems, “Dark Testament,” writing the words, “Hope is a song in a weary throat.” 

During her time as a professor in Ghana in the early 1960s, she began to accept that ancestry, she said. 

“The difficulty is coming to terms with a mixed ancestry in a racist culture,” she said.

She said she didn’t consider her experience unique. 

“I don’t believe that, ‘You came over in chains so how can you feel American?’ That’s poppycock. Thousands are just like me. In fact I probably feel more American than many whites. I just want this country to live up to its billing.” 

After returning from Africa, President Kennedy appointed her to his Committee on Civil and Political Rights. She worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and other top civil rights leaders and took part in the 1963 March on Washington. But she remained critical of “the blatant disparity between the major role which (Black) women have played and are playing in the crucial grass-roots levels of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions.” 

She helped found the National Organization of Women. In 1977, she became the first Black woman to serve as an Episcopal priest. 

“Being a priest is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “The first 48 hours were the most difficult of my life. I found myself on the receiving end of tremendous human problems I didn’t know how to handle.” 

She rejected the idea that she should slow down. “We shouldn’t stop growing ‘til our last breath,” she said. She died eight years later, and in 2012, the Episcopal church named her as a saint. 

In 2021, a documentary on Murray was released, using her own voice and words as narration. The documentary also includes an interview with law professor Anita Hill. 

Even though Murray knew that the odds were often against her success, she kept fighting for what she believed was right,” Hill said. “It takes a lot of courage to be hopeful.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

For many there is no more cherished right enshrined in the U.S. Constitution than the freedom of speech and, of course, its accompanying freedom of the press.

During the November election cycle, various people like billionaire Elon Musk and podcaster Joe Rogan spoke of the importance of free speech. Both cited part of their reasoning for supporting Donald Trump was his commitment to free speech.

Those and many other self-professed free speech proponents are noticeably quiet as Trump works to curtail freedom of speech to a degree that perhaps has never been seen in this country.

Trump, as part of a broad legal attack on the American press, is suing the Des Moines Register because the newspaper published a poll showing he was trailing Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris a few days before the November election. The president-elect also is suing longtime pollster Ann Selzer, whose poll the newspaper published. Granted, the Selzer poll of Iowa voters was way off, but because a poll is wrong has never been viewed as a reason to sue a news outlet that chooses to run it.

And ABC, one of the nation’s legacy broadcast networks, has already settled with Trump another lawsuit that many believe the network eventually would have won.

Historians and journalism advocates view Trump’s Des Moines Register lawsuit, ABC lawsuit and others as an effort to curtail press freedom. The lawsuits, they argue, create a fear of reporting on powerful people with deep pockets, and they force news outlets to expend large sums of money to defend lawsuits that have in many cases been viewed as frivolous.

A deeper expressed fear is that the Trump lawsuits are designed to convince a U.S. Supreme Court loaded with Trump sympathizers to curtail the press freedoms that this country has long enjoyed.

It is important to remember that at one time in the nation’s history, newspapers were largely extensions of the political parties and particular politicians — something that is no longer the case for most mainstream or legacy media outlets.

The late James Baughman, the late mass communications historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a 2011 Center for Journalism Ethics speech, “Papers in opposition to Andrew Jackson in 1828 attacked him for marrying a woman before her divorce had been finalized. He was the violator of marital virtue, a seducer. Jackson, one paper declared, ‘tore from a husband the wife of his bosom.’ Pro-Jackson newspapers insisted on the general’s innocence and accused his critics of violating his privacy. There was no objective, middle ground.”

Baughman pointed out that in 1884, the Los Angeles Times did not like that Democrat Grover Cleveland had won the presidency, so the paper “simply failed to report this unhappy result for several days.”

The history of American media, however, may mean little to Trump. He is suing the Pulitzer Prize committee for reaffirming the coveted award to The New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting of Trump’s campaign ties with Russia during the 2016 campaign. He is also suing CBS and its news show 60 Minutes for how an interview with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was edited.

There are, of course, countless examples of Fox News and other Trump-friendly television networks editing clips of interviews or news segments in ways that could be seen as favorable to Trump. Fox has said simply the edits were made for the sake of brevity. Advocates of press freedom would argue the practice is Fox’s guaranteed legal right, though they may disagree with the conservative outlets’ decisions in terms of journalism ethics.

Fox did pay a record $787 million to Dominion, a voting machine manufacturer, because of allegations aired on the network that their machines changed votes to favor Joe Biden in the 2020 election. The lawsuit was based on financial harm incurred by Dominion as a result of the false reports.

Many of those allegations were made not by Fox employees, but by Trump supporters who were network guests. Emails obtained during the lawsuit reveal that the Fox staff did not believe the unfounded allegations but repeatedly allowed the Trump allies to make them.

The so-called legacy media, including Fox in this instance, have long been legally responsible for what other people say on their news outlets. A newspaper, for instance, can be held liable for making false claims about a person in a letter to the editor it publishes.

Free speech, of course, does not mean people or news outlets cannot face consequences for what they say. A company could choose to fire an employee for offensive speech, and outlets are certainly not obligated to publish what they view as offensive or false claims.

But this latest barrage of lawsuits from Trump, that so-called advocate of free speech, have many experts questioning how far the long-held American free speech principles could be stretched.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Jan. 4, 1965 

Five busloads of Black Mississippians arrived at the U.S. Capitol to challenge the seating of Mississippi’s all-white congressional delegation. 

Those in charge in Washington initially had little sympathy because the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had rejected the compromise at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, said SNCC leader Michael Thelwell. 

“We were absolutely persona non grata and the pariahs of beltway politics,” he said.

But their cause soon found some support on the floor of Congress when 149 members sided with them. Suddenly, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party could question the state’s top leaders. Suddenly, these white politicians, the most powerful people in Mississippi, found themselves using courtesy titles toward Black Americans — something they had refused to do since slavery ended. 

Although those in Congress eventually took their seats, “it shook them,” recalled SNCC leader Victoria Gray. “That vote just really turned things upside down.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.