Mississippi Today
On this day in 1939
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.
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Mississippi Today
On this day in 1750
Nov. 4, 1750
Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the “Father of Chicago,” was born.
A man of African descent, he became the first known settler in the area that became the city of Chicago. He married a Potawatomi woman, Kitiwaha (Catherine), and they had two children.
According to records, the property included a log cabin with two barns, a horse-drawn mill, a bakehouse, a poultry house, a dairy, a smokehouse, a fenced garden and an orchard. At his trading post, DuSable served Native Americans, British and French explorers and spoke a number of languages.
“He was actually arrested by the British for being thought of as an American Patriot sympathizer,” Julius Jones, curator at the Chicago History Museum told WLS, but DuSable beat those charges.
In Chicago today, a school, street, museum, harbor, park and bridge bear his name. The place where he settled near the mouth of the Chicago River is now a National Historic Landmark, part of the city’s Pioneer Court.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Podcast: Mississippi’s top election official discusses Tuesday’s election
Secretary of State Michael Watson talks with Mississippi Today’s Geoff Pender, Bobby Harrison and Taylor Vance ahead of Tuesday’s election. He urges voters to remember sacrifices many have made to protect Americans’ voting rights and get to the polls, and he weighs in on whether a recent court ruling on absentee vote counting will impact this year’s elections.
READ MORE: As lawmakers look to cut taxes, Mississippi mayors and county leaders outline infrastructure needs
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Insurance chief willing to sue feds if Gov. Reeves doesn’t support state health exchange
State Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney is willing to sue the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services if it does not allow Mississippi to create a state-based health insurance exchange because of Republican Gov. Tate Reeves’ potential opposition.
Federal officials, who must approve of a state implementing its own health insurance exchange, want a letter of approval from a state’s governor before they allow a state to implement the program, according to Chaney.
“I don’t know what the governor’s going to do,” Chaney told Mississippi Today. “I think he’ll probably wait until after the election to make a decision. But I’m willing to sue CMS if that’s what it takes.”
The five-term commissioner, a Republican, said his requests to Reeves, also a Republican, to discuss the policy have gone unanswered. The governor’s office did not respond to a request to comment on this story.
Earlier this year, the Legislature passed a law authorizing Chaney’s agency to create a Mississippi-based exchange to replace the federal exchange that currently is used by Mississippians to obtain health insurance. The bill became law without the governor’s signature.
States that operate their own exchanges can typically attract more companies to write health insurance policies and offer people policies at lower costs, and it would likely save the state millions of dollars in payments to the federal government.
Chaney also said he’s been consulting with former Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, who also supported some version of a state-based exchange while in office, about implementing a state-based program.
Currently, 21 states plus the District of Columbia have state-based exchanges, though three still operate from the federal platform. Should he follow through and sue the federal government, Chaney said he would use outside counsel and several other states told him they would join the lawsuit.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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