If there were moments of deep despair in those years, there was also the sustaining knowledge that the quest for human dignity is part of a continuous movement through time and history linked to a higher force.
These words come from the autobiography of Pauli Murray—Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage (1987, p. 300). She lived from 1910 to 1985. So, she was a teenager when Negro History Week was launched in February of 1926 to (among other things) commemorate birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
She lived to see and comment upon that week becoming Black History Month. She also—while studying at the Boalt Hall of Law and living at the International House right here in Berkeley—learned “to see the civil rights struggle within the wider context of all human rights” (p. 338).
Over the course of a very active and diverse lifetime, she came to see the struggle in the context of gender as well. Using today’s language, one might say that she grew to embody the civil rights struggle rather than simply using top-down, binary language to comment from the sidelines. The embodiment was not solitary, however, it was broadly communal.
When the whole family, including my great-aunts, great-uncle, and second and third cousins of all ages, assembled, it looked like a United Nations in miniature, ranging from fair-skinned, blue-eyed, red-haired, freckle-faced types through various shades of peach and olive to those with Indian copper skin, dark eyes, and heavy black hair. (p. 36).
She claimed and documented her African, Irish, American Indian, and Carolina planter ancestry. And at a time when passing for white was a no-nonsense survival strategy for those who could manage it, Murray and most family members that she documents in her writing chose not to. So the civil rights struggle (although it was not called that at the time) provided the context from childhood onwards through which she came to understand the world.
Seemingly every facet of life, from manners of speaking, to where one lived, to where and for how long one went to school and even worked was racial. Perhaps the bottom line of her memoir is that although some people may seem to benefit from oppression, no one really does.
Such is the premise of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathways to Mending our Hearts and Bodies (2017) by Resmaa Menakem, which is currently the focus of our “Engaged Spirituality” meeting on fourth Sundays. Menakem applies somatic experiencing and other modern, body-centered psychology methods to centuries-deep problems of racial trauma. Despite centuries of scientific, religious, and philosophical works that purport to justify racial oppression, the bottom line actually seems to be a trauma response.
The autonomic nervous system or “lizard brain” is still attempting to respond to passed-down memories of generations-, centuries-, and even millennia-old trauma—received as well as given. For instance, Menakem traces centuries of white-on-black racial violence beginning in sixteenth-century America, to a previous millennium of white-on-white religious violence in medieval Europe.
Cognitive explanations of racism, or of colonialism, or even of climate change or exploitive economics for that matter—be they scientific, religious, philosophical, or whatever—are essentially rationalizations of lizard-brain behavior that the cognitive brain does not directly influence or access.
Menakem’s book suggests exercises for beginning to address this problem, such as the five anchors (p. 168):
• Anchor 1: Soothe yourself to quiet your mind, calm your heart, and settle your body.
• Anchor 2: Simply notice the sensations, vibrations, and emotions in your body instead of reacting to them.
• Anchor 3: Accept the discomfort—and notice when it changes—instead of trying to flee from it.
• Anchor 4: Stay present and in your body as you move through the unfolding experience, with all its ambiguity and uncertainty, and respond from the best parts of yourself.
• Anchor 5: Safely discharge any energy that remains.
The healing process using such exercises is expected to take multiple generations. In a post publication interview, Menakem suggested nine generations. That’s two to three centuries. So, what we’re really talking about is stepping out and taking action based on straight-up faith in good results, results that our great grandchildren might begin to see.
Menakem is far from alone in advocating the current individual change that seems essential to long-term social change. In Racial Trauma: Clinical Strategies and Techniques for Healing Invisible Wounds (2023), Kenneth V. Hardy addresses the therapist who works with individuals who suppress, repress, or express the rage that builds both consciously and unconsciously upon racial oppression. Hardy specifically works on helping people transform the habit patterns of the lizard brain into strategic patterns of the cognitive brain.
Feelings play a major role in Hardy’s Validation-Challenge-Request (VCR) approach, in which:
To oversimply, the validation messages are designed to highlight what’s working, the challenge messages acknowledge what is broken or not working, and the request messages are to solicit the client’s input and support, to draw the client to cosign a plan for moving forward that builds on what’s working and eradicates or minimizes what is not working. (p. 355)
Like Menakem’s anchors, the VCR approach:
is used to provide the foundation for taking the initial rudimentary steps for counteracting internalized devaluation, for overcoming an assaulted sense of self, and for actualizing self-love while planting the seeds for restorative work. In fact, VCR is a key strategy for positioning the therapist to work effectively with all the invisible wounds of trauma. (p. 350)
Does this kind of faith-based stuff work? Murray’s memoir suggests that it did with Jim Crow dining, bus-travel and the like. For instance, Murray wrote based on the use of Gandhian non-violence techniques in April 1943 and April 1944, “Howard University students carried out sit-in demonstrations in segregated Washington restaurants.” (p. 258):
The sit-ins were experimental and fleeting, launched by a transient group at the end of the school year, but although they could not be sustained, they were carefully planned, the successful forerunners of the more widespread sit-ins by Negro college students in southern and border states during the early 1960s.
Murray also wrote concerning the Brown vs. Board of education decision in 1954 that in 1944 an, “embattled introduction to living in California fueled my determination to find the key to a successful legal attack upon racial segregation.”
My approach was to enumerate the rights that affect the individual’s personal status in the community, one of which is “the right not to be set aside or marked with a badge of inferiority.” In developing the argument to overrule the “separate but equal doctrine” of Plessy v. Ferguson, I asserted that the effect of this doctrine “is to place the Negro in an inferior social and legal position” and “to do violence to the personality of the individual affected, whether he is white or black.” Having no legal precedents to rely on, I cited references to psychological and sociological data supporting my assertion.…
Vindication of this approach came ten years later when the Supreme Court concluded unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” Speaking of children in grade and high schools, Chief Justice Earl Warren’s opinion declared: “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”
From childhood experiences in the South reinforced by fresh hurts suffered during those first few weeks in California had come the germ of an idea which anticipated the reasoning of the Supreme Court. In 1944 I typed up my paper without making a carbon and mailed it off to Dr. Ransom. Although I heard it caused much comment around Howard Law School, nineteen years passed before I discovered that its affinity with the Supreme Court’s pronouncement was not entirely accidental. In 1963 I visited Howard Law School and asked Spottswood Robinson, who was then dean, if he knew what had happened to my paper…. To my surprise, he promptly produced it from his files and had a copy made for me. While waiting for the paper to be reproduced, he casually mentioned that when he had left the law school to go into private practice, he had taken my paper with him. He had not thought much of it when he first read it, he told me, but in 1953 when the NAACP legal team was preparing arguments for Brown v. Board of Education, he took another look at it and thought it better. “In fact,” he went on, “it was helpful to us. We were able to use your paper in the Brown briefs .…” (p. 329)
But as Menakem and others point out, Jim Crow was replaced by what Michelle Alexander called The New Jim Crow of massive incarceration (2010). This is perhaps why Menakem says it will take generations. The lizard brains are not sitting idle, but faith over the course of generations still makes a difference. Murray wrote of her longest term victory over gender discrimination that was millennia old (pp. 565-566):
I missed the excitement when women’s ordination was finally approved by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church. I was alone when I learned the result of the vote, but almost immediately afterward I got an amazing telephone call that once more linked my present and past in an almost mystical continuity. Earlier that summer I had received a letter from the Reverend Peter James Lee, rector of the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The Reverend Lee wrote that he had … learned … of my relationship to the nineteenth-century Smith family of Chapel Hill: how my great-grandmother, the hapless slave Harriet, who was the property of Dr. James Strudwick Smith, had been raped by young Sidney Smith and had borne a daughter, Cornelia; and how Sidney Smith’s older sister, Mary Ruffin Smith, had taken her infant niece into her home and church and raised her as a devout Episcopalian. In the parish register of the Chapel of the Cross, the Reverend Lee had found the record of Grandmother Cornelia’s baptism.
On the evening of the vote, Peter Lee telephoned me from Minneapolis. “I want to invite you to celebrate your first Holy Eucharist as a priest at the Chapel of the Cross,” he told me. “I can think of no more appropriate symbol of what has happened here today than having you preside at the altar in the same chapel building where your Grandmother Cornelia was baptized in 1854.”
Murray was among the first women ordained to the priesthood by the Episcopal church. So, this is perhaps what the social change that comes from individual change will look like. It will take time and it will be clearly “linked to a higher force.”
In an epilogue to Murray’s memoir, friend and colleague Carolyn F. Ware wrote (p. 571):
To be treated as a human being and to regard all others as members of the same human family were at the core of Pauli’s outlook and effort. As she prefaced her book of poems, Dark Testament:
I speak for my race and my people—
The human race and just people.
This is her legacy.