Explicit

Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray Pt. 2

Published Mar 4, 2022, 5:00 AM

Pauli joined a law firm where she inspired a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg to change the country. But there she also met her "closest friend" Irene Barlow, widely accepted to be the love of her life. Continuing to kick down doors and fight for intersectional civil rights, Dr. Murray also added Poet and Reverend to her many titles! And her work continues to impact legislation even today.

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Hey, everybody doing out there. I'm too full of casella. Case it did it? Oh, case it did it. That's good. I did I over case I did it. Like I'm not normally a case of dilla. I wouldn't order that at a restaurant, but I don't know. I was just feeling it tonight. Yeah. It feels like when I order a case of dia. It always feels like the kid's menu, you know, like, Oh, you didn't want like a real meal, so you just put cheese on veggies for you, and here you go, here's your mac and cheese. Like it's the Mexican equivalent of a mac and cheese. No, it's a grilled cheese. Yeah, sure, yeah, same same energy. Yeah, maybe cheese is making a comeback. Sure, there's gourmet girl cheese all over the place. All right, all right, uh show me teach me cheese out there. Y'all have heard we're about to take a trip and we're going out to l A. So it's but we've had Mexican food twice in Atlanta's got good Mexican, don't get me wrong, Um, but I've been like, we're about to get some of the best Mexican food in the country, so I'll be fine with the CA city at a night. I'm not worried about the local tacicos. I've got a list of tacos length of my army that we're going to definitely be putting in our face holes. Yeah, I can't wait. So good, so excited, But not right now. I'm not excited for food at all at all. Just too much, too much. It was one of those things that I was like halfway through the plate and I was like, I'm I'm done eating now, but I'm not going to stop eating. It wasn't even that good, just like it's here and now it's gone. Yeah, yeah, don't put food in front of me please. Well, but that doesn't mean we can't sit here and have a nice conversation about a cool person. Yeah, yeah we can. We can have a meal of a Oh yeah, we'll really make a meal out of this, make a meal out of this story. We're meals and you'll be even more full. Yeah. I'm so excited to have you back for part two of the Dr Paully Murray story. I hope you loved part one, Yes, I did. Fascinating person with a fascinating history and a whole complicated bunch of stuff going on that just I don't always I don't know if I've mentioned, but it's fascinating to learn a new word. Bro, I can't. I'm too full. It's too late for me. Dr Paully Murray is like, what the hell are they talking about? Their right? The disrespect? I apologize, I am an. Yes, you're right, you're right. I have some respect for real, for real, in fact, Yeah, forget me and my case of the l Let's just get into it, yes, so, yes, Welcome to Part two of Dr Polly Murray. Last time we talked about Polly's time riding the rails and hanging out in the Harlem Renaissance, and her present her presentation as mail for a few years, and her first heartbreak and one of her first triumphs, which was when her arguments helped their good Marshall overturned. Plus c V. Ferguson how life dream achieved. But she has so much more to accomplish and love to find, love to find exactly. So let's hear everything else about Polly Murray. Let's go, Hey, their French come listen. Well, Elia and Diana got some stories to tell. There's no matchmaking, a romantic tips. It's just about ridiculous relationships, a love. It might be any type of person at all, and abstract cons don't a concrete wall. But if there's a story. Were the second Glance Ridiculous Roles a production of I Heart Radio. So we picked back up in nineteen fifty six when Polly was invited to join the law firm Paul Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton and Garrison. Many names, my guys, do you think? I wonder if lawyers meet up and they're like, you know, they want to start a firm together, but one of them's name is like, you know, Greg Smith, and they're like, I'm not putting Smith on the sign outside. We only take really wild and crazy names Wiss, Rifkin, Wharton, and Garrison. What if the names don't flow together and they're like, well, this partnership is over, gentlemen. Good day. Yeah, it was like Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton and Banks. Actually there's I mean many a lawyer, many a lawyer name Banks, and I'm related to many of them. Well, Paully worked for Paul Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton and Garrison, and there she was again the only black person and one of three women in sixty plus lawyers, and two of those women soon left, so she's really standing a loan Polly. But a summer associate named Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined them briefly, and the future Supreme Court justice was so inspired by Polly that she even called Polly her legal Heroka. Well, there's more on that later. I wonder if when she first came in as the summer associate, if she walked in because her name was Joan Ruth Bader is her, you know her the name she was born with. She went by Ruth and then married Ginsburg. I wonder if she walked in it was like, Hi, I'm Joan Bader and they were like, now, no, it doesn't work. It's lackluster. I don't know what you need. But it's something like, what's what's your middle name? Ruth? Okay, it's a start. Let's start with Ruth. Could do something with that, Ruth Bader. It's just something missing. You gotta marry a Ginsburg. Also in nine six, Polly published her second book, which was called Proud Shoes, The Store of an American Family, and it explored her family's history. You know that miniature United Nations that she kind of had grown up with. And it was released twenty years before Alex Haley's Roots, so it's credited as the seminal work on African American genealogy. Cool. That's a very cool little factoid. Yeah, I had to throw that in there. But that's not all. She also met Irene Barlow, the lovely office manager at Paul Weiss, and she was probably the most enduring romance of Polly's life. They never lived together, but Barbara Law who's the director of the Polly Murray Project at the Duke Human Rights Center, says, quote, they had dogs together, they had cars together, and they went on vacations together. So I mean, that's that's it, right, If you got a dog with someone, that's to me, that's stronger than marriage. I was basically like sharing a kid. I mean a little less like sharing a kid, but sort of if you have some custody things to work out. But yeah, like a lot of people are like, oh, that was her closest companion or companion, you know what I mean. Best friends be very close. Best they're such good friends, they hold hands when they're walking on the street together. But yeah, it's generally accepted that they were romantically entangled, and entanglement much like Peg homes her first love. There's not a lot about Irene herself out there to find. So I think we should pull into speculation station and imagine they're being cute. You know, there's an office romance we're talking about. I don't know. Maybe maybe Irene's carrying like like a big bunch of heavy law books like Chelle and uh Paul. He's got all these like binders full of case work, but she's got And there they both come around the corner crash and then they're like stammering like apologies and collecting, and they don't really notice each other. And then I've got mine and oh those eyes, Hi, Irene? Hi? What was your name again? Oh, Polly? Okay, Irene doesn't really. Irene wasn't great about learning people's names. She's the one thing that helped her that that held her back. Otherwise she's so good her job, and everyone was like Irene was so bad with names. I love this story we're building for them. Oh, I love it. Little rom com and yeah. Their relationship spanned seventeen years, but Polly actually destroyed many of their letters between each other, and she doesn't say much about Irene in her memoir other than to call her my closest friends. So even Polly was kind of like we were roommates, you know. I think even she was kind of a little bit cagy about this romance. And as the New Yorker article, which is called The Many Lives of Polly Murray points out, quote, by leaving her a gender identity and romantic history out of her autobiography, Murray necessarily leaves out something else as well, the lifetime of emotional distress they caused. From the time she was nineteen, Murray suffered breakdowns almost annually, some of them culminating in hospitalizations, all of them triggered either by feeling as if she were a man or by having feelings for a woman. She wrote once to her aunt Pauline, quote, this conflict rises up to knock me down at every apex I reach in my career. And she reached a lot of apexes, so you can see that that would be a very constant thing. And to her doctor, she wrote, quote, anything you can do to help me will be gratefully appreciated, because my life is somewhat unbearable. In its present phase. It's like we talked about in the last episode, you know, that sort of comp located swirling issues around uh, gender and identity and conversations. Especially for someone like Paul. He is living through this with with no no guidance, basically no precedent um, you know, and really kind of trying to understand yourself. And I hope that people can hear stories like that and understand that this is not a new phenomenon. This is not something that's made up, uh, you know, by gen z for for for whatever purposes. People think that gender identity is made up for. This is something that people genuinely, earnestly really suffer with dysphoria and their their own personal identity versus what you know, society wants to project on them. Uh. It's a really challenging issue that we're still working on. We're still having conversations about. Uh. And again, like I said before, I don't know why you wouldn't be totally content to just kind of sit back and listen. Um, Well, anybody's got to stick there now, isn't It is beyond me? It's true has really well. We did that because because it's very clear when you see someone like Polly or you know, if if you know anyone out there today, talk to them. This is a really difficult situation for them to be in, and it can cause intense mental and even physical illness like anguish. Yeah, yeah, Like you can't comprehend what that means for someone to go through. You honestly cannot. I cannot, None of us can without going through it. So it just accept it, Just accept and and offer what you can and just let people be them damselves really well and like to go through all that and then on to throw on top of them an additional layer of intolerance, potential violence and crazy restrictions on your life. Is like, it's already hard enough all by itself. It doesn't need any help from you to be difficult, and no one is doing it to have a good time. And that was something that really was driven home to me by Lily Elbe when she was really describing in her diaries what it was like to go through those changes. I was really like, she was made herself sick all the time, and no one would choose that, do you know what I'm saying? It is happening whether she wanted it or not, because the sickness comes from the intolerance, right. The sickness comes from the stress of saying, well, I feel like this, that I this is who I am, and this is what I need myself to be, and yet I can't be that because some people are going to give me more than a hard time about it, but actually put my life in danger potentially because of it. And that that's what makes it such a dangerous and damaging issue. People should be allowed to be themselves freely and openly, and then it wouldn't be psychologically damaging. It wouldn't be putting people in the damn hospital if they didn't have to worry about how how twisted the world is gonna make them out to be and feel. And imagine all the help that Polly could have gotten from the Magnus Hirshfield Institute. If oh my god, absolutely back in the Lilyeube episode, if if you haven't heard that you should, But if you haven't, there was a whole hospital in Germany dedicated to studying LGBT issues in a very open and accepting way that was like unheard of at the time. I didn't even know there was anything like this at the time. I guess what the Nazis came in and burned that place to the ground and destroyed all their records and killed the doctor in charge. We should probably do an episode just about the magnets Field Hospital, honestly so. In nineteen sixty Paully left the US for the first time when she accepted a job at the newly opened Ghana School of Law, but she only stayed there for a year before returning in nineteen sixty one when she was appointed to President Kennedy's Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. Status It's bad, she in, like, I got, I got, I got the memo for you. I know the status it's funked up out there in the streets. So she wrote a memo arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment forbade sex discrimination as much as racial discrimination, and she didn't let civil rights leaders off the hook for sex discrimination either. In nineteen sixty three, she criticized the March on Washington because not a single woman was included in either the major keynotes speaking lineup or in the delegation sent to speak with the White House. She wrote, quote, I have been increasingly perturbed over the blatant disparity between the major role which black women have played and are playing in the crucial grassroots level of our struggle, and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy making decisions. It is indefensible to call a national march on Washington and send a call which contains the name of not a single woman leader amen for real in the world. So true, right, and certainly not for me to criticize the March on Washington, But we can definitely look at that and say, yeah, y'all forget somebody. Well again, Polly is intersectional as fuck. She's like, you should not be leaving out Rosa Parks and Fanny lou Hamer and me. I mean, she never said herself, but she would have been a great speaker to what are y'all doing? You had some wonderful speakers at your fingertips, so I totally get that. In ninety three, Congress was debating the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin, and some civil rights leaders wanted to take out the word sex because, according to Forbes, they thought the inclusion would shift focus away from black people to white women or sink the bill entirely, which is very interesting and often true. I guess I've heard that about affirmative action as well, that if you look at the numbers, it's benefited white women the most interest of any group. I would have to double check that, so I will put myself in corrections quarter later I have to. But I have heard that. But Polly decimated that argument. She wrote a memo saying that if they took out the word sex, only half the black population would be protected, since black women, millions of home worked and supported families already could still be fired due to their gender. She wrote, quote, it is exceedingly difficult for a black woman to determine whether or not she is being discriminated against because of race or sex. These two types of discrimination are so closely intertwined and so similar that black women are uniquely qualified to affirm their interrelatedness. She also wrote an article in titled Jane Crow and a Law, Sex Discrimination and Title seven, explaining how certain legal statutes meant to protect civil rights still limited the scope of liberties afforded to women. By the way, She's been enrolled at Yale for a couple of years at this point, and became the first black woman to earn a Doctor of Juridical Science degree there in. So she's doing all this meanwhile she's also in Yale Credible and hopefully having some lovely dinners at home with Irene I hope. So I mean again, I think I said this in last episode two, but I am so fascinated with her just way with words. I mean, the way she puts things makes things, makes these issues make so much sense. And again you could be like, yeah, sure, if you say intersectional, then I'm all about it. That sounds like a great idea. And then she puts it in such a way where you're like, holy ship, that is super important. I've gone from being just a supporter on the sidelines to like actively, Oh my god, this makes so much sense. How can you not be supporting feminism while you're supporting racial equality, because then you still got half the people not dealing with it. Or you can't support feminism without also supporting trans women because then you've got a whole bunch of women who still aren't getting their chip. It's it has to come from all sides at once. It really does. It really does, and you've got leave any of it out right and be like, we'll do this first, right, what do you mean first? So it's the Jane Crow article that in helped Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who worked with Pauli also at the a c l U, successfully argue the landmark Supreme Court case Read versus Read, which established equal protections for women. Ginsburg knew that she was so indebted to Pauli's work on this subject that she even just named her a co author of the legal brief, even though Paully didn't directly work on the case. She was like, I know you didn't work on it, but you did wor. Ginsberg later said, quote Laurie was the one who sparked the idea that the fourteenth Amendment should protect the right of men and women to follow their talent as far as it could take them. We were not inventing something new. We were saying the same things Polly had said years earlier, at a time when society was not prepared to listen. Yeah, hello, believe it or not. Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it all. She made her point. Wow, I guess, and then just like third Good and Spots would Ginsburg one her case that she based on Polly's argument. Incredible yeah, incredible, yea. And these seeds she had to plant like that before they bore any fruit. Pauli's out here just throwing foundations down left and right, like here, you build something on that. Here, you build something on that. Go build something on that ship. Yeah. But back in nineteen sixty five, Polly was frustrated with the lack of progress for women. So one day she said, women should organize a march on Washington, like a similar civil rights one, but for women's rights. And as usual, you know, people around here, what in the world's Polly talking about it? She's so crazy? She said something crazy again. But then she got a phone call from at the time the most famous feminist in America, Betty Freedan, and she was like, what's this now? You want to do? And they did organize a conference for women in Washington, d c. And at that conference, Polly told Betty she thought it was past time that there was an n double a c P for women, so you know, a group that could take on cases of segregation but specifically based on sex, and like tackle that ship head on. And together with Shirley Chiselm and others, they started the National Organization for Women or Now in nineteen sixty six, nice, Now that's what I call organizing. Now, that's what I call a joke. Yeah. And also that same year, she successfully argued that women should be allowed on juries alongside her a c ou colleague, Dorothy Kenyon, who also inspired RBG and was also named a co author on that sventy one legislation. Because they both were so amazing back in the day, I had to give them props. Well, uh, Ruth had to give them props, and we have to give you some commercials. So we will be right back right after this. Welcome back to the poly Murray story, everybody. So, by nineteen sixty seven, Paully was criticizing now for sidelining minority and poor and working class women in their efforts for equality tail as old as feminism working hard. But then, hey, hey, feminism, you forgot somebody, a lot of somebody. Yeah, it tends to happen, So, she wrote, quote, since as a human being, I cannot allow myself to be fragmented into black at one time, woman at another, or worker at another. I must find a unifying principle in all these movements to which I can adhere. This it seems to me is not only good politics, but also maybe the price of survival. Again with the words, don't you just get it when she speaks, don't you just fully understand what she's talking about? I do? And she's absolutely right, Like how could you separate those identities and have an organization be like, well, we're just going to deal with one at a time, like, well, which one? Yeah, because I'm all of them, I'm all of them? Which one takes a backseat? Right? I can't. I can't only be a woman today. I am also black still, she says, and a work. Yeah, it's amazing. It wouldn't be until nineteen eighty nine that legal scholar professor Kimberly Crenshaw would coin the term intersectionality as a way of describing how systems of oppression overlap to create these distinct experiences for people with multiple identity categories. Polly wrote in quote, when my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind with humility, but with pride, I shall offer one small life, whether in Foxhole or in Wheatfield, for whatever it is worth to fulfill the prophecy that all men are created equal. Polly stirring shit. I don't even feel qualified to read that quote. It was so good. Oh man, she's amazing. This person is incredib and I love that to her attitude of like, I'm trying to encompass more. Why are you guys trying to leave people out? You're trying so hard to leave people out, and I want everyone in here. Why can't we all have what says straight white men have right? Why can't we have that it says right here in the Constitution that we're supposed to have that. I'm not asking for nothing. I wasn't promised well. Speaking of her way with words, in Polly published her only volume of poems, Unfair that she also gets to be a poet. She's I mean, she can do anything. Uh. It's called Dark Testaments and many were written back in her Harlem days, so they kind of span her life. Remember she was hanging out with Lankston Hughes and James Baldwin also a friend. So yeah, she she was hanging out with some literary cats and did some poems of her own, and they're all worth reading, but we wanted to highlight two of them, So let's go down to poetry corner. Here from Dr Polly Murray, her poem to the oppressors. Now you are strong, and we are but grapes aching with ripeness. Crush us, squeeze from us all the brave life contained in these full skins. But ours is a subtle strength, potent, with centuries of yearning, of being kegged and shut away in dark, forgotten places. We shall endure to steal your senses in that lonely twilight of your winter's grief. Snap, Snap Snap. And here's another poem from Dr Murray in nineteen seventy called simply Words. We are spend drifts with words. We squander them, toss them like pennies in the air, arrogant words, angry words, cruel words, comrade leye words, shy words tiptoeing from mouth to ear. But the slowly wrought words of love and the thunderous words of heartbreak, those we hoard. Mm hmm, I like that too, because what about you know, if you think about everything going on with Irene in the kind of the background of her life, is this sort of secret not so secret, open secret romance. And I wonder if she's like, I don't get to say with my whole chest how I feel. Yeah, yeah, so I have to hoard those I'll throw. I've thrown words at you all day long. It seems like I'm just giving you all my words. But I've got some that I gotta keep to myself, right, And I mean, I think it's a pretty universal thing. She all. I think we all hoard words of love and words of heartbreak. Nobody wants to say be the first to say, and nobody wants to be the first to say. Um. But but that's what I was reading it, and I was just like, oh, I wonder if she's kind of thinking about some yearning of her own to be like I want to be just hanging out with my wife like everybody else. So by the time that this volume was published, Polly had accepted a teaching position at Brandy's University, and she not only taught law there, but she basically created the American Studies program. She was fighting all the time to include courses on African American and women's studies, which were both firsts for the school. Polly wrote that her time there was quote the most exciting, tormenting, satisfying, embattled, frustrated, and at times triumphant period of my secular career. So I think that's great. I mean, that sounds like her life and all those words, you know what I mean. Um, So she's crushing at Bran and Dy's. She received full tenure there in nineteen seventy one, securing the most financially stable and respectable job of her life. So she seemed to be like set, She's gonna be hanging out at Brandy's and doing her things. And this is seventy one and she was born in nineteen so she's sixty at this point. Like what what what's left? Well, it came as a real surprise to everyone when in nineteen seventy three she quit Brandy's to become an Episcopalian priest. Yep, So let's find out more about that right after this. Yeah, welcome back to the show, everybody. All right, So Irene Barlow, Polly's, you know, alleged love of her life, was actually dying. Um. She had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, and she made Polly her executor. Now, long after Irene passed away, In nineteen seventy three, Paully resigned from Brandy's and entered New York's General Theological Seminary to become an episcopal priest. She and Irene had been active at this church, and she had many friendships with women there, so this might have been something that she thought about doing for a long time. And she even once said that when she taught her students, she asked them what do you think and got conversations going with them, and later realizing that she was acting more like an ecclesiastical counselor than she was a lawyer in class. You know, it wasn't about like, let me make a case for this for this case, but let me let's have a conversation about it, right, And she wanted to like explore people's ideas, what they thought and why they thought what they thought, you know. So she was like, I just felt more like we were talking about bigger things than just the letter of the law of the spirit of the law. So that might have been what let her to take this position, or it might have been inspired by the deaths of both her life partner and her aunts, who were the most important people in her life who died around the same time that might have caused her to make this kind of big, drastic professional change so late in her life. Yeah, she said, when she's going through some of Irene's papers, because she was her executor, she went through some of her stuff and she was like, I thought I knew her pretty well, but I didn't realize all these small, lovely, kind things that she had been doing, which is just, uh, a little clue about Irene's character. Yes, it's a very little clue. Unfortunately we don't have more. But I guess Irene was always out there being sweet as hale, helping people out and doing cool things. She just sounds like a wholesome, pretty lady that Paula got to spend a lot of time with. So that makes me happy. So yeah, maybe she was also like, I want to do good. I want to do good in small ways every day, like Irene did. Maybe there was some inspiration in that or something, although it could partly have been so the fact that the Episcopal Church did not ordain women at the time, don't you for real well, allow me to just change another system real quick. I'd like to kick in one last door. So yeah, I think she may you know, some people think that she maybe saw an opportunity to put pressure on another system that was segregating, and so she was like, well, let me get up in there and start making making some good trouble. But this time in her life, her timing was perfect. The church's General Convention voted to change that policy effective January one, seven, only three weeks after she would complete her Divinity training. So if I can pull into speculation stage room, do you think that she enrolled? And they were like, oh, ship, Polly Murray's up in here. Well you know she's gonna make us do it anyway, guys, let's just go ahead and get the wheels training. We got about three years while she goes to the divinity training, and to make this happened, someone call up the pope or whoever. Let's just quit get the paperwork done before she comes in and starts yelling at us, because I don't want to get yelled at by Polly Murray. I'm not interested in another stirring quote. What she's done. She's gonna make us look like idiots, or or was it more like, oh, ship, Polly Murray wants to be a priest. Oh, this is about to be right, we need to get somebody get the paperwork. I want to sign it right now. Oh my god, can you imagine the people. She'll be out there saying amazing stuff, the sermons. I can't wait. Oh so I can't decide which how the church reacted to Polly wear his name in the list. So however they decided to do it, they did decide to do it. They decided that women could be ordained. So on January eighth, at the National Cathedral, Polly became the first black American woman to be vested as an Episcopal priest. New Yorker notes that quote. A month later, she administered her first Eucharist at the Chapel of the Cross, the little church in North Carolina, where more than a century earlier, a priest had baptized her grandmother, Cornelia, then still a baby and still a slave. Crazy. That ship never fails to touch me, like and when somebody is like, oh my god, a hundred years ago we were dealing with the most iniquitous ship in history, and now I am the boss bitch doing everything. I mean, that really is amazing. It's incredible because it's so, it's so, it's such a warm and powerful thing. For them, and it's also just such a big fuck you to the past. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you tried to pull some ship, but look where we are now. It didn't work. Made it never works. Everybody stop oppressing people because it never works. Eventually. Can we just skip to the part where you lose? I know, But the problem is it works for people for so long. My lifetime went by and it worked great, and I died and I had everything I wanted to tell them that right, I'm sorry, we're trying to convince them that they suck. They've certainly turned it off by now off, so that would be the last of Police's first She never got a permanent preaching position, so she took a few part time jobs and did sermons that bucks per appearance. I would have booked it for my birthday. I would have been like, come give a sermon, booked her for my bedtime stories every night, Just come behind, please just tell me something brilliant. But yeah, she was close to retirement age anyway, So this is why I think she never ended up with a full time position or anything like that. But on July one, she died at seventy six years old of pancreatic cancer. And she was laid to rest in a Brooklyn cemetery, next to her two aunts and under the same headstone as the love of her life, Irene Barlow. I mean, is that not a clue that maybe they had a deeper We were such good friends together under the same headstone. She made me her executor. We had dogs together. Somebody somebody early in the show messaged us and said, will you guys please do stories about women who were friends people who were ms. This is definitely, I think got to be one of those stories. Paully's memoir Song in a Weary Throat was published posthumously, and though she didn't include much about again Irene, or her sexuality or anything like that, or her gender struggles, but she did choose to include all those musings in the files and her personal papers, which she donated to Harvard's Schlicinger Library. The hundred and forty boxes of papers include letters between Irene and PAULI that, according to the Smithsonian quote, show past the couple's affection and playful sign offs such as double O seven or Charlie Brown cute. But I wish I could read some of these letters. You have to actually go to Harvard and we did not oh it to physically go to Harvard. Yeah, I tried to look. You can look them up and I'll tell you like witch box s it's in, but you couldn't. They weren't like digitized online to read. So you have to actually, I guess go check them out or like go ask you know, to read them at the library. Right, So unfortunately I can't read them, any of them to you. Well, if any of our friends in Boston have access and want to I want to letters, please go to reach out, right. I Also, I love that they signed off cute names like that, like yours truly double O seven because what weren't they probably sneaking around with this relationship like they probably felt like spies sometimes maybe they might be having fun with that. You know, you may as well if you have to do it better? Was self destruct doble? You know, No, that's awesome. I love it. I love it. Um. I'm glad she didn't destroy all their letters, right, because it's always sad when you feel like the need to do something like that. Really, it must just be a wrench. I know how I would feel to like destroy something my grandmother wrote on or something. Yeah, I would hate to do that right now. The letters I have in a box somewhere, probably, I mean, I doubt they tell an interesting story, but I Polly wrote that she quote lived to see my lost causes found. But she also felt that she didn't accomplish as much as she could have in a more egalitarian society. And that's Polly for you right there, just like I'm gonna get as far as I can, but I will always remind you I could have gotten farther if it weren't for you, specifically being an obstacle in my way. In seventies, she wrote, quote, if anyone should ask a black woman in America, what has been her greatest achievement, her honest answer would be I survived. But Polly, even in death, wasn't done change in the world. First of all, her home in North Carolina was designated a National Historic Site in damn right, it is okay, I would like to visit it. Also, um, she was also sainted by the Episcopalian Church. Obviously makes sense. They're like this, this, this one here, another fast track for Polly. Please everybody pay attention to this. Yale University has a college named for her, but as usual, it's her words that are still resonating even decades after her death. That's right, because three employees were fired for being gay or transgender, and their lawsuit against their employers was argued in front of the Supreme Court. As Forbes writes, quote, on June, six justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, ruled in favor of the employees, effectively banning workplace discrimination due to sexual orientation or gender identity. The opinion, delivered by Neil Gorsuch hinged on the word sex in the nineteen sixty four Civil Rights Act that Pauli Murray had fought so hard to include. So even in death, she's protecting people from segregation and discrimination. It's incredible. I mean, does that not send shivers up your spine that if she had given up that that argument in nineteen sixty four, it would have completely been totally different, especially for women. But then again, resonating so far into the future that that one single word protects so many people, I mean, that's insane. It's wild. Throughout her life she was not just at the forefront of history, she was quite literally making it all the time. It's legit, like give me a little flower, give me a little baking soda, because I'm about to make history historians. Susan Ware once said, quote, it may be that when historians look back on twentieth century America, all roads will lead to Paully Murray. Ain't that the truth? All roads lead to Polly Murray. We're gonna have to every episode we do from now. I don't gonna be like, well, how would it be if Polly Murray hadn't been around? Polly had not said sex is important? Right? What an incredible person and a remarkable story. And I hope, I hope you'll appreciate that while this story wasn't about as much their specific romance and how it played out, it's uh an episode that is a foundational in the story of romance in general, right of of love stories. Anything post certainly nine is definitely has something to do with this. And I think this is such a fascinating story of a person's you know, we don't know much about her actual love story, but her entire story is around sex and gender and love and all these things that are that are so important in this category. I think she was just such a I don't just a firestarter. Just people. There's some people in this world that just burn, you know what I mean, And she was like just one of those lights to me. She was like, I'm gonna burn this motherfucker now, I mean with her fire then she did. I mean, just admire her so much, And like you said, it's really too bad that we can't tell you more about Irene because what an interesting person she must have been to to to be. I mean again, they weren't like living together, but it was it was pretty well known that Polly was a lesbian, or though she preferred she didn't really prefer that word herself. That's certainly how people category eyed her later on her life and everything. So it wasn't a secret. But it just took a lot of bravery, I think, to live like that. And so we get a lot of Polly's bravery, and deservedly, so we don't get any of Irenees, which is just too bad. Um and Peg to Peg also got kicked out that camp and she was doing she was she was living life on the edge when it was very, very tough. So props to both those ladies, whatever they were like. Otherwise, I'm so glad it's gotten so much better. I'm pretty sure for people in uh, for for for people who are LGBT anywhere on that category are a lot more free to be public with their relationships. But I know a lot of people still aren't too, especially in their home communities. You know, it's a lot different than be like you know, you can go on TV and and it doesn't matter. You can be out on TV, and it's not like it was even ten years ago. But I mean, I I still know people today who are in sex relationships or who are trans who even if they're out with their families and it's all okay, they might still have a grandparent or even a relative even whose appear who refuses to acknowledge it, either violently or passively, which is still violently. Um. And that's that's stop stop it. That's so insane. Or the rest of the world where state you live in our community, yeah, absolutely very closed minded and still hard to get jobs and things like that. It's for as far as we've come, there's still a long way to go. Um. But uh, but hopefully there's more polies out there working on it. Now we can all take a little piece of Polly with us and try and be a better person and and on a positive note for resonance. I mean, speaking of resonance, this is like a story of somebody who's straight up was hitting walls all day long and instead of quitting, was like, I'm going to keep working and I'll just write this down real and leave it and someone else will do something with it. And it ended up like everything as she said, her lost causes were found. She she she wanted to overturn Plussy Ferguson and it happened. She wanted equal protections for women, and it happened. Even after her death, protections for people with gender identity struggles like she had are even benefiting from her work. So like these little steeds that she planted ended up growing more slowly than maybe she wanted, but they still grew. And I just think that's a really valuable lesson because I'm very much a person who wants things to happen just as soon as possible. I like things to pay off very quickly, and they can't. Often they won't, especially if there's something good and lasting. They will take some time, but once they've rooted, it's like inevitable. So I want to try to remember that energy and polymery energy plant some seeds just work, even if you're not seeing the immediate results. Plant the tree that will shade someone else the right. Yeah, that's what I always love about landscape architecture is I think I've talked I'm sure I've talked about this before, but somebody in building a park has to straight up think about what it will look like years from now and when it's actually the vision they have, right, and they may never see that themselves, but it's not about that, And I just think that's amazing. What a long con you. Yeah, I'm plant these saplings all around this lake and I know that long after I'm gone, it'll look incredible like this. Yeah. Yeah, that's so cool. Thank you for doing that, because now we have beautiful parks that you never got to enjoy, but we enjoy every day. So who we're really coming out swinging for in this episode is landscape architects. Uh, just we all need to treat them a little better. Murray was the landscape architect of legislation. Okay, so you was thinking about the future social issues? Yeah, yeah, she really was. Well that's awesome, Polly. I hope you all love Polly too. Yeah, we would love to hear your thoughts of course, as all. Well, usually we don't mean it, but this time you really want to hear your thoughts. Usually we're just bullshit. Yeah you know, I would just say whatever to just get those notifications. That's all we really want. I'm just thirsty for attention. I don't pay attention to what that attention is. Sweet sera tune and yes, give me another hit? No no no. We love hearing from you, um, and we would love to hear from you on this one. So please shoot us an email. It's romance and I heeart media dot Com right, or we're on Instagram and Twitter. I'm at Dynamite Boom and I'm at Oh great, it's Eli. Now we're both at raddic Romance. That's right, um, so follow along, shoot us some words, uh, tell us your thoughts, break into Harvard and in those letters and read them for us the internet for all to read. Uh, and we will catch you with the next episode. Thanks so much for listening. By so long, friends, it's time to go. Thanks so listening to our show. Tell your friends neighbor's uncles in dance to listen to a show ridiculous Well Dance

Ridiculous Romance

Throughout time and across the globe, from the Stone Age to the Digital Age, people have been having 
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