Our Role in the Relay of “Cosmic Composition”
Writing about how their time in Washington D.C. and at Howard University drew to a close in the early 1940s, Pauli Murray reflected on all the work they did, notably the 1943 sit-ins in the nation’s capital and how those sit-ins laid the foundations for the 1960s. Murray thinks about the tensions between their “urge toward kamikaze defiance of Jim Crow and the more demanding discipline of prodding research” to counter Jim Crow. This tension led Murray to think about the long path forward, one that stretched back before their appearance in the world in 1910 and after their physical passing in 1985. Murray saw themselves as part of a long relay, one leg in the race for equity, equality, and freedom.
In Song in a Weary Throat, Murray writes about coming to a balance between the tensions they faced. Murray says, “In the process I discovered that joining others in the effort to overturn an entrenched system of injustice is often like running a relay. There were times when I didn’t even know the outcome of the race, other times it was my privilege to break the ribbon at the finish line, and still others when I share an overwhelming sense of accomplishment and exhilaration even though my contribution had been made early in the contest, not at its culmination.” Murray knows that they play a small part in a much larger and longer race, one that has people come and go from…
