Our Role in the Relay of “Cosmic Composition”

Pauli Murray The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

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…