Eight O'Clock; Proud Shoes: Rev. Pauli Murray

On January 1, 1977, the Anglican Communion in the USA broke a 2,000-year tradition and admitted women to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church, USA. This event, in my opinion, will take its place in significance with the great changes in the history of religion and more particularly in the history of the Christian Church. And in historical perspective, the ordination of women to the priesthood may rank with the admission of the Gentiles to the faith of the followers of Jesus Christ in the first century, the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century and the growing liberation theology of the late 20th

century. Every break with longstanding tradition is both apt to be a moral victory and a risk. There was a risk in parting company from the Roman Catholic Church and establishing the Church of England, which is our ancestor. There was a risk in emancipating 4 million Negro slaves without compensation to their masters, to whom they represented a heavy capital investment, or compensation to the slaves for a 2 centuries of forced labor. There was a risk, as you know, in declaring unconstitutional state-inforced segregation. The price of that last victory was the blood of the martyrs, black and white, in Mississippi, in Alabama, in Tennessee, in Texas, in California, and elsewhere. All of us who are adults and who have lived in the south,

whether we are black or whether we are white, have suffered in various ways in the course of this struggle, yet one of the veterans of the struggle. A victim of the University of North Carolina's rejection in 1938, 39 years ago, stands before you today in Chapel Hill, the sight of that rejection, proclaiming the healing power of Christ's love. Deep in my own heart, I do believe that the American South will lead the way toward the renewal of our moral and spiritual strength, and our sense of mission. I think perhaps the initiative may have passed to places like Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where we are today witnessing the reconciling of Isaac and Ishmael

in the House of Abraham. I owe much of my religious devotion and my Episcopalian heritage to my grandmother, Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald, born February the 10th, 1844, baptized in this parish next door in the Old Chapel of the Cross on December the 20th, 1854, at the age of 10, and it is listed in the parish registry that she was one of quote five servant children of the Smith family, and the registry added the mother of these five children is Harriet. Harriet is my great grandmother, and I am mindful of the biblical prophecy that the sins of the Father shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. Here the Old Testament story of Abraham, Sarah, Haga, the bondswoman, Isaac the legitimate heir, and Ishmael the outcast

comes alive in our own time. Read Harriet Smith for Haga, and you have the connection. The promise of the Angel of the Lord to Haga and the wilderness when she laid her son Ishmael down to die for lack of water, was to make Ishmael and his descendants a great nation. I have come to fulfill that promise, but in my eyes the great nation is the American nation, neither black nor white, but all colors, living freely to be able to express themselves as children of God. Reverend Murray, you hold law degrees from various institutions. You are a professor of law at Brandeis. You were a founding member of the national organization for women

and on the board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union. What made you decide at the age of 63 to embark on a new path in the Episcopal ministry? Well, first, you must understand that I'm a child of the Church. I have been in the Episcopal Church from birth, baptized at six months, confirmed at nine years old, and when I look back at my life, I think I was being pointed in this direction all of my life. My cousin, Mrs. Edline Reynolds Spalding, is about seven years younger than I am. I baby sat for her when she was about 10 months old, and I was about eight years old, and her mother had her out on a blanket in the yard, and I baptized her. You know, she has never been away from the Church since, and now I am a priest. I point this

out because many of the things we do unconsciously in our lives are pointers that at some later date, we look back, and we see that we were moving in that direction. The catalytic experience, which finally pushed me over the line, so to speak, came in February 1973. One of my dearest friends, and fellow Episcopalians, Irene Barlow, died on February 20, 1973, with cancer of the brain. She went into the hospital, January 10, 1973, partially paralyzed, and she called me or communicated with me by telephone in Massachusetts, where I was teaching at

Brandeis to come down and be her power of attorney, because she could not write her checks. The brain was being affected, the memory was being affected, she could hardly speak. And I had to go through this death and dying experience with one of my best friends. And I think perhaps one of the most shattering experiences that I've ever had. This was a beautiful human being, and as a last resort, she was given cobalt treatments. Within a week, she was utterly bald. The wounds of the instruments that they used made her look exactly like La Pieter, the beautiful and moving painting of the Christ. She was tall, she was

aquiline in features, and I had to watch this physical destruction and mental destruction of a beautiful, beautiful human being who had helped hundreds of people. She was Christ-like in her whole approach to life. She was at the top of her profession. She was only 59 years old. And I, in my agony, watching this friend of mine dying, and I had never been subjected to this kind of experience. I argued with God, but it isn't fair, God, she's not even three, score years and ten yet. Well, I had to end the intake. And after she died because there was no one, her mother was 93, and I had to be responsible for getting the mother relocated to the one surviving sister who could not take full responsibility because her husband

was a multiple stroke victim in the hospital in Connecticut. And so the whole family responsibility for this until that time, autonomous, self-supporting human being, fell upon me. And to go through a death and dying experience, if one is a Christian, change is one's life. I thought perhaps then it was unique to me. It is not. I am told by many friends, whether they are Christian, Jewish or whatever, that to watch and see someone die, changes one's life. In the process, I ask myself, what do you want to do with the rest of your life? Because watching my best friend die made me face my own mortality. Now at 63, what do you want to do with the rest of your life? And what I was doing on behalf of her was exactly what a

deacon or a priest would do. Because as she reached the last few hours of her death, there was no priest available. And I was reading the administration to the sick and silently reading the prayers for the dying to her. And so it was in the process of going through that experience as a lay minister that just pushed me over the line. And I said to myself, you're crazy. And I couldn't believe that I had had a call. And so I chose the highest person in my diocese to counsel with. I wanted to know, I wanted to present this experience to the bishop. And it happened to have been bishop John in Burgess. And it went on from there. So when I say that I did not make the decision, this was not a decision as I made to go to law school. It was something that I could neither eat nor sleep

nor do anything until I went to the bishop and said, what is this? Well at 63, then you felt this desire to enter some form of religious life. Were you actually told that it was possible for you to become a priest? Let me say that as early as 1966, seven years earlier, my friend Rene Barlow, the one who died, and I had been involved in very quiet pressure within the church structures for greater equality for women in the church. I didn't think of it as myself going into the priesthood. But as early as 1966, I had written a letter to my then rector and the vestry of my parish at that time, St. Mark's on the Bowery and the Reverend Michael Allen, urging that women become lay readers, acolytes, helping at the altar, and that they

be given the opportunity to function on every level within the church. And within about two years, two women were elected on the vestry of our church. And one of those was Irene Barlow. In 1969, Irene Barlow, myself, Dr. Inabel Lindsay, who is now the retired Dean of Social Work at Howard University, Hilder Smith, who's in her late 80s, and who had been in the new deal all the way back in 1935. She was head of the Workers Education Project, WPA, on which I had worked, appoint a six of us, a center letter of protest to the special convention of the Episcopal Church, which was meeting in South Bend, Indiana at Notre Dame. At the very time that Bishop Pike

was lost in, where was it, Palestine? All of this was happening at the same time. And what were we protesting? The fact that the House of Deputies, meeting in a special convention, along with the House of Bishops, had refused to seat a Mrs. Oliver, a duly elected deputy delegate from the Los Angeles diocese. And because she was a woman, they had refused to seat her. And we, six women, two of whom were Negroes, sent this letter of protest, not letter of protest, but a telegram protest to the presiding Bishop, the House of Bishops, and the House of Deputies. Now, the presiding Bishop at that time was the most Reverend John Hines. The Chairman of the House of Deputies, or President of the House of Deputies, was Dr. John Coburn. Dr. John Coburn today

is the right Reverend John Coburn, Bishop of Massachusetts. And is therefore a my Bishop, because I am a priest who is canonically resident in Massachusetts. So with this background, with my friend who had been a very quiet but very continuous and determined feminist, you can see how all of these things were moving together. Bishop Hines appointed me in 1970 as a member of a special commission on licensed and ordained ministries within the church, along with the Reverend Dr. Henry Ryder, Ryder, who is on the faculty of Virginia Theological Seminary, and also a constitutional lawyer, along with others who were on that committee or who functioned with that commission, where the right Reverend Paul Moore, now Bishop of New York, I think Bishop

DeWitt met with us at that meeting. And Phyllis, I can't remember her name, but anyway, she was the first woman Deacon whom Bishop Pike had ordained as a Deacon and created a funeral in the church. Well, now this collection of individuals met before the convention, the triennial general convention in Houston, 1970, and two of us were constitutional lawyers, Henry Ryder and myself. We investigated the constitution and the canons, and we saw that there was no specific prohibition against women as clergy. And we made a unanimous report and recommendation to the 1970 general convention that the entire church be opened up to women in all respects, in lay ministry and ordained ministry. At Houston, our main resolution or recommendation was bypassed.

But the general convention did remove the bar against women becoming deacons. And so between 1970 and 1973, a number of women were ordained as deacons in the church. Now, two things happened to me. I read that the Reverend Jeanette Picard, who was then almost 80, had become an ordained Deacon. I had worked with Jeanette Picard in one of the women's caucuses, known as the Gray Moore Conference, in which again, we had recommended full equality for women in the church in all of its orders. And I said, if she at 80 can go into the ministry, why can't I at 63? And there was also just about the same time a tiny little news item in the New York Times about a male Deacon or

men who was 63 years old, who had studied for about 10 years and was being ordained a priest in Pennsylvania. I would not have had the courage to have applied or even to enter the ministry, assuming that I had a genuine call. Unless I had seen these two particular items, Jeanette Picard, a role model at the age of 80, and this male priest being ordained a priest at the age of 63, which was exactly my age, one other factor. My heroine, the late Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, began her greatest life's work at the age of 62. This was when she was at the UN as chairman of the Commission, United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and out of that commission came the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And so I felt that if I had the strength and the stamina,

perhaps my greatest life's work lay before me. Did you see yourself in any way adding something to the church as a woman and a priest? What can women add to the church in that respect? I had a particular feeling about coming into the church. Even before he came on the scene, he, meaning the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I had been committed to nonviolent direct action or nonviolent creative direct action. I had been practicing it and experimenting with it since the early 1940s as a student at Howard University Law School and the sit-ins that we students conducted in the downtown restaurants in Washington to open up public accommodations to Negroes. Dr. Martin Luther King's movement came along and made our little experiments a mass movement,

which we couldn't possibly do as students in a transitory situation. And of course, in due course, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. And then, and Mrs. Roosevelt died. And Mrs. Roosevelt had been a person who had the love of the black community. When she went to Harlem, her last summer alive in a campaign and rode in an open car, women came around the car and wanted to touch her. Eleanor and her grandsons were concerned. They were afraid that she would be injured. And she, no, they just wanted to touch her. And she said, I felt like the old lady in the in the side show, she had a marvelous sense of human. These two great personalities died. And here I am committed to creating nonviolence as an instrument in the resolution of human

disputes and had no standing, no way of asserting leadership. And the country was going through turmoil, riots in the cities, blood on records, all kinds of violent expressions of protest, psychic violence as well as physical violence. I felt that assuming I had a genuine call, this is always the first thing, if it were a genuine call, where I belonged was in the pulpit. Because my message was basically a moral and spiritual message. Most human questions, most human controversies have their moral base. And where can you legitimately speak to the moral issue?

If you do not do it in terms of what Paul Tillich calls men's ultimate concern, God, nowhere else would I have the standing not as a lawyer. My colleagues on the American Civil Liberties Union Board, and we had a board of close to 80 and about 40 of us were lawyers. They would say, Paul, you're too preachy. And so everything was pushing me in the direction of the church. And so I felt that my particular contribution could be to do what I could to revive the tradition of Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King. Because I think the two together, in a sense, complemented one another. Eleanor Roosevelt, the symbol of womanhood, the symbol of compassion. Martin Luther King, the symbol of the spiritual non-violent creative,

prophetic activism, never compromising with principle on this whole question of liberation and freedom, but never permitting the opposition to become alienated. Now in the vacuum left by there moving off the scene, in comes black power, in comes black theology with my brother, James Cohen talking about a black Christ, you know, I am not denigrating these movements, they may have been necessary. It was probably necessary for masses of blacks to think of themselves as black is beautiful. But as you know, I accept all of my ancestry. I am of mixed ancestry, I am irrevocably of the new world. I have lived in Africa so that I have not rejected Africa,

but I know that my place is here and I am concerned and I am passionately devoted to the new world, this little country called the United States of America. And I am determined to see the United States of America live up to her mission as the light of the world. But I really believe that women are being called as prophets of the late 20th century. You see, we had the great Old Testament prophets. I think women have lain fallow for these thousands of years and in the Christian church for the past two thousand years, I think they have sat and listened to the word of God and listened and pondered and never perhaps hoped that they could say anything. And I think in the great crises of our century, they haven't been able to sit still in their seats any longer, they haven't been able to be silent. Who would who needs the kind of rejection that we've had

in this struggle? Who needs a situation where a woman is is our good North Carolinian Carter Haywood, the Reverend Carter Haywood? She is in the most solemn moment of her life, legitimately as a Deacon, assisting the Archbishop of Canterbury at that time in the Eucharist. And legitimately so as a Deacon, she is administering the chalice of wine and a young cleric. We don't know whether he was a Deacon or a priest, but he had on a clerical collar, rips her at the back of her hand and attempts to pull the chalice out of her hand and say, I hope you burn in hell. Can you imagine how one would feel in the most solemn religious moment of your life in our faith, the administration of the Eucharist, to have that kind of experience happen? Well, this brings up another point. The admission of women into the priesthood has

really rocked the Episcopal Church. It has rocked Christendom. Not just the Episcopal Church, but Christendom. How do you see the future then? How is this going to be healed? This is very hard to say. The reason I say it is very hard to say, you know the power of the Roman Catholic Church. And what we have done in the Episcopal Church is to challenge the citadel of power in Roman Catholicism. I don't want to be a prophet here. I do think that there are these possibilities. I think there may be large defections from the Roman Catholic Church on the one hand. Or in the alternative, the women of the Roman Catholic Church will rise up in revolt.

Already I understand that the feminists of the Roman Catholic Church have said that by 1983 we will be priests. Yet Pope Paul said that women do not have the proper biological identification with Christ or his apostles. But theology upon which Pope Paul relies is a dangerous anthropomorphism. It's very dangerous anthropomorphism because what this kind of theology has done is to link masculinity with God. Those of us who have studied theology know that God is too great, too tremendous to be contained in sex and gender. The man for whom I am named Apostle Paul made the same fight in the first century with the primitive church with

respect to bringing Gentiles in. Remember the first Christians were Jews. They were followers of a Jewish male. And Paul the Apostle saw the need to preach the gospel to the Gentiles. And he fought to get them in. And he ultimately won. Now there were some little sects left, you know the purists were left over there on the side. Well the Catholic Church could become a little sect. If God moves in history as I believe God does, notice I am avoiding any kind of gender related pronouns. Then history seems to be dictating that what we call the Church of God must be inclusive. And if as we are taught we are all children of

God and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven. And if as we say in our liturgy or in our songs or even in the words of St. Paul, in Christ there is no east or west, no north or south, no male or female, no black or white, no Jew or Christian in that narrow sense. Then obviously Paul the sixth is looking backward and not forward toward the kingdom of heaven. And here is where I do think that women entering the ministry can be this force in reconciliation. Reconciliation doesn't mean that we accept what we believe to be wrong. We have to stand for

what we believe to be right. But it is the way in which we stand. We always remember our opponent. We try to love our opponent. But nevertheless we stand for what we believe is right. Now what I am hoping is that we will learn creative non-violent techniques so that we continue to love the Paul's success. And we continue to think of them as brothers or in any case as sisters. But nevertheless we also continue to stand for the inclusiveness and to witness for the inclusiveness. Now reconciliation is already going on within our church. Many people are being converted to the notion of women in the priesthood. We will gain more people who are returning to the

church than we will lose because they are hung up on this male image of Christ. So in a sense we are trying to reclaim Christians who have fallen away from the church because they believe that the church is not speaking to the spiritual needs of 1977. You speak of reconciliation and you mentioned it several times in your sermon. Do you see your ordination and the ordination of women bringing about this reconciliation outside the church as well? I am aware of the deep alienation of the racist in this country. I am aware of the terrible sickness that the United States suffers known as racism. Also sexism. The two I call them the twin immoralities. When I have vacation down in the island of Jamaica and I have seen the mixtures all in the same family, the mellato, the black,

the European, all members of the same family, all enjoying themselves. I stand there and I look northward and I say you know we are utterly insane in the United States. Just completely insane. Now Jamaica is only an hour and a half from Miami. Just off of the tip of Miami so to speak. So that we have got to get rid of this terrible sickness. I have known from as early as I knew anything that I had both white ancestors and Negro ancestors. I have never rejected either wing of my ancestry. I have also known that I have American Indian ancestors. And so I talk of being the genuine future American in whose bloodstream run the three great

streams of mankind. The Caucasian, the Oriental, or American Indian, the Red, the White, and the Black. Since I can't tear myself apart, I don't intend to let anybody bottle me up and say that I am Black because I'm not. I mean it's ridiculous to call myself Black within this group of people of color, which is the only inclusive term that can can encompass all of us from types that look Caucasian to types that look African people of color. America has a richly varied group. And so I present myself as a racial mixture. I am what is known as a mulatto type. And so while everybody

else is talking about Black is beautiful, I'm saying mixy is beautiful. Although I do it humorously, in that I'm reaching out my hand spiritually and symbolically to both sides of this seemingly racial gulf. I hope the congregation felt that I was saying I am related to both of or all of these streams. Well, your roots are here in North Carolina. You were raised by your grandparents in Durham. You wrote about your heritage and your ancestors in Proud Shoes, which was published in 1956. And now with the publication of Alex Haley's Highly Successful Book, the whole country, both Black and White, has really begun searching for their roots. How do you see Proud Shoes in relation to Alex Haley's roots? It's been my fate to be a Pathfinder. And in being a Pathfinder

or a spearhead, you simply punch a hole and sooner or later there is a breakthrough. So it was my fate probably to write the first book of roots of a person of color on the American scene. My book was published in 1956 by Harper and Rowe. In 1966, another poet, Margaret Walker, whose poetry for my people was I think won the prize for Yale Younger Poets. I think she is now a professor of English at Jackson State College in Mississippi. She wrote a book on her family called Jubilee. And her family was the same kind of mixture of White ancestry and slave ancestry in Alabama and Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. As mine was of North Carolina, Maryland,

Delaware and Pennsylvania, because these are the streams of my roots. As Miss Jane Pitman, which was a fictionalized account, was of Louisiana. So here are these three precedents that have been circulating around among small groups, or rather exclusive audience, those who were interested in that. And they were really preparing the way for Alex Haley's breakthrough on roots. Now, since we're talking about Alex Haley and roots, let me try to give some perspective on roots in 1976 and proud shoes in 1956. Alex Haley went all the way back to his African roots. His emphasis is on the history as it begins in Africa. And he brings his characters through

to the United States. And he emphasizes the African stream in his ancestry. Proud shoes begins with America. It is called the story of an American family. And it goes back as far as it can in the records. And everywhere it goes back, it meets White ancestry. Because I come out of what was in the late 19th and early 20th century, called the Near White Families. These were the male latter types of which there were about 10% in at the end of slavery. It is only able to find, because at each point, it finds tremendous amount of white ancestry. And it then portrays the subtle interrelationships of these related people,

people who are caught on different sides of the color line. And some who seem to get there by default, my grandmother. My grandmother said that her father, Sydney Smith of Chapel Hill, and of the University of North Carolina, told her that she had no Negro blood, that she was seven eighths white, and one eighth Indian. Cornelius Smith was caught on the Negro side of the color line. She married my grandfather, who was a true mulatto, and an octorune type which meant that he was at least three fourths white and one fourth Negro. Now here are these two Near White people operating in the reconstruction period, and in the period in which Negroes were really being denied all of the rights that they had won as they thought they had won in 13th, 14th,

and 15th Amendments. Now given that kind of background, a child growing up in a family jumping back a generation, so that I really grew up with a Civil War generation. The Civil War and Reconstruction were more real to me seeing them through my grandparent size than say the early part of the 20th century, which would have been through my parent size. In a way, a proud choose was the biography of my grandparents, so it is the story of a family living just prior to the Civil War. Going through the Civil War on both sides, grandmother on the southern side that lost grandfather as a part of the whole military union forces that won, grandfather being what I call a young snake, a kid of 1866, just 100 years earlier. He was the young New England schoolmar who came south to teach among the freedmen. His dedication, he was trained at Lincoln

University at Presbyterian, missionary school, and instead of going to Africa as they were training missionaries, he came to the American South, so that out of that, out of this two, this double vision, my grandmother's pride in her aristocratic white ancestry, my grandfather's pride in fighting for freedom and manhood. This comes down to me and knowing this history, today, I am ready for the reconciliation, for the integration. And so again, I am a pathfinder, but America had to be shocked by roots before it could accept the relatedness of Proud Jews. See, remember that Proud Jews came out in 1956. Martin Luther King's movement began in 1955. What was the reaction to Proud

Jews when it did come out? Rave reviews. Rave reviews came out in 1956 with, remember, unknown author, first book. Rave reviews went into the black, to the tune of 45 cents. In other words, it paid back the advance that I got and then an additional royalty of 45 cents. And I have that check. I wouldn't cash it. I have it in my scrapbook. The masses of Negroes were not ready for it. Many of them didn't want to admit they have quite ancestry. But look, let's be candid. There are about 14 generations that have existed in this country since 1619 when the first 20

Negroes were brought as then they were indentured servants. The recirculation of genes over a period of 14 generations means that there is probably not a single native Negro of any roots in this country who does not have white ancestry and who does not have some Indian ancestry. The moving over on mass of thousands upon thousands of near whites in the reconstruction period and even that process is still continuing. People are just disappearing in the white race. My family is full of it. I have cousins of my generation who are living as whites in the United States. Means that very few white people in the south and perhaps in the north know whether or not

they have black ancestors. So why don't we get rid of all of the Archibungi type of carrying on and just admit that we're all in the family that any one of us may have European ancestry, any one of us may have African ancestry. So what? So what else is new? Do you think that it was necessary to go through a black as beautiful and a total identification before this other identification? I think for those who felt that. Yes. I did mine by going to Africa and teaching for two years and I sat there in Africa and reflected upon all kinds of things and it was in Africa that I realized how utterly irrevocably new world and America and I was. There was just no way. No way that I could be anything else but American. The first day I arrived on the law school campus where I was teaching. Young African looked at me and he said

he watched me for a while and he said lady what are you American lady or English lady? And I thought he sees my color he sees my accent. I said what do you think? He said I think you're American lady and I said how do you know? He said I tell by your walk Americans walk different from English people. I told this as a conversation piece at a reception and the Israeli diplomat was there and he heard it. He says he's perfectly right. He said you can look out the window and watch people walking down the street and you can tell in America and you have a certain swivel of your hips that Europeans do not have. Now this was just one clue as to how American I was. I fell into another American stereotype. Americans are sanitation crazy. We like our plumbing,

we like everything to be sanitary and we make people very uncomfortable in developing countries because we must have you know we don't like using newspaper to wrap food. I upset the whole construction housing project because I insisted on having my plumbing in a certain way and went back to ordinary high school physics and convinced them that they could arrange their pipes in such a way that I could have both hot and cold water in my shower in my bathtub and in the little basin in the bathroom and they didn't believe me. I said certainly you can do it and I said the pressure that brings up the cold water will push the hot water that's in this hot water tank and sure enough it worked and I was probably the only person in a car that had both hot and

water or both hot and cold water taps. This is typical of the American. We are innovators, we are aggressive, we tend to be creative, we tend to think anything is possible and we drive other countries nuts. Why did you not go as Alex Haley did back to your African roots? Why did you stop with your great grandparents? Because I stood there on the coast of Africa. Now remember I was in Ghana and I traveled from Ghana to Nigeria and this was known as the slavery coast. I saw all of those slave castles. I read the history, I talked with Africans, I knew that the wealthy Ashanti were rich because of the blood money that they had gotten by raiding neighboring tribes, not their own, but alien tribes because if you don't belong to an Ashanti you're an alien or

if you don't belong to an airway you're an alien but they raided and made war on alien tribes and those who were captured became the slaves that were then sold to the European and American slave traitors. And so I sat right in Africa and realized that my American slave ancestors were slaves because of the cooperation between African merchants and European and American merchants and so I was not going for this business that it was only the whites who helped to enslave us and I said to myself as I saw these slave captains and I went through the not slave captains, the slave castles, the fortresses that were strong along the coast where the young captives were male and female were deposited to wait for the slave ships and I re-enacted psychologically

what had happened. I said to myself the history of the American Negro begins at the shores of the Atlantic, the western shores of the Atlantic and I pay tribute to my African ancestors for the biological heritage that they gave us for endurance but I am an American my fate is in the new world we are trying to build something in the new world a revolution a permanent revolution based upon the declaration of independence that is where I belong. Did you feel any desire to get actual records while you were there or to search back for your own particular African roots?

No I didn't I went to villages and I looked at the villages and I said one could be but it wasn't necessary for me to go to do that. I was sufficiently satisfied with the dignity, the culture, the achievements of black African south of the Sahara not the feel the need of finding an individual ancestor. So you concentrated then on your American heritage. Proud shoes brings it back to your great-great-grandfather I believe. What did you find the most important thing for you to get out in that book? What were you looking for through Proud shoes? Two things. The acceptance of my slavery heritage and the acceptance of my African roots but also the acceptance of my white roots without resentment. You know I had nothing to do with that. Not my problem.

My problem is to see to it that I live up to the best of my heritage whatever the best is and that I make it possible for future people not to suffer the degradation of slavery or any of its aftermath and my whole life has been dedicated to that. To human dignity and it doesn't matter whether the person is black or white or crippled or not. Human dignity must be human dignity across the board. To express it in medical terms maybe roots is the surgery and maybe Proud shoes and its successor which is called the fourth generation of Proud shoes which is now on the publisher's desk. Maybe this can be the healing antiseptic. I have been a challenger and I will continue to be a challenger. Indirectly I'm challenging the Vatican

but in terms of the racial picture I do see my role at this time in history as a role of healing. Women have a long way to go. There are the American Indians who are almost the forgotten natives. There are the Chicanos who have their problems. There are many ethnics who are now beginning to feel as if they've been left out of the picture and so we will probably have this turmoil until both anthropology and biology produce what I call the typical American and if you don't mind my being so arrogant I will say I think you're looking at the typical American. Some several hundred years from now. Maybe not as long as several hundred years from now. I think we're going to wind up a beautiful beautiful country. Reverend Dr. Paulie Murray,

the first black woman ordained in the Episcopal priesthood interviewed recently in Chapel Hill. For WUNC this is Barbara Bernhardt.