DURHAM -- Several Durham organizations have pooled resources to buy and renovate the childhood home of Pauli Murray, a civil rights leader who became the first black woman ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church.
"We own the house, as a collaborative," said Barbara Lau, director of the Pauli Murray Project at Duke University's Human Rights Center.
Duke, the Southwest Durham Quality of Life Project and Self-Help collaborated in the purchase, which closed Monday. According to Durham County tax records, the house is valued at $74,133 but its sale price was $55,000.
Murray, born in 1910, was raised in Durham by her maternal grandparents and wrote a memoir, "Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family," that vividly described life in the West End neighborhood of the 1910s.
She went on to graduate first in her class from Howard University's law school, advised former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on civil rights and was ordained in 1976. She celebrated her first communion at Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, where her grandmother had been baptized as a slave.
Murray died in 1985. The Carroll Street house where she grew up has fallen into disrepair, but plans are to rehabilitate it as a community meeting place.
At a cleanup day in November about 30 residents, college students and other volunteers peeled boards off windows, bagged the mess that squatters had strewn on the floors, and stripped layers of carpet that covered old hardwood stairs Murray mentioned in "Proud Shoes."
"We want more people to know about her," Lau said that day. "We want this place to become a place where people can learn about her work, her activism for fighting for human rights for everyone."
"She was ahead of her time," said Lau, who noted how Murray tried to get into UNC-Chapel Hill 20 years before a black student was admitted. "We are finally catching up to her."
The Pauli Murray Project will hold a news conference Tuesday to formally announce its plans for the house.
