Dark Testament - 1970

106pp. Silvermine Publishers, Norwalk, CT. VG+ copy of Afro-Indigenous queer civil rights activist, lawyer, legal scholar, Episcopal priest and poet Pauli Murray's only collection of poetry, Dark Testament. Gorgeous linen cream cloth boards with black lettering in VG+, slightly edgeworn blue DJ with slight chipping, and light staining to lettering of lower title and top of spine. The titular long-form poem, an epic of the incomplete project of emancipation, was first published in Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling's South Today, while Murray's poems, written predominantly ebtween 1938-1945, circulated across the Crisis and other journals. In 1940, Murray and girlfriend Adelene McBean took direct action against Jim Crow, moving from the back of the bus into the whites-only section, and were arrested and prosecuted. Murray's own work of legal scholarship States' Laws on Race and Color, would become a foundational critique for civil rights jurisprudence to defend similar cases of civil disobedience. Murray was mentored and encouraged by Stephen Vincent Benet, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Untermeyer and Lillian Smith. In this volume, the love poems float without a gendered subject- reflecting Murray's masc self-presentation and love of women, and as Naomi Simmons-Thorne has noted, the vexed question of pronominal reference for Murray.