Description:
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…
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