I use first names to talk about and organize my perSISTERS designs. You may have noticed this when and if you’ve thumbed through my tabbed print bins. “Alphabetical by first name.”
These variations are based on some shirt designs I’ve made for Ruby and Harriet (soon to appear under “Wearables”). I also wanted to include these two people in the 2022 calendar, but I didn’t want to include the same designs I’ve used in calendars twice already. So here are FEARLESS and RUBY PERSISTED, 2.0. You can read about my FEARLESS project at this link. But I don’t think I’ve ever put the story of Ruby Bridges on the blog. So scroll on for the text that I include with the print designs I’ve made for her.
FEARLESS for Harriet Tubman, a perSISTERS print variation in the Female Power Project
NEVERTHELESS SHE PERSISTED a new variation for Ruby Bridges, a perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project
New variations on some old favorites.
As a six-year-old, Ruby Bridges (born September 8, 1954) famously became the first African American child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in the South. When the 1st grader walked to William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans on November 14, 1960 surrounded by a team of U.S. Marshals, she was met by a vicious mob shouting and throwing objects at her.
One of the federal marshals, Charles Burks, who was on her escort team, recalls Bridges’ courage in the face of such hatred: “For a little girl six years old going into a strange school with four strange deputy marshals, a place she had never been before, she showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn’t whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier. We were all very proud of her.”
Once Ruby entered the school she discovered that there were no other children because they had all been removed by their parents. The only teacher willing to teach Ruby was Barbara Henry, who had recently moved from Boston. Ruby was taught by herself for her first year at the school due to the white parents’ refusal to have their children share a school with a black child.
Despite daily harassment, which required the federal marshals to continue escorting her to school for months; threats towards her family; and her father’s job loss due to his family’s role in school integration, Ruby persisted in attending school. The following year, when she returned for second grade, the mobs were gone and more African American students joined her at the school. The pioneering school integration effort was a success due to Ruby Bridges’ inspiring courage, perseverance, and resilience.
Bridges, now Ruby Bridges Hall, still lives in New Orleans with her husband, Malcolm Hall, and their four sons. After graduating from a desegregated high school, she worked as a travel agent for 15 years and later became a full-time parent. She is now chair of the Ruby Bridges Foundation, which she formed in 1999 to promote “the values of tolerance, respect, and appreciation of all differences”. Describing the mission of the group, she says, “racism is a grown-up disease and we must stop using our children to spread it.”
From “A Mighty Girl” Facebook page and Wikipedia. Image based on a photo by an unnamed Department of Justice employee.
Ruby Bridges at William Frantz Elementary School in 1960
The Creatrix at William Frantz Elementary School in 2017
QUESTION CATEGORIES for Pauli Murray, a perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project
In a new documentary, Pauli Murray says that communication is at the center of everything she does. This thrilled me because I have for years been thinking about communication. Communication is fundamentally about the meeting of two persons, two subjectivities, and the bridging of differences. Differences are set up and perpetuated by social categories, most often binaries, and individuals are sort of tied in a web of these categories. Pauli Murray was a brilliant and perceptive human whose self was suspended in the threads between firm categories. I’m thinking of the categories of subject and object, not-white and white, female and male, heterosexual and homosexual. Binaries are distortions. She was capable of perceiving her situation, and effecting action upon it, long before we had (as a culture in U.S.) the language to talk about these things. She was like a grammarian to a language that had yet to exist. She had the astounding imagination to be able to sketch the landscape that Martin Luther King, Jr. could only partly see from his mountaintop. This is because he did not have people who were not heterosexual, or who were assigned female, standing there with him. Murray liked to say that she lived to see all her lost causes found. Many of them were. Many will be.
Ruth (a poem by Pauli Murray)
Brown girl chanting Te Deum on Sunday Rust-colored peasant with strength of granite, Bronze girl welding ship hulls on Monday, Let nothing smirch you, let no one crush you.
Queen of ghetto, sturdy hill-climber, Walk with the lilt of ballet dancer, Walk like a strong down-East wind blowing, Walk with the majesty of the First Woman.
Gallant challenger, millioned-hope bearer, The stars are your beacons, earth your inheritance, Meet blaze and cannon with your own heart’s passion, Surrender to none the fire of your soul.
Pauli Murray (November 20, 1910–July 1, 1985) was a poet, a writer of letters to powerful people, a lawyer, civil rights activist, women’s rights activist, organizer, professor, Episcopal priest, and a non-binary person. She was a Black person who had many white ancestors, and at least one indigenous ancestor. She was assigned female at birth but always felt that she was really a man, that there was some mistake in her body. She lived most of her life as a lesbian woman, after a short time presenting as a boy when riding the rails during the Great Depression. She never spoke publicly about her sexuality or sexual identity, but her voluminous archive does include many documents expressing them. She knew that she would be an object of study in the future—her archive includes photos and film from the 1930s!— and she did not hide her complex identity from us, here in the future, although she did destroy her letters with her greatest love. I am so grateful to whoever did not destroy this record of her non-binary self. I think we are ready to think about her as she really was in a way that was not possible while she lived. Maybe that’s why most people are only now discovering her.
Pauli Murray is not able to tell us explicitly which pronouns are hers. This choice was not available to her the way it is available to people now. I am using the third person pronouns she did use for herself. It is not wrong to use “they/them”. It is not wrong to use “he/him”. These are categories we can question FOR her. Another category we have now that I don’t think she had then is “non-binary.” This may have been the best home for her, but we just don’t know. That is why her power for us is to QUESTION CATEGORIES. As a lawyer, Murray questioned racial and gender categories and worked to show that laws discriminating against people based on these categories are arbitrary and unconstitutional. These laws are wrong at their core, not just in their implementation.
In the same way it is not wrong to include her—someone who knew themselves to be a man—in a project about female power. If you have read this long, I am now going to tell you a secret (it was never a secret). Female Power is not just for females. My project is to expand the definition of power to include the power of females. We know that binaries are inadequate. Let’s imagine what replaces them.
I urge everyone to see the recent documentary called “My Name Is Pauli Murray” available at the link below. In it we hear Chase Strangio, an ACLU attorney, say, “We can’t comprehend legal movements for justice without understanding Pauli’s role in them.”
There is too much to include in this small space, so I will make a condensed list of Murray’s ground breaking human rights work. In the last decade of her life she worked in ministry as an Episcopal priest, the first ordained African American woman in that church. She felt she wanted to work directly in communion with individual people.
• In 1940, Murray sits in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus with a friend, and they are arrested for violating state segregation laws. They had been reading about Gandhian non-violent resistance. The NAACP drops her case when the charges are changed to disorderly conduct. This event fires her interest in Civil Rights law.
• In 1941 she enters Howard University Law School and stays at the top of her class. She writes a paper on a strategy to counter segregation and her reasoning is later used by Thurgood Marshall to argue Brown v. Board of Education. While at Howard she participates in sit-ins challenging discrimination at restaurants in D.C.
• Long before Kimberlé Crenshaw develops the idea of intersectionality, Murray uses the term “Jane Crow” to describe the special status of Black women as the targets of discrimination. She later criticizes the sexism of the civil rights movement, “It is indefensible to call a national march on Washington and send out a call which contains the name of not a single woman leader.”
• In 1950, Murray publishes a book surveying state racial segregation laws across the country. She continues her argument that lawyers should fight such laws as directly unconstitutional, instead of trying to make the separate accommodations more equal. Thurgood Marshall calls Murray’s book the “bible” of the civil rights movement. The text functions as a catalogue of laws for dismantling, similar to the Solicitor General’s list that RBG used.
• 1961–1964 Murray writes influential works on extending the developing civil rights law protections for Black people to women as well. Ruth Bader Ginsburg adds Murray as coauthor on her brief in her first case for the ACLU, Reed v. Reed (1971).
• In 1966, she originates the idea for, and then co-founds, the National Organization for Women (NOW), which she hoped could act as a NAACP for women’s rights.
DESIGN NOTE
You might have noticed that the large titling typeface I used in this design is a “unicase font” (called Quinoa) in which upper case and lower case forms are combined into one case. In other words, this type is non-binary.
Artwork based on this Photo: Pauli Murray of New York, winner of Mademoiselle Merit Award for signal achievement in law, 1946. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
DISIENTO (“I DISSENT”) for Sonya Sotomayor, a perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project
Sonia Maria Sotomayor (born June 25, 1954) is an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009 and has served since August 8, 2009. She is the third woman to hold the position. Sotomayor is the first woman of color, first Hispanic, and first Latina member of the Court. Sotomayor was born in The Bronx, New York City, to Puerto Rican-born parents. Sotomayor graduated with honors from Princeton University in 1976 and received her law degree from Yale Law School in 1979. –Wikipedia
DESIGN NOTE I have been pondering a design for Sonia Sotomayor for several years. I was impressed with her compassion, drive, and brilliance after reading her 2013 memoir. However, it was not clear to me what words to use for her “power.” I had thought to use “LISTEN” but was disuaded by someone who used to work for her who told me that Sotomayor is notorious for interrupting people. Sigh. Then recently someone came in to my Female Power hut at Eastern Market and, looking at my RBG “DISSENT” button, told me, “I would love a button with Sotomayor on it that says ‘DISSENT.”’ (She was refering to the dissent quoted below.) “Especially if it were in Spanish!” Well, I know a good idea when I hear one, and this also solved the problem I’ve stated above. I’m starting with a perSISTER print, and a button will be coming.
I found three ways to say “I dissent” in Spanish, and a lawyer friend helped me find the official judicial phrasing by looking up Supreme Court decisions published in Puerto Rico.
I found out that the Supreme Court publishes their decisions using the typeface Century Schoolbook, so that is the face I used to typeset the dissent appearing behind the judge in this print. The text reads:
The court’s order is stunning. Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.
Last night, the court silently acquiesced in a state’s enactment of a law that flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents. Today, the court belatedly explains that it declined to grant relief because of procedural complexities of the state’s own invention. Because the court’s failure to act rewards tactics designed to avoid judicial review and inflicts significant harm on the applicants and on women seeking abortions in Texas, I dissent.
In May 2021, the Texas legislature enacted SB8 (the act). The act, which took effect statewide at midnight on 1 September, makes it unlawful for physicians to perform abortions if they either detect cardiac activity in an embryo or fail to perform a test to detect such activity. This equates to a near-categorical ban on abortions beginning six weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period, before many women realize they are pregnant, and months before fetal viability. According to the applicants, who are abortion providers and advocates in Texas, the act immediately prohibits care for at least 85% of Texas abortion patients and will force many abortion clinics to close.
The act is clearly unconstitutional under existing precedents. The respondents do not even try to argue otherwise. Nor could they: no federal appellate court has upheld such a comprehensive prohibition on abortions before viability under current law.
The Texas legislature was well aware of this binding precedent. To circumvent it, the legislature took the extraordinary step of enlisting private citizens to do what the state could not. The act authorizes any private citizen to file a lawsuit against any person who provides an abortion in violation of the act, “aids or abets” such an abortion (including by paying for it) regardless of whether they know the abortion is prohibited under the act, or even intends to engage in such conduct. Courts are required to enjoin the defendant from engaging in these actions in the future and to award the private-citizen plaintiff at least $10,000 in “statutory damages” for each forbidden abortion performed or aided by the defendant. In effect, the Texas legislature has deputized the state’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.
The legislature fashioned this scheme because federal constitutional challenges to state laws ordinarily are brought against state officers who are in charge of enforcing. By prohibiting state officers from enforcing the act directly and relying instead on citizen bounty hunters, the legislature sought to make it more complicated for federal courts to enjoin the act on a statewide basis.
Taken together, the act is a breathtaking act of defiance—of the constitution, of this court’s precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas. But over six weeks after the applicants filed suit to prevent the act from taking effect, a fifth circuit panel abruptly stayed all proceedings before the district court and vacated a preliminary injunction hearing that was scheduled to begin on Monday. The applicants requested emergency relief from this court, but the court said nothing. The act took effect at midnight last night.
This dissent, this case, this new “originalist” Supreme Court, is about much more than denying reproductive rights for women. The historian, Heather Cox Richardson, points out in her letter of September 3, 2021, “A state has undermined the power of the federal government to protect civil rights. It has given individuals who disagree with one particular right the power to take it away from their neighbors. But make no mistake: there is no reason that this mechanism couldn’t be used to undermine much of the civil rights legislation of the post–World War II years.”
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