Influential professor at Hunter College
Murray describes the influence of her professor, Dr. Dorothy Keur, at Hunter College in New York City. As an anthropologist, Keur taught her students about different cultures. For Murray, this had the result of dissolving any lingering embarrassment about her African and American Indian heritage and gave her an appreciation for what she calls "the unity of mankind." This view would become central to Murray’s positioning within the civil rights movement in later years.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Pauli Murray, February 13, 1976. Interview G-0044. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- PAULI MURRAY:
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One other experience I had in college I think is worth recording. We had
a marvelous young teacher in anthropology by the name of Dorothy Keur. I
could have completely missed up on anthropology but I had a very dear
friend who was a science major and loved anthropology and she
recommended that I take it and so, I took it as an elective and Dr.
Keur, for our field work, had us go once a week over to the Hall of Man
at the Museum of Natural History over on 87th Street across the park. It
was a marvelous hike because Hunter was at 68th and Park Avenue.
- GENNA RAE MCNEIL:
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Across the park?
- PAULI MURRAY:
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Across the park. In those days, there was no problem whatsoever. You
could sleep in the park. I have slept in the park. We would hike down to
the park and sleep over night, but remember, I am talking about over
forty years ago, pre-World War II. We would spend once a week in the
Hall of Man, particularly with African villages
and village life and art and artifacts and American Indians. Now, I have
touched upon the other two streams of my ancestry, growing up in a kind
of European dominated a society and my American Indian ancestry and my
African ancestry being more or less suppressed. This experience in
anthropology did more for me, I think, than maybe any other course in
college, because first of all, it showed me a comparative view of man
and how man responds to the environment in which he lives, to build his
homes, his art, his institutions and whatnot and I could see the
parallels between American Indians and Africans. Secondly, in a sense
for me, it removed them from the column of what I needed to have any
sense of being embarassed about.
- GENNA RAE MCNEIL:
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That's interesting. This Professor Keur, do you have any idea
with whom she studied or what …not all anthropologists took
that kind of approach at that period.
- PAULI MURRAY:
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She was a marvelous person. She's still alive and just
recently …oh, she retired, I guess, a number of years ago,
but I think that she may have studied with Ruth Benedict, I
don't know. She studied at Columbia, I'm fairly
sure. Her husband was an archeologist, they spent a lot of time in the
West …
- GENNA RAE MCNEIL:
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On what they called digs?
- PAULI MURRAY:
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Right.
- GENNA RAE MCNEIL:
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And field trips.
- PAULI MURRAY:
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Yes. And she had a sense and she transmitted to me a sense of the unity
of mankind and I've never lost that. This may make me a loss
to militant racial identification, but this sense of unity within
mankind, this sense of seeing mankind as mankind …
