Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family
New York: Harper & Row, (1978). Single volume, measuring 8.25 x 5 inches: xviii, 280, [2]. Original black cloth spine lettered in bronze, orange blindstamped paper boards, original unclipped color pictorial dust jacket. Illustrated with twenty pages of photographs. Ownership label of Barbara Smith to front free endpaper. Spine panel of jacket sunned.
Later edition of civil rights pioneer Pauli Murray’s groundbreaking account of her ancestors’ experiences before and after the Civil War, from the library of Combahee River Collective co-founder Barbara Smith. Murray’s lifetime of legal activism was animated by the experience of being a perpetual outsider, never easily inhabiting the categories of race, class, sex, and gender assigned to her. Her student writing on racial segregation informed Thurgood Marshall’s argument in Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), and her analysis of discrimination based on sex, what she termed “Jane Crow,” laid the foundation for Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s argument in Reed vs. Reed (1971). Murray was the first Black deputy attorney general in California, the first Black American to receive a J.S.D. from Yale, one of the original founders of the National Organization for Women, and the first Black American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest. First published in 1956, Proud Shoes deals with the psychological toll that slavery and its aftermath took on generations of Murray’s high-achieving mixed-race family: “true emancipation lies in the acceptance of the whole past, in deriving strength from all my roots, in facing up to the degradation as well as the dignity of my ancestors.” This 1978 edition contains a new introduction by Murray; this copy contains the ownership label of Black feminist trailblazer Barbara Smith, co-founder of the Combahee River Collective (1974) and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press (1980). In 2026, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, longtime home of Pauli Murray’s papers, acquired the archive of Barbara Smith as well. A near-fine copy, with excellent provenance.
Price: $350.00