Proud Shoes

Murray's life story is a remarkable one, as an often behind-the-scenes influence on the Civil Rights Movement, a co-founder of the National Organization for Women, and one of the first women ordained as an Episcopal priest. But Proud Shoes, written in the '50s when barriers to her race and gender made it hard, despite her sparkling qualifications, to earn a living, is the story of the people that came before her, two in particular: her grandfather, who grew up in a free-black community near Philadelphia but chose to settle in the South after fighting for the Union, and her grandmother, the half-acknowledged daughter of a white man and a woman enslaved by his family. It's a complex, and indeed proud, legacy, told equally with the sly wit of family gossip and the earnestness of her grandfather's idealism. It's a great American story.