"We'll sing it at the workbench": Time and History in Pauli Murray's Theopoetics

“The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray was a twentieth-century human rights activist, legal scholar, author, labor organizer, poet, Episcopal priest, multiracial Black, LGBTQ+ Durhamite who lived one of the most remarkable lives of the 20th century.” What does this remarkable poet and priest have to teach us about time, temporality, and history? This presentation examines Murray’s theological view of history in their poem Dark Testament. I argue Murray’s theo-poetics disrupts our conceptions of linear time and racial progress. Instead, Murray tarries with America’s history of sexual subjection, chattel slavery, and settler colonialism to direct the reader to its repetitions and backslides. In doing so, Murray offers us a cross-shattered conception of history, one which locates Christ in solidarity with victims of racial violence.