Wednesday, April 3, 2024

Donald Gaines Murray, Attorney and Plaintiff in the Case of Murray v. Pearson

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Donald Gaines Murray (May 24, 1914 – April 7, 1986, in Baltimore, Maryland) was an American attorney, the first African-American to enter the University of Maryland School of Law since 1890 as a result of winning the landmark civil rights case Murray v. Pearson in 1935.

Murray was born on May 24, 1914, in Philadelphia, the son of George Lee Murray and Cecilia Lillian Gaines Murray. He graduated from Frederick Douglass High School in 1929. Murray then earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Amherst College in 1934.[1][2][3]

Murray sought admission to the University of Maryland School of Law on January 24, 1935, but his application was rejected on account of his race and his appeal to the Board of Regents of the university was unsuccessful. The case Murray v. Pearson was initiated by Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity as part of its widening social program; however, Murray was not a member of the fraternity.[4] The fraternity hired Belford Lawson, but by the time the case reached court, Murray was represented by Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall of the Baltimore National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Marshall argued the organization's policy of racial segregation was unconstitutional and argued in principle that "since the State of Maryland had not provided a comparable law school for blacks that Murray should be allowed to attend the white university."[5] and stated

What's at stake here is more than the rights of my client. It's the moral commitment stated in our country's creed.[6]

The Judge issued a writ of mandamus ordering Raymond A. Pearson, president of the university, to admit Murray to the University of Maryland Law School.[5] The ruling was appealed to Maryland's highest court, the Court of Appeals, which affirmed the lower courts' rulings on January 15, 1936.[1][a]

Murray was admitted to the University of Maryland School of Law; however, he was not in a position to pay for tuition and books. Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity paid Murray's tuition and books from the time of his admittance to his graduation from law school.[4]

Murray went on to practice law in Baltimore with the firm of Douglass, Perkins and Murray. He was involved in a number of cases which led to the removal of the color barrier from the University of Maryland graduate schools.

Murray was a member of the Baltimore Urban League, American Civil Liberties Union and Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.[7] He retired around 1971 and died at the age of 72 while in Baltimore's Lutheran Hospital after a lengthy illness.[8]

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Donald Gaines Murray and the Integration of the University Of Maryland School of Law

Donald Gaines Murray, Sr. (1914 - 1986) was the first African-American to enter the University of Maryland School of Law following the 1890 effort to prevent African-Americans from attending the school (see: "Colored Students Ruled Out"). Murray first sought admission to the University of Maryland School of Law on January 24, 1935, but his application was rejected based on race and his subsequent appeal to the Board of Regents of the university was unsuccessful. Upon this second rejection Murray began to work with lawyers at Washington D.C.'s Howard University to consider possible legal action. According to Juan Williams writing in his 1998 work Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary when Thurgood Marshall learned that some other lawyers were considering filing a suit against the State of Maryland and the University:

he [Marshall] got upset and wrote to [Charles Hamilton] Houston that he wanted to be first to file suit. He could not bear to allow any other lawyer to take the lead on this case.

By the time the case reached court, Murray was represented by Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, with help from Baltimore based attorney Nicholas Gosnell. Marshall argued the organization's policy of racial segregation was unconstitutional and argued in principle that "since the State of Maryland had not provided a comparable law school for blacks that Murray should be allowed to attend the white university." and stated " What's at stake here is more than the rights of my client. It's the moral commitment stated in our country's creed."

Judge Eugene O'Dunne ordered Raymond A. Pearson, president of the university, to admit Murray to the University of Maryland Law School. The ruling was appealed to Maryland's highest court, the Court of Appeals, which affirmed the lower courts' rulings on January 15, 1936.

Catalog 1939Murray, who eventually graduated in 1938, [1939 catalog listing Murray's graduation] went on to practice law in Baltimore with the firm of Douglass, Perkins and Murray. He was involved in several subsequent cases which would lead to integration of other professional schools at the University of Maryland.
Murray was a member of the Baltimore Urban League, American Civil Liberties Union and Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity. He retired in the early 1970s and died at the age of 72. [Murray Obituary]

The Murray case was an involved, far-reaching effort and has been extensively studied by both historians and lawyers. It played an important role in the breaking down of barriers to education at other University of Maryland Schools and helped Thurgood Marshall to develop the arguments that would come to the fore in the Brown v. Board of Education. This site is intended to serve as a starting point for researchers interested in the subject but is not comprehensive.

Legal Materials

Petition for Writ of Mandamus in Baltimore City Circuit Court (1935).

Opinion of the Maryland Court of Appeals in Murray v. Pearson (1936).

Published Opinion: 169 Md. 478 (1936).

Briefs and other records from the Maryland State Archives

Archival Resources

There are a number of archival sources that detail the history of the Murray case. One of the most detailed was assembled by the Maryland State Archives and can be found at "From Segregation to Integration: The Donald Murray Case, 1935-1937." [This site requires a password from the State Archives to access and can be requested directly from the Archives].

Additional archival material may be located in the Papers of the NAACP. Part 3, The Campaign for Educational Equality [series A & B]. These records are available at the Thurgood Marshall Law Library, The University of Maryland School of Law.

The Thurgood Marshall Law Library's African Americans in the Law Special Collection contains several related items:

Murray letter to Justice FrankfurterMurray letter to Thurgood Marshall

Books/Articles

Ball, Howard,
A Defiant life : Thurgood Marshall and the persistence of racism in America. 1st ed.
New York : Crown Publishers, c1998.
428 p., [16] p. of plates : ill. ; 25 cm.
Thurgood Marshall Law Library - KF8745.M34 B35 1998

Before Brown, beyond boundaries : commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education: A publication of The Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
Trenton, NJ : Africa World Press, c2004.
205 p. : ill. ; 28 cm. + 1 CD-ROM + 1 poster (56 x 42 cm.)
Thurgood Marshall Law Library - KF4155 .B44 2004

Bland, Randall Walton.
Justice Thurgood Marshall : crusader for liberalism : his judicial biography, 1908-1993.
Bethesda [Md.] : Academica Press, c2001.
364 p. ; 24 cm.
Thurgood Marshall Law Library - KF8745.M34 B547 2001

Davis, Michael D.
Thurgood Marshall : warrior at the bar, rebel on the bench.
New York, N.Y. : Carol Pub. Group, c1992.
400 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
Thurgood Marshall Law Library - KF8745.M34 D38 1992

McNeil, Genna Rae.
Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights.
Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.
Electronic Book: Thurgood Marshall Law Library Collection of Civil Rights E-books

Rowan, Carl T.
Dream makers, dream breakers : the world of Justice Thurgood Marshall. 1st ed.
Boston : Little, Brown & Co., c1993.
475 p., 16 plates : ill. ; 24 cm.
Thurgood Marshall Law Library - E185.615 .R65 1993

Smith, J. Clay.
Emancipation : the making of the black lawyer, 1844-1944.
Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c1993.
703 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
Thurgood Marshall Law Library - KF299.A35 S65 1993

Williams, Juan.
Thurgood Marshall : American revolutionary.
New York : Times Books, c1998.
459 p., [16] p. of plates : ill. ; 25 cm.
Thurgood Marshall Law Library - KF8745.M34 W55 1998


The University of Maryland Versus Donald Gaines Murray (Editorial Comment)
The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Apr., 1936), pp. 166-174.

Donald G. Murray and the University of Maryland Law School. Maryland Humanities (Winter, 1992).

Taunya Lovell Banks. Setting the Record Straight: Maryland's First Black Women Law Graduates, 63 Md. L. Rev.  752 (2004). Available at Digital Commons@UM Carey Law. .

David S. Bogen. The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment: Reflections from the Admission of Maryland's First Black Lawyers, 44 Md. L. Rev. 939 (1985). Available at Digital Commons@UM Carey Law..

David S. Bogen, The First Integration of the University of Maryland School of Law, 84 Maryland Historical Magazine 39 (1989). Available at Digital Commons@UM Carey Law.

Bernad Meyer. Is There Cause for Jubilee? 50 Md. L. Rev. 227 (1991).

Garrett Power. Meade v. Dennistone: The NAACP's Test Case to "...Sue Jim Crow Out of Maryland with the Fourteenth Amendment," 63 Md. L. Rev. 773 (2004). Available at Digital Commons@UM Carey Law.

Mark Tushnett. Thurgood Marshall as a Lawyer: The Campaign Against School Segregation, 1949-1950. 40 Md. L. Rev. 411 (1981).

Audio visual

Mark Tushnett. Thurgood Marshall as a Lawyer: The Campaign Against School Segregation, 1949-1950. 40 Md. L. Rev. 411 (1981).

Simple Justice (New Images Productions, Inc. ; produced by Yanna Kroyt Brandt ; directed by Helaine Head ; teleplay by John McGreevey ; story by John McGreevey, Avon Kirkland & Peter Cook).
Alexandria, VA : PBS Video, c1993.
3 videocassettes (46, 48, 40 min.) : sd., col. with b&w sequences ; 1/2 in.
Thurgood Marshall Law Library - Video KF4155 .S12 1993

Internet Resources

Color at the Bar: The Rise of African Americans in the Maryland Legal System.Bookmark and Share

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Wednesday, June 28, 2023

James Maraniss, Pulitizer Prize Winning Librettist of La Vida Es Sueno Opera

 

James Maraniss, Librettist of Long-Silent Opera, Dies at 76

A Spanish scholar who taught for more than four decades at Amherst College, he waited, along with the composer, 32 years for “Life Is a Dream” to be staged.

James Maraniss in an undated photo. A Spanish professor at Amherst College, he wrote the libretto to a colleague’s opera that won a Pulitzer Prize for the composer.
Credit...Jim McDonald

By Richard Sandomir

James Maraniss, a Spanish scholar who wrote the libretto for an opera that was finished in 1978, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 but was not fully staged for another decade, died on Jan. 9 at his home in Chesterfield, Mass. He was 76.

The cause was a heart attack, his brother, David, said.

Mr. Maraniss, a professor of Spanish and European studies at Amherst College, had never written a libretto when the composer Lewis Spratlan, a faculty colleague, approached him in 1975 to collaborate on an opera based on Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s early 17th-century drama “La Vida es sueño” (“Life Is a Dream”). The piece had been commissioned by the New Haven Opera Theater in Connecticut.

Excited at how Calderon’s vivid writing quickly conjured musical images in his mind, Mr. Spratlan told Mr. Maraniss the news about the commission — not knowing that Mr. Maraniss was an expert on Calderon’s work.

“It was a wonderful happenstance that this was the case,” Mr. Spratlan, now retired from Amherst’s music department, recalled in a phone interview. The two men, friends and neighbors in adjoining apartments in a campus house, soon started working together and completed the three-act opera in 1978. That year, Mr. Maraniss also published “On Calderon,” a study of the writer’s plays, including “La Vida es sueño,” which is about a prince in conflict with his father, the king.

Mr. Maraniss’s familiarity with Calderon’s rhythms and language animated the libretto.

“Jim managed to take extremely elaborate 17th-century Spanish, the equivalent of Elizabethan English, with very exalted levels of diction, and rendered it into modern English that preserved all the grandeur of Golden Age Spanish,” Mr. Spratlan said.

By the time they were finished, though, the New Haven Opera Theater had gone out of business, and no other opera company would produce it. Frustrated for many years, Mr. Spratlan finally raised money for concert performances of the second act in early 2000, first at Amherst, then at Harvard. Mr. Spratlan nominated himself for the Pulitzer for music and won.

Still, “Life Is A Dream” did not receive a full production until 2010, at the Santa Fe Opera.

In his review in The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini described the libretto as “elegantly poetic,” and said that Mr. Maraniss and Mr. Spratlan “honor Calderón by adhering closely to the philosophically ambiguous play, considered the ‘Hamlet’ of Spanish drama. Sometimes too closely.”

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A scene from the Santa Fe Opera’s production of “Life Is a Dream,” by the composer Lewis Spratlan and Mr. Marannis, colleagues at Amherst.
Credit...Ken Howard

David Maraniss said that his brother didn’t complain about the long wait for a full production.

“But that libretto meant as much to Jim as anything he had done in his life,” Mr. Maraniss, a journalist and biographer who won a Pulitzer in 1993 for his coverage of Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign for The Washington Post, said in a phone interview. “I can’t say the waiting was as torturous for Jim as it was for Lew, but it was a great feeling of relief when it was finally produced.”

James Maraniss and Mr. Spratlan won the 2016 Charles Ives Opera Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

James Elliott Maraniss was born on March 22, 1945, in Ann Arbor, Mich. He moved several times with his family before settling in 1957 in Madison, Wis., where his father, Elliott, a journalist who had been fired from his job as rewrite man at The Detroit Times after an informant identified him as a Communist, found work at The Capital Times. His mother, Mary (Cummins) Maraniss, was an editor at the University of Wisconsin Press.

After graduating from Harvard in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in Spanish literature, Mr. Maraniss earned a master’s there in the same subject. He then began work on his Ph.D in Romance languages and literature at Princeton University. It was granted in 1975.

Following several months working for Wisconsin Gov. Patrick Lucey on Native American and migrant worker issues, Mr. Maraniss was hired at Amherst in early 1972 where he remained until he retired in 2015. He taught Spanish culture and literature in Spanish.

Until recently, he had been working on a translation of “Don Quixote.”

In addition to his brother, Mr. Maraniss is survived by his wife, Gigi Kaeser; his daughter, Lucia Maraniss; his sons, Ben and Elliott; his stepson, Michael Kelly; and his sister Jean Alexander. Another sister, Wendy, died in 1997.

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Mr. Maraniss in 2015, the year he retired from Amherst College after teaching there since 1972.
Credit...Amherst College

After his work on “Life Is a Dream,” Mr. Maraniss wrote the Portuguese lyrics to James Taylor’s 1985 song “Only a Dream in Rio” and translated fiction and essays in the 1990s by Antonio Benitez-Rojo, a Cuban émigré and a major voice in Caribbean literature who was a professor of Spanish at Amherst.

“I was bored with being an academic until I began a new life as his translator,” Mr. Maraniss said in an obituary of Mr. Benitez-Rojo, “and in a sense his presenter to the English-speaking world, to share that degree of his power, which was that of a great art.”

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