I haven’t finished the whole piece yet, but Pauli Murray lived an amazing life and blazed a lot of the trails people better-remembered walked.
Learning about Pauli, Susie King Taylor, Fannie Lou Hamer, Lucy Craft Laney and others… we need to expand our pantheon of heroes we learn about in school.
Think about the people in your history books from school. How many of them are men? How many are white? How many do we now know aren’t as heroic as we were taught?
It’s time to expand the pantheon to include people history tried to erase, the trailblazers who made the path others followed, and spoke truth to power when the consequences were life and death.
And maybe it’s time to retire some of those other statues that never belonged there in the first place.