TO BUY THE SUN:
The Challenge of Pauli Murray
1 woman + a typewriter
= a revolution.
15 years before Rosa Parks refused to stand, Pauli Murray refused to sit in the back of the bus; 20 years before the Greensboro sit-ins, Pauli organized restaurant sit-downs in the nation’s capital. Murray was denied admission to the University of North Carolina because of her race and to Harvard because of her gender. 123 years after her enslaved grandmother was baptized at The Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, Pauli Murray returned and celebrated a groundbreaking Communion as America’s first female African American priest.
TO BUY THE SUN opens the evening of February 12, 1977, the night before Pauli’s historic appearance at The Chapel of the Cross. CBS’ Charles Kuralt and his On the Road crew have been following Murray all day. For the first time in decades, Pauli returns to the family home place to reflect on her place in the life and times of America and to craft the words she will speak to the two million viewers. As Pauli Murray revisits old haunts and old friends, from Harlem to Harvard and Eleanor Roosevelt to Betty Friedan, the purpose of her life takes on an unexpected new shape.
Using archival images, three chairs, and a typewriter, three performers bring to life 60 characters, 6 decades, and 2 continents in this acting tour de force. By the close of To Buy the Sun, you will want to stand and cheer for this mixed-race, gender-ambiguous attorney, poet, activist, and professor and the challenge she offers us all.
“With open eyes and an open heart we are often called to choose
truth and risk over comfort and ease. Now is such a time as this.”
To Buy the Sun returns!
We’re in the planning stages for a new tour to 5 colleges and universities in the mid-Hudson region of New York. Stay tuned as we update those details.
For more information on Pauli, visit the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice www.paulimurraycenter. com. And check out the trailer for a new film, My Name Is Pauli Murray:
