There is a paper I presented as part of a public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation some years ago which includes a section about the life and work of an important woman, Civil Rights lawyer Pauli Murray. She, with others, was instrumental to the success of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. My paper, which can be read online, begins:
"Eli Siegel explained what individuality really is--and I believe that every person’s personal happiness and our collective future depends on this great, true explanation being known. He writes in his essay titled “There Is Individualism”:
"Individualism is the whole world rightly in ourselves, and welcome there. It is reality working with a sweet lack of interference, through us….It is the self thriving on what it has to do with, making beautiful what it has to do with." . . . .Pauli Murray's life shows that what makes for true individuality is not our difference from others or our possible superiority to others--it is respect for the world. Born in Baltimore—in the segregated South—she and her family, as black persons, suffered from the contempt of white for black that was enforced by law. Like apartheid in South Africa, they were separated by force from what every human being needs and has a right to: their full relation to the world. more
