photo by lauren “Chuck” Shows
Catherine Roma directed the World House Choir in a recent rehearsal of “Sincerely Yours, Pauli Murray,” a 10-movement cantata dramatizing the life and work of civil rights activist, lawyer, poet and Episcopalian priest Pauli Murray. The choir will perform the canatata at the Foundry Theater Nov. 7 and 9. (Photo by Lauren "Chuck" Shows)
World House Choir honors the legacy of civil rights fireband Pauli Murray
- Published: November 7, 2025
Monday night, the 100 voices of the World House Choir rang out in the Foundry Theater’s auditorium, singing: “Jump back, turn around, Jim Crow is leavin’ town, look what he’s left behind: Jane Crow is what you’ll find.”
It was civil rights firebrand Pauli Murray who coined the term “Jane Crow” in 1947 while a student at Howard University; the term, which aimed to highlight the impact of gender discrimination, particularly against women of color, is a kind of shorthand that defines much of Murray’s intersectional work against oppression and discrimination as a lawyer, legal theorist, poet, activist and Episcopal priest.
While the United States still feels the impact of that work, Murray’s name is often absent from broad discussions of civil rights — which the World House Choir and Antioch College hope to change with “Rebel With A Cause: Sincerely Yours, Pauli Murray,” a symposium and series of concerts dedicated to exploring Murray’s life and legacy.
This weekend, the 10-movement dramatic cantata, “Sincerely Yours, Pauli Murray,” will be performed in Yellow Springs Friday and Sunday, Nov. 7 and 9, and in Cincinnati on Nov. 8.
The cantata, commissioned by a GALA Choruses commission consortium — which includes World House Choir — is the work of composer Steve Milloy, librettist Kim Hines and dramaturg Jane Ramseyer Miller. Drawing from Murray’s own words, “Sincerely Yours” moves chronologically through Murray’s life.
Pauli Murray was a civil rights advocate, lawyer, poet and Episcopal priest whose work left lasting impacts on the ongoing efforts toward equal rights for women and people of color. World House Choir will perform “Sincerely Yours, Pauli Murray” Nov. 7 and 9 in the Foundry Theater at Antioch College. (Submitted photo)
Born in 1910, Murray was the first woman to earn a Doctor of the Science of Law degree from Yale Law School; the first Black woman ordained in the Episcopal Church; and a legal theorist whose writing helped dismantle segregation in Brown v. the Board of Education, later informing Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Equal Protection arguments for women. Murray also helped found the Congress of Racial Equality and the National Organization for Women.
The musical and theatrical work also dramatizes aspects of Murray’s private life, including a struggle to live authentically in a world unwilling to recognize gender identities outside of the male/female binary.
Assigned female at birth and known publicly throughout her life as she/her, scholars note that Murray might have embraced other pronouns. As World House Choir Director Catherine Roma told the News, the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice in Durham, North Carolina alternates between “she” and “they” pronouns.
“I think it’s always good to talk about language,” Roma said. “In her lifetime, she called herself ‘she,’ but if she were living in the world right now, she would probably call herself nonbinary or genderqueer.”
“Off the Rails,” an early movement in “Sincerely Yours” detailing the pain of a romantic heartbreak, also delves into Murray’s exploration of gender and the sadness and frustration of moving through a world that would not easily accept a “male head, male brain, female-ish body.”
Other movements pull the narrative toward public struggle, including Murray’s battle with transit segregation decades before Rosa Parks — and a longtime friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, established when Murray wrote to First Lady and President Franklin Roosevelt in protest of segregation. The two-and-a-half-decade friendship saw Murray continually prod Eleanor Roosevelt into taking stronger public stances against injustice.
“She poked Eleanor — you know what I mean?” Roma said.
Several movements incorporate popular-music genre stylings that reflect passing decades: a ragtime-inspired melody sung from the perspective of Murray’s Aunt Pauline in the 1910s; flourishes of Irving Berlin as Murray rides the rails with a first love in the early 1930s; blues and jazz and Motown as Murray moves through college and into legal and advocacy work that pushed for intersectional rights in the 1940s–60s, long before “intersectionality” was a widely used and understood term.
“[Murray] was able to understand because of who she was, the discrimination as a Black person, as a woman, and then her struggle to be who she could be — all that she could be,” Roma said.
In addition to the 100 voices of the World House Choir, two narrators/soloists — Sharisse Vernelle Santos and Aleah Vassell — will punctuate the cantata’s 10 musical movements, composed and arranged by Steve Milloy, whose name might be familiar to local audiences as the composer behind “Bayard Rustin: The Man Behind the Dream.” That work was performed by World House Choir in 2018, and Roma noted the structural kinship between the works — both portraits of pivotal, yet underrecognized queer civil rights strategists.
“’Pauli stepped up and dared to interfere,’” Roma said, quoting a line from the final movement of “Sincerely Yours.” “Just like Bayard, right?”
The choir, which has been rehearsing weekly, or more often, since mid-July, will perform with an ensemble of piano, electric guitar, bass, clarinet/tenor sax, drums and synthesizer. Filmmaker and local resident Steve Bognar has been with the choir in the Foundry since July, too, filming rehearsals. A documentary is in the works, he said, though its shape and structure have yet to be decided.
The World House Choir’s performance of “Sincerely Yours” arrives, Roma said, at a perilous political moment, when “the current administration is denuding the Civil Rights Bill, step by step by step by step.” That’s why she sees the cantata performance — and all similar efforts to speak, sing, dance, act or paint truth to power — as the work of “cultural warriors.”
“That means we have to keep art alive — we have to speak through art; we have to communicate with each other,” Roma said. “This work, and our working on it, is educational. It’s enlightening, it’s spiritually renewing.”
Roma echoed the cantata’s final movement, “Be a Spark,” which pushes beyond Pauli Murray’s biography into a provocation, a plea: “Everybody wants to make their mark. Everybody wants to be a spark. … Poet, lawyer, activist, she knew no restraint; ordained as a priest, they even made her a saint. … So ask yourself this question now: what needs to be done to make this world better before the setting of your sun? Don’t leave this world with your work undone.”
The cantata ends by conferring a sense of responsibility on the listener, asking, “Whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do?”
“It’s calling us,” Roma said. “It’s calling us to act.”
“Rebel With a Cause: Sincerely Yours, Pauli Murray” begins Saturday, Nov. 1, with symposium “Defying Jim & Jane Crow: The Power & Impact of Pauli Murray,” 11 a.m.–4:30 p.m., in Antioch College’s Arts & Sciences Building and Herndon Gallery.
Performances of “Sincerely Yours, Pauli Murray” follow at the Foundry Theater on Friday, Nov. 7, at 7 p.m., and again on Sunday, Nov. 9, at 2 p.m.; a Cincinnati performance will be held Saturday, Nov. 8, at 4 p.m. at the House of Joy on Central Parkway. Each concert will be followed by a panel discussion with composer Milloy; dramaturg Ramsayer Miller; Rosita Steven-Holsen, Pauli Murray’s niece; and Miriam McKenney, Episcopal missioner for Beloved Community.
Saturday morning, from 9:30–11 a.m., St. Andrews Episcopal Church in Cincinnati will host “Pastries with Pauli,” a symposium honoring Murray’s legacy.
All events are free and open to the public, with donations accepted.
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