First published in 1956, Proud Shoes is the remarkable true story of slavery, survival and miscegenation in the South from the pre-Civil War era through the Reconstruction. Written by Pauli Murray – legendary civil rights activist,  a lawyer and a priest (one of the first women ordained in the United States) this is a chronicle of the lives of her maternal grandparents. From the birth of her grandmother, Cornelia Smith, daughter of a slave whose beauty incited the master’s sons to near-murder, to the story of her grandfather Robert Fitzgerald, who grew up free in the North, joined one of the first black regiments to fight in the Civil War despite the fact that he was already going blind from an injury and went south after the war to educate freed slaves in the face of white opposition and whose free black father married a white woman in 1840, this autobiography offers a revealing glimpse of America’s history.