As an adult, Pauli Murray came across a sociological study, Social and Mental Traits of the Negro, that had been published in 1910, the same fateful and charged year in which she had been born. In it, a white sociologist named Howard W. Odum argued that “the migratory or roving tendency seems to be a natural one to [Black people], perhaps the outcome of an easy-going indolence seeking freedom to indulge itself and seeking to avoid all circumstances which would tend to restrict its freedom.” Odum believed that a Black person’s desire for autonomy and mobility was the byproduct of a
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