"Homeless to Harvard": Murray shares inspirational life story with students
Joni McKinney, feature editor

 

Many people refer to life as a story of triumph over adversity one young woman refers to it as just life. Her theory is that she is no different than anyone else; she just has a slightly different background.

Liz Murray grew up in a home where nobody had a job and drugs were not out of the norm.

“I didn’t even know people had jobs,” she said.

Murray spoke on September 9in Lubbock in conjunction with a program hosted by the Center for Campus Life at Texas Tech.

Her parents were addicted to cocaine and spent the majority of the family income feeding that addiction. They were big into the New York party scene.

“They told me it was all peace, love and drugs,” Murray said. [There were] “Lots and lots of recreational drugs.”

They lived in the Bronx in an apartment that would certainly not pass the Martha Stewart cleanliness exam. There was garbage all over the floor, the bathtub had gotten clogged and turned black, and although they had two cats and a dog, nobody changed the litter box and nobody walked the dog. If something broke in the apartment, there wasn’t anyone to fix it.
 

“I’d like to tell you that it was horrible because it makes me sound so much better that I got through it, but, I didn’t notice that it was all that bad,” Murray said.

Murray’s parents lived for the welfare checks that came at the first of the month, but they were always spent long before they arrived. Every month her parents went to the welfare office and did what she referred to as “the crack-head shuffle,” hurrying through the line to plead their case to stay on welfare.

“Most people have Christmas and Thanksgiving,” Murray said. “But in the Bronx we had 12 holidays a year. That was the first of the month, every month when the welfare checks came.”
 

When the welfare check was spent, items began to disappear around the house.

“The T.V. would be gone for $5 dollars,” Murray said ”I’d see some kid wearing my coat and be like ‘hey that’s my coat.’”

Since there was never any money to eat on, when Murray and her sister were hungry they would knock on their neighbors’ doors and ask for food.

“We lived in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, so there was always rice and beans cooking,” she remembered. “We would go up and down the halls and knock on the doors where it smelled the strongest.”

Since the television had been sold, Murray’s only form of entertainment was reading. Her dad would often go to the library and bring home a stack of books, none of which were ever returned.

“My father had multiple aliases at the library,” she commented.

She was never forced to attend school and usually only showed up for the last week of school to take the end-of-year tests so that she could advance to the next grade. She meant to go to school but somehow rarely ever made it there. Rules were never enforced upon her. She would stay up late at night and watch infomercials. That is, until the television disappeared. In the mornings, Murray’s sister would throw cold water on her face to wake her up for school.

“Occasionally, she would win the fist fight and I would get dragged to school, ” Murray said.

The only reason she passed the end-of-year tests was because she loved to read so much.

Social workers often stopped by the apartment to tell her that if she did not go to school she would be taken from her parents and put in a group home. They would tell her that she would be forced to scrub toilets and would probably be treated very poorly.

“I found out later in life that these people are actually supposed to help you,” she said.

In the south Bronx, all that was needed to become a social worker was a driver’s license and a one-day seminar.

Murray never saw the relevance of going to school. The only jobs she knew of that people had were the burger flippers at McDonald’s and the teachers at her school. Nobody seemed to like the teachers, and she saw nothing special about the people who worked at McDonald’s. So she decided school did not have any real importance.

Murray became very self sufficient at a young age. When she was 9, she got a job pumping gas and sacking groceries. Since she was the only one in her family with a job, Murray used the money to supply what she could for the family. She never realized how mature that was for her. She just knew that her life would always be her own responsibility.

While her sister Lisa spent much time being angry at their parents for their lifestyle, Murray did not look at it that way. She knew that addiction was a disease, and her parents were doing the best they could.

“It’s not like they were going off and being better parents to someone else,” Murray said “That’s just all they had to give.”

When Murray was young, her mother used to get drunk and sit at the foot of her bed talking to her and confiding in her. When she was 10 years old, her mother came in one night and began making several promises to her. After a while she told her that she was sick. She had AIDS, and Murray knew exactly what that meant. AIDS was like a death sentence where Murray came from, so she was naturally very scared for her mother.

That year, her mother informed her that she was going to quit doing cocaine, but in order to do that she had to leave her father. She told Murray that she had met a “real family man” at the bar, and they were going to live with him. When she said real family man; that meant he had a job. But, Murray refused to go. She did not want her family to split up, so she stayed behind and tried to fix the house, but she failed.

When she was 12 and went into junior high, things changed. The school called her social worker every time she was absent, which was every day. Finally, a social worker came and took her from her father and put her in a group home. True to what the social workers had said, she was forced to scrub toilets. Since she was one of the few, if not the only, Caucasian girl there, the other children treated her very poorly.

When she got out, she went to live with her mother, her sister and the family man, because her father had neglected the bills and lost the apartment. He was living in a homeless shelter.

Murray had to go to school in order to keep from returning to the group home. While she was there, she met a girl named Chris. Chris was one of those that society generally refers to as gothic. She wore all black and was very defiant. Chris and Murray became friends instantly. They began to hang out with their other friends and cut class together. Murray and her friends formed their own little family and referred to themselves as “the group.”

Murray felt the group was the one place she really belonged, the one place she could really be herself. She made it her goal to be like them, and eventually she became the leader of the group. If they were doing something extraordinarily bad, it was her idea. If they were being loud and obnoxious, she was the loudest and the most obnoxious.

When they were about 13 or 14, Chris was kicked out of her house, and she came to live with Murray and her dysfunctional family. They fashioned a sheet so that Chris could not be seen and made sure that they were not around when the family man was. Chris lived with Murray for a year and half before being discovered. When the family man discovered Chris, he called her all sorts of names and kicked her out immediately. Murray was informed that she was not far behind. Murray decided right then and there that she couldn’t take it anymore. She spent five minutes packing the things that were most important to her (her journal, a picture of her mother, and several pairs of socks) and she left with Chris.

They had a plan though. Each night they stayed with a different friend. But after a few weeks they had worn out their welcome. Their friends’ parents started telling them to go home and that they had been there too much. So, at the age of 15, Liz Murray and her friend Chris were homeless.
Murray’s sister was constantly trying to reach her at her friend’s houses. She would tell her, “You need to see mom, she’s getting sick,”

But, Murray’s favorite word was “later.” She would always do everything later. She continuously told her sister that she would come around on her own time.

One day, Murray’s sister talked to her and told her not to worry about coming to see her mother anymore because she had just died.

Murray’s mother was buried in a cheap wooden box at a charity grave site with several others. She was given no headstone and no burial ceremony.

Her mother’s death was a huge turning point for Murray. She connected her mother’s lifestyle with the way she ended up. Murray decided that she wanted better for herself, and she was going to do whatever it took to get it.

She began applying to high schools all over New York, one of which was Humanities Preparatory Academy. She filled out an application and went in for an interview with the principal of the academy, Perry Weiner. She told Weiner her entire story, leaving out only the part about being homeless. Weiner accepted her immediately.

Murray loaded up on classes and completed four years worth of high school in only two years. Weiner was at her side throughout her high school journey.

“Meeting him made a difference…Perry treated me like a human,” she said.

The school organized a trip to Boston for the top 10 students at the high school and Murray, being the top-ranked student in her class, went on the trip with all expenses paid.

While visiting Harvard Park in Boston, Weiner approached Murray and whispered over her shoulder, “It would be a reach for you, but it is not impossible.”

Murray began to look at the people around her, and that was when she decided she was no different from anyone else there.

“I looked at them and thought what do they have that I don’?” she said.

She began filling out scholarship applications and came across one from the New York Times offering $12,000 a year for four years. The application prompted her to describe her accomplishments and what obstacles she had to over come to achieve them. She decided to do the best she could and tell the whole truth. The New York Times was the first to hear the struggles she had faced in her life without any missing details.

Murray continued to make the cut every time they narrowed down the competition and was eventually called for an interview. She was lucky that she knew nothing about The New York Times, other than that the men she saw on the subway were always reading it. Otherwise, she may have been more nervous than she was. When she arrived, an array of breakfast pastries had been set out for the students. But because of nervousness, not a single thing had been touched. The secretary told her she could have all the food she wanted.

“I thought she was crazy,” Murray laughed.

Murray entered the board room of the New York Times armed with the truth about her life and a donut. She asked for a minute with the donut before beginning the interview.

Each of the 12 board members asked her a question about why she deserved the scholarship, and she answered each question as best as she could.

At the end of the interview, she told them, “I hope you understand that I really need this.”

She was awarded the scholarship and attended Harvard for two years. But she wasn’t sure what she really wanted to do with her life. She just knew what was expected of her, and she wasn’t happy.

After two years, she transferred to Columbia University and began attending classes this fall. She wanted to be closer to her father, who is HIV positive, and Columbia makes her happier than she was at Harvard. She is now taking film classes at Columbia, and is also making herself more qualified to speak. She really enjoys it, she said.

She lives in an apartment in Brooklyn about a block away from Perry Weiner who retired at the age of 64 in June. She still keeps in touch with Chris and her sister and is spending time with her father as well.

Murray, 23, wants to hold her own seminars and teach high school students about the value of their education. She hopes to reach out to the kids and maybe convince a few that they too can achieve the impossible if they just try.

Lifetime Television Network recently made a movie about her life, “Homeless to Harvard: the Liz Murray Story” which went on sale Sept. 7 and can be purchased at Wal-Mart and any major video store.

It can also be found at www.lifetime.com or on amazon.com.

The movie accurately portrays the major events in Murray’s life.

Murray has also recently written an inspirational memoir titled “Breaking Nights,” which is due out in April 2005.