GREENSBORO — Elizabeth “Liz” Murray says it was a fluke that she ended up a student at Harvard University after taking a photo in front of the John Harvard sculpture during a high school field trip to the campus.
But actually, it was just an example of what can happen when a determined individual has the backing of a community — even when she has no home to call her own.
Murray is best known as the kid who went from being homeless during her high school years in Bronx, N.Y., to Harvard. Lifetime TV made a movie about her life and she wrote a bestselling memoir about her struggles growing up.
She will be the keynote speaker this month at the United Way of Greater Greensboro’s Community Speaker Series.
The series, which features one keynote speaker annually, brings together people from across the community to learn while supporting the organization’s work.
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Proceeds from this year’s event will go toward addressing the poverty problem in the area.
Murray, 35, said she’s excited about speaking at the United Way event because it was agencies such as the ones that the organization supports that helped her go from being a chronically truant student raised by parents addicted to heroin to a Harvard graduate now studying for her master’s degree at Columbia University.
Her determination and what she called simple acts of kindness from people in her community “came together like a symphony, like a tapestry,” to get her to where she is today, she said.
“Really, you can’t do one without the other,” Murray said during a recent phone interview. “I have to put my best foot forward, but when I do, there have to be programs there to support me, and that’s what the United Way is doing.”
Family erosion
Murray loved her parents, and they loved her.
“They were very loving, caring people, but I think that addiction caused an erosion of our family,” she said.
That addiction led to both parents acquiring HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and to Murray having to spend part of her adolescence in group homes, sleeping on friends’ couches and in hallways and parks.
When she was living with her parents, there wasn’t always food in the home. And when she did go to school, she did so in clothes that had holes in them. She also had lice in her hair.
So she abandoned school and began “hiding” at home with her parents.
“I fell behind,” Murray recalled. “It’s really hard to catch up, and it’s a real blow to your self esteem when you go to school every day and you just can’t catch up to where everyone is.”
She said the family never had any secrets. Her parents used drugs openly in front of her. Her father eventually left the family and moved into a homeless shelter in Manhattan.
Still, somehow Murray didn’t grasp the magnitude of it all.
“You can know what’s happening, but that’s not the same as understanding the significance of it,” she said.
Murray had just turned 16 when her mother died of AIDS. But she had been homeless for about a year before that because her mother was often hospitalized. Murray said her mother’s death was her wake up call.
Starting over
The Piedmont Triad area has been on the radar for its poverty rate in recent years.
A national Gallup poll that the Food Research and Action Center commissioned in 2014 ranked the Greensboro-High Point area No. 1 for people who had difficulties securing food, based on a percentage of the total population. The state ranked eighth overall in that poll.
Last year, the United Way launched an 18-month pilot program to find ways to reduce poverty in Greensboro neighborhoods, starting in the 27406 zip code. The program, the Family Success Center, brings under one roof all services that can help the poor climb out of poverty, such as career counseling and financial literacy. It hopes to expand the centers over the next few years.
The United Way announced last week that more than 13,000 people gave $10.4 million to its 2015 campaign, money that will help the organization fight poverty in the community.
Murray said she received such help on her way to Harvard.
She re-evaluated her life after her mother died. She said she had been “pushed through” her earlier years in school, but returning to high school was different because she had to earn credits to graduate.
Murray had always loved to read. She got that from her father. He had been a graduate student studying psychology before he became an addict. Father and daughter would spend Saturdays at the library checking out stacks of books — and never returning any of them. She said she connected with literacy and storytelling.
When she decided to return to school, she found her father in the homeless shelter where he was living, gave him the address of the friend with whom she was staying and told him to memorize it.
And then she got connected with a New York nonprofit, The Door, which helps homeless youth by giving them hot meals, tutoring, counseling and other services.
She said she had great mentors and teachers who looked out for her. A guidance counselor, who she’s still friends with today, gave her a folder full of scholarships that she thought Murray qualified for. One was the New York Times scholarship for needy students. The significance of the newspaper was lost on Murray.
“No one in my neighborhood read The New York Times,” she said.
She was one of six winners of the scholarship. The paper profiled the winners, and then came the attention. Murray said the ABC news magazine 20/20 picked up her story. Lifetime TV made a movie about her life, “Homeless to Harvard.” That was followed by a book deal. “Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard” was a New York Times bestseller.
But before the big attention came the little attention. Murray said after her story initially appeared in The New York Times, there were people who came to her school and offered to pay rent for an apartment for her, gave her clothing, baked her cookies.
One woman told her she had no money, but she offered just to wash her clothes once a week.
“I figure I can’t do much, but I can do that,” Murray recalled the woman saying.
The myth of ‘they’
That woman’s message is one that Murray will bring to Greensboro.
She said she wants to dispel the myth of “they,” people looking at the world’s problems and saying “they” need to do something.
“I really work with people to have them see that there is no ‘they,’ that you are it,” she said.
Murray pointed to the United Way as an example, saying it can’t accomplish its goal of changing the lives of people living in poverty without others stepping up and volunteering.
She said one of the biggest mistakes that people make is to think that it’s up to one person to solve a problem. Instead, she said it’s about whether one is willing to do their part.
It took Murray eight years to get that Harvard psychology degree because she shared her college years with her father. They reconnected, and she became his caretaker. He died of full-blown AIDS in 2006. Murray is proud of the fact that he had been drug-free for eight years at the time of his death.
Today, Murray is a married mother of two. She’s enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University, where she is studying psychology and education. In addition to motivational speaking, she’s launching a nonprofit next year in Harlem that will focus on mentoring middle school students.
Murray has advice for young people who find themselves in an overwhelming situation: be kind to yourself.
“We like to imagine our lives can be changed in an instant,” she said. “It takes time.”
