Rev. Pauli Murray

Rev. Pauli Murray (1910-1985), lawyer, activist and priest. Anna Pauline Murray was born in Baltimore. Her mother died when she was three, and her grief-stricken father quickly succumbed to mental illness and was sent to a mental institution, where a white guard taunted him with racial slurs and beat him to death; one of her only memories of him was lying in a casket, his skull “split open like a melon and sewed together loosely with jagged stitches.” She was raised by her aunt and grandparents in Durham. “I had in effect three mothers,” she later recalled, “each trying to impress upon me those traits of character expected…stern devotion to duty, capacity for hard work, industry and thrift, and above all honor and courage in all three things.” Her aunt also accepted her habit of acting like a “little boy-girl,” wearing boy’s clothes and insisting on being called Paul and then Pauli. As a child, she walked long distances to avoid riding in segregated streetcars and developed her reading skills by reading the newspaper to her grandfather, a Civil War veteran who had operated a school for former slaves before going blind. IN high school she served as editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, president of the literary society, member of the debate team and basketball team, and valedictorian, She refused to attend a segregated university in the South and instead tried to enroll at Columbia University, but they turned her away because of her gender. She instead sought admission at Hunter College, also in New York, but the inferior quality of her segregated education in North Carolina meant that she had to attend high school in New York for two more years before finally starting college in 1929. The Great Depression shortly thereafter, and Murray was forced to live in tenement buildings, work multiple jobs, and eat so little that she suffered from malnutrition, but she graduated on time four years later while also becoming a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.

By then the Depression had reached its peak, with the unemployment rate for black New Yorkers over fifty percent. Murray worked at several jobs, including the Urban League and a woman’s camp run by the Works Progress Administration. She joined the Communist Party but quickly left because she “found party discipline irksome.” She also struggled with her same-sex, gender nonconforming identity in a time when society had little acceptance for this, suffering frequent mental breakdowns and asking doctors to give her male hormones and to perform surgery. She applied to the University of North Carolina School of Law but was turned away because of her race. In 1940, she was arrested in Petersburg, Virginia for refusing to give up her seat on an interstate bus, later recalling that the bus was her most hated of all segregated institutions because it “permitted the public humiliation of black people to be carried out in the presence of privileged white spectators, who witnessed our shame in silence or indifference.” Although she hoped that the charge of violating segregation laws would lead to legal action against segregation on interstate buses, Virginia prosecutors avoided this possibility by charging her with disorderly conduct. She spent several days in jail rather than paying the fine and decided to continue her education as a way of fighting for civil rights, later writing that “I felt I needed to have a skill that would enable me to fight more intelligently.” Before that could happen, she became involved in the case of Odell Waller, a Virginia sharecropper who had been sentenced to death by an all-white jury for shooting his landowner in self-defense; Murray helped raise money for his legal defense by giving speeches, and one of the people in the audience was a young attorney named Thurgood Marshall, who encouraged her to apply to Howard University College of Law, the only black law school in the country at that time. On the first day of class a professor remarked that he did not understand why women enrolled in law school at all, and in later semesters her classmates mocked her when she suggested legal strategies for overturning segregation. Nevertheless, she published articles such as “Negroes Are Fed Up”; co-founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); led protests at segregated Washington D.C. restaurants; and worked in legal defense for the poor. She was also elected to the highest student position in the school and graduated first in her class. Previous Howard law valedictorians were automatically given graduate school fellowships at Harvard, but she was denied this honor because of her gender, and not even a letter from President Franklin Roosevelt could reverse this decision. Harvard’s rejection letter simply stated “You are not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School,” to which she replied “Gentlemen, I would gladly change my sex to meet your requirements, but since the way to such change has not been revealed to me, I have no recourse but to appeal to you to change your minds on this subject. Are you to tell me that one is as difficult as the other?” These experiences helped inspire her term “Jane Crow” to refer to the ways that black women were discriminated against on the grounds of both race and gender. Murray earned a graduate degree from the University of California-Berkeley, then became the first African American deputy attorney general in California. When the United Methodist Church asked her to write a comprehensive, state-by-state analysis of segregation laws, she produced the 746-page work “State’s Laws on Race and Color.” This was quickly used by the NAACP in the Brown v. Board of Education case; Thurgood Marshall called it “the Bible for civil rights lawyers.” The strategy that she had been mocked for in law school was now the cornerstone of the desegregation movement. Murray then worked at a New York law firm but left after several years because she felt isolated as the only African American and one of only three women, taking a teaching position at the new Ghana School of Law.

She returned in the early 1960s and devoted her time to the fight for racial and gender equality. She served on several government commissions, including President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, and wrote articles such as “Jane Crow and the Law,” “The Liberation of Black Women,” and “The Negro Woman and the Quest for Equality,” which criticized sexism in the Civil Rights Movement, including the lack of women speakers at the March on Washington. In her 1965 article “Jane Crow and the Law,” she argued that the Equal Protection Clause in the 14^th Amendment should apply equally to race and gender. This became foundational to the work of women’s rights attorney and future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who included Murray as an honorary co-author in her brief for the groundbreaking 1971 Reed v. Reed case. Murray also authored many books, including a family history entitled Proud Shoes. In 1966, she helped to found the National Organization of Women, co-authoring its statement of purpose. A year earlier she had become the first African American to earn a Doctoral of Juridical Science from Yale. She taught and worked as an administrator at Brandeis University, Benedict College, and Ghana University Law School. Despite all of this, her work in the fight for equality was not widely known outside of academic circles because she was a lesbian. One scholar later wrote “The civil rights struggle demanded respectable performances of black manhood and womanhood, particularly from its heroes and heroines, and respectability meant being educated, heterosexual, married and Christian. Murray’s open lesbian relationships and her gender nonconforming identity disrupted the dictates of respectability, making it easier to erase her five decades of important intellectual and political contributions from our broader narrative of civil rights.” Another put this more bluntly: “It was Pauli Murray’s fate to be both ahead of her time and behind the scenes.” Even so, her personal life and multiple forms of activism and scholarship helped shape present-day understandings of intersectionality. Her presence at the death of a close friend pushed her to enter the ministry, and in 1977 she became the first black woman ordained as an Episcopalian priest. Her first performance of Communion took place in the same church where her enslaved grandmother had been baptized a century earlier. She served in this capacity until her death in 1985. In 2012, the Episcopal Church gave Pauli Murray its equivalent of sainthood, listing her among people “whose lives have exemplified what it means to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and make a difference in the world.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.