Pauli Murray

Pauli Murray (born November 20, 1910, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.—died July 1, 1985, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) was a key figure who helped define the intellectual foundations of the 20th-century civil rights and women’s rights movements. The legal analysis and research by the activist, lawyer, nonbinary Black feminist, poet, and Episcopalian priest formed the basis of the legal argument against the “separate but equal” doctrine in the case of Brown v. Board of Education.

Early life

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Murray was a descendant of Black Americans (free and enslaved), Native Americans, and North Carolina slave owners. She was orphaned by the age of six—a circumstance that she described as the most significant fact of her childhood—and went to live with her aunt Pauline Fitzgerald and her maternal grandparents, Cornelia and Robert Fitzgerald, in Durham, North Carolina.

From an early age, Murray bristled against Jim Crow laws—choosing to walk or ride a bike instead of boarding a segregated streetcar and avoiding going to the movies rather than climbing the back stairs of a segregated cinema to sit in the balcony. After graduating from high school, she moved to New York City to complete another year of high school (Black high schools in North Carolina taught only through the 11th grade) before enrolling at Hunter College, where she was one of only four Black women in an all-female class of 247.

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Not long after arriving in New York, Murray moved to Harlem and became immersed in the art and politics of the Harlem Renaissance, befriending poet Langston Hughes and attending lectures by civil rights pioneer Mary McLeod Bethune. During this time Murray started to publish poems and prose and began using the name Pauli, a gender-neutral name that affirmed what she described as her “he/she personality.” Coming of age before the term transgender was coined, she was gender-nonconforming in hair and dress and appealed (unsuccessfully) to doctors for hormone replacement therapy. Murray would struggle with the conflicting feelings of what she called “an inverted sex instinct” throughout her lifetime. (Murray used female pronouns in her writing.)

Murray graduated from Hunter College in 1933 with a degree in English. Two years later she went to work for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). While with the WPA’s Workers’ Education Project, Murray met white students who were as deprived as Black students, leading her to understand that racial struggle was part of a larger human struggle for dignity and equality. Later, she reflected in her autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat:

Seeing the relationship between my personal cause and the universal cause of freedom released me from a sense of isolation, helped me to rid myself of vestiges of shame over my racial history, and gave me an unequivocal understanding that equality of treatment was my birthright and not something to be earned. I would be no less afraid to challenge the system of racial segregation, but the heightened significance of my cause would impel me to act in spite of my fears.

Education and career

Murray’s interest in race relations led her to apply in 1938 to the sociology department at the all-white University of North Carolina (UNC). She was denied admission because she was Black. A note from the dean read, “Under the laws of North Carolina, and under the resolutions of the Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina, members of your race are not admitted to the university.” Protesting this discrimination, she wrote letters to newspapers, U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP’s executive secretary, Walter White, shared her letter with NAACP special counsel Thurgood Marshall—the first, but not the last, time Murray would come to Marshall’s attention. Eleanor Roosevelt and Murray forged a frank and lifelong friendship that endured even as Murray forcefully challenged FDR (she frequently employed what she called “confrontation by typewriter”) over what she perceived as his insensitivity to racial discrimination.

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Denied admission at UNC, Murray went to work for the Workers Defense League and participated in a 1940 campaign to save the life of Odell Waller, a Black sharecropper accused of murdering a white farmer (the campaign failed, and he was executed in 1942). Committed to continuing her work to advance racial equality, she enrolled at the Howard University School of Law in 1941. Murray was the only woman in her class and encountered gender discrimination from both faculty and students. It was there, she later wrote in Song in a Weary Throat, that she became a feminist:

I had entered law school preoccupied with the racial struggle and single-mindedly bent upon becoming a civil rights attorney, but I graduated an unabashed feminist as well.

Murray labeled this gender-based bias “Jane Crow.” After graduating at the top of her class in 1944, she attempted to gain a further degree from Harvard University, but she was refused admission because she was a woman. Harvard wrote, “Your picture and the salutation on your college transcript indicate that you are not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School.” In response, she fired back:

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?

Harvard declined to change its mind (the Law School admitted its first female students in 1950), even after a direct appeal from President Roosevelt. Murray instead received a master’s degree from the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1945, after which she practiced law in California and New York City and traveled to Ghana to work at the nascent Ghana School of Law. In 1965 she became the first Black person to receive a doctorate in law from Yale University, with a dissertation entitled “Roots of the Racial Crisis: Prologue to Policy” (1965).

In 1962 Eleanor Roosevelt asked Murray to serve on the Committee on Political and Civil Rights in U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy’s first Commission on the Status of Women. In 1966, along with such other feminists as Betty Friedan, Murray was a founding member of the National Organization for Women. The next year she became vice president of Benedict College in South Carolina and later served (1968–73) as a law professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. She developed Brandeis’s first courses on African American studies and women’s studies.

Murray then entered the General Theological Seminary in New York City and earned a master’s degree in divinity in 1976. She was ordained an Episcopal priest at Washington National Cathedral the next year, becoming the first African American woman to hold such a position. Murray served communities in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore until her death in 1985 from pancreatic cancer. In 2012 the 77th General Convention of the Episcopal Church named her to its compendium of prayers, guidelines, procedures, and descriptions of common saints, Holy Women, Holy Men: Celebrating the Saints, thus anointing her an Episcopal saint. The U.S. Mint honored Murray’s achievements with her inclusion in its American Women Quarters Program; her commemorative quarter was issued in 2024.

Legal legacy

Pauli Murray led a remarkable life. Her contributions to legal jurisprudence, however, are especially extraordinary. A tireless advocate for equal rights for women and people of color, Murray formulated the legal arguments that undergird the most important legal rulings in the 20th-century civil rights and women’s rights movements.

While a student at Howard University, Murray debated with her classmates about the “separate but equal” doctrine of racial segregation that arose from the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, and she made the radical proposition that, to challenge Plessy, one should focus not on the “equal” part of the doctrine but rather on the “separate” part. She posited that segregation violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution. Murray was so confident in her position that she bet her professor, Spottswood Robinson, that Plessy would be overturned within 25 years, and she persuasively argued her point in her final paper, entitled “Should the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy v. Ferguson Be Overruled?” (1944). Robinson would later be part of the legal team that successfully argued the case of Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court. In formulating the team’s case, he remembered Murray’s paper and shared it with lead attorney Thurgood Marshall.

Meanwhile, Murray was approached by the Women’s Division of the Methodist Church in 1948 to help the church understand national segregation laws and in which states they would be legally required to enforce segregation. What was supposed to have been a pamphlet resulted in a 700-plus page tome entitled States’ Laws on Race and Color (1951). A copy of the book was sent to Marshall at the NAACP. He later referred to it as “the Bible for civil rights lawyers.” In arguing Brown, when asked by the Court what he meant by “equal,” Marshall replied, “Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time, and in the same place.” Marshall’s argument was rooted in Murray’s formulation and backed by her research.

Murray joined the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) board of directors in 1965. While at the ACLU, Murray wrote about the intersection of race and gender discrimination in the case of White v. Crook, which challenged Alabama’s exclusion of people of color and women from juries. The brief in the case was appended with an article she wrote with Justice Department lawyer Mary Eastwood entitled “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII” (1965), in which the pair argued that both Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex. The ACLU won the case, and in September 1970 the ACLU board voted to make the legal advancement of women’s rights its top priority. In 1971 Ruth Bader Ginsburg cofounded the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. In Ginsburg’s brief in Reed v. Reed (1971), she listed Murray as a coauthor; although Murray was not a part of the case, her inclusion was Ginsburg’s acknowledgment of the roots of the intellectual framework of her argument. In its unanimous finding in Reed, the Court decided—for the first time—that sex discrimination violated the U.S. Constitution.

In a 2017 interview with filmmakers Julie Cohen and Betsy West for their documentary RGB (2018), Ginsburg reflected on Murray’s importance to her career and to the argument in Reed:

We were not inventing something new. We were saying the same things that Pauli had said years earlier, at a time when society was not prepared to listen.

The same filmmakers released My Name Is Pauli Murray in 2021, a documentary film placing Murray’s legal contributions in their rightful context.

Published works

Murray was the author of numerous works, including the poem “Dark Testament” (1943) and subsequent collection Dark Testament and Other Poems (1970); the legal scholarship The Rights of Man Are Worth Defending (1942, with Roger N. Baldwin, the League for Adult Education, and the Workers’ Defense League), States’ Laws on Race and Color (1951), and The Constitution and Government of Ghana (1961, with Leslie Rubin); and two autobiographical works, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (1956) and Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage (published posthumously in 1987).