PAULI MURRAY (1910-1985)
Pauli Murray was a civil rights activist, advocate, legal scholar, and later in life, an Episcopal priest. Murray’s work influenced the civil rights movement and helped to expand legal protections for gender equality.
Murray — born Anna Pauline Murray — was born in Maryland and was the fourth of six children. Murray’s mother died when they were 3 of a brain aneurism. Their father, still dealing with his own grief, sent Murray to live with an aunt in North Carolina. Murray’s father died 3 years later, having been beaten and killed in the basement of a mental institution by a white guard.
From an early age, Murray was an exceptional student, having taught themselves to read at the age of 5. They were involved in many activities in school, including editor of the school newspaper, president of the literary society, and member of the debate club.
At 16, after graduating from high school, Murray moved to New York City to attend Hunter College. They graduated with a BA in English and upon graduation, shortened their name to Pauli to embrace a more androgynous identity.
In 1940, Murray sat in the whites-only section of a bus in Virginia and was arrested for violating state segregation laws. This incident, and their subsequent involvement with the Workers Defense League led them to pursue a career of working as a civil rights lawyer.
Murray enrolled at the law school at Howard University where they were the only woman in the class. During their time at Howard, their class was discussing how best to bring an end to the Jim Crow laws. Murray’s argument: instead of continuing to chip away at the “equal” part of the “separate but equal,” why not challenge the “separate” part instead. Murray’s law school peers scoffed at them for that suggestion, declaring the idea both impractical and reckless.
Murray bet the professor, a man named Spottswood Robinson, $10 that the law would be overturned within 25 years. Murray, of course, was right and the law was overturned in a decade.
In their final paper for that class, Murray argued that segregation violated the 13th and 14th Amendments, an idea that Robinson presented alongside Thurgood Marshall in Brown v. Board of Education a decade later. Another decade would pass before Murray realized that her paper was the basis for the strategy used in Brown. In 1963, Murray visited Howard Law School to meet with Robinson and when they asked about what became of their paper, Robinson promptly produced a copy of it, along with the $10 he owed from their wager.
Murray went on to received a master’s in law at UC Berkley and received a J.S.D. At Yale law school, becoming the first African American to do so. As a lawyer, Murray argued for civil rights and women’s rights. Their 1950 book, “States’ Laws on Race and Color” was considered to be the “bible” of the civil rights movement.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s Murray was involved in many facets of the civil rights movement, but wrote that they were increasingly “perturbed by the blatant disparity between the major role which Negro women have played and are playing in the crucial grass-roots levels of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions.”
Murray co-founded the National Organization of Women (NOW) in 1966. She wrote extensively on her experiences of black womanhood, asserting that her gender, race, and sexuality could not be separated. Murray soon became disillusioned with NOW, as the organization distanced itself from economic and racial justice.
In 1973, Murray left academia altogether to become an ordained priest with the Episcopal Church, making them the first African American woman to do so. Murray focused their work on ministry to the sick.
Murray struggled throughout their life with their sexual and gender identity. Murray self-described as a “he/she personality” in correspondence with family members, believing that they may have been intersex. While the term transgender didn’t exist during Murray’s lifetime and there was no social movement to help or support Murray’s understanding of their identity, it is believed by many that Murray would identify as a transgender man.
Murray died of pancreatic cancer in 1985 at the age of 75.
Sources:
- The Pauli Murray Center For history and Social Justice
- Pronouns and Gender (via The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice)
- National Women’s History Museum
- National Museum of African American History & Culture
- The Many Lives of Pauli Murray via The New Yorker
- Wikipedia
Where to purchase this original art print:
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A note about pronouns and Pauli Murray from The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice:
Several scholars have explored Murray’s personal journals and writings and examined Murray’s relationship to their gender/s. Scholars have used “he/him/his” pronouns (Simmons-Thorne), “they/them/theirs” pronouns (Keaveney), “s/he” pronouns (Fisher), and “she/her/hers” pronouns (Rosenberg, Cooper, Drury).
This is an ongoing discussion among the Pauli Murray Center. Currently, the Pauli Murray Center chooses to use he/him and they/them pronouns when discussing Pauli Murray’s early life and she/her/hers when discussing Dr. Murray’s later years. When discussing Pauli Murray in general, we interchangeably use she/her/hers, he/him/his, and they/them/theirs pronouns, or we refer to Pauli Murray by their name and title(s). We hope this strategy will encourage readers to embrace the individual and fluid nature of gender.
Source: https://www.paulimurraycenter.com/pronouns-pauli-murray