Pauli Murray

Anna Pauline Murray was born in Baltimore in 1910. Murray’s mother died when Anna Pauline was three; the father — institutionalized for what was probably a reaction to typhoid encephalitis — died in 1923 in a state psychiatric hospital, possibly killed by a guard. Anna Pauline was raised by an aunt and grandparents in Durham, [[asheville|North Carolina]], in a mixed-race family with substantial complications around the color line and family history. The childhood — including memory of segregated schools, the ever-present threat of racial violence, and the difficulty of being a child who did not fit the categories the segregated South provided — shaped the rest of the life.

Murray (the name Murray adopted in young adulthood and used thereafter) was educated at Hunter College in [[beacon-ny|New York]] (BA, 1933, in English), then in the late 1930s applied to the University of [[asheville|North Carolina]] law school — and was rejected because of race. Murray applied instead to Howard Law School and was admitted in 1941. At Howard, Murray was the only woman in the class. The experience of being treated as not fully present in the classroom (called Jane Crow in Murray’s coinage) shaped subsequent thought about the intersection of race and sex. Murray graduated first in the class in 1944.

In 1944 Murray applied to Harvard Law School for the LLM — and was rejected because of sex. (Murray’s letter of application included a copy of the Howard graduation transcript and a note: Pauli Murray… is convinced that you might… reconsider. The reply: 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.) Murray went instead to [[berkeley|Berkeley]] for the LLM and Yale for the JSD — the first African American to receive that degree.

The civil rights legal work

Across a long legal career, Murray:

• Worked on the Workers Defense League legal team in the 1940s representing migrant farmworkers and workers caught in the criminal-legal system.
• Wrote States’ Laws on Race and Color (1950), a state-by-state compendium of segregation laws that Thurgood Marshall later called the bible of Brown v. Board of Education.
• Was rejected by the U.S. State Department in 1952 because of FBI suspicions about Murray’s politics and personal life.
• Co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 with Betty Friedan and others.
• Argued, in the 1971 brief Murray co-wrote in Reed v. Reed (the case that first applied the Equal Protection Clause to sex discrimination), that the Brown logic should extend to sex discrimination — a position then-attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg drew on extensively (Ginsburg later acknowledged Murray’s foundational influence and named Murray as a co-author on the Reed brief in tribute).
• Taught at Brandeis University (1968–73) as one of the first African American law-and-American-studies professors at a major university.

The theological turn

In Murray’s early sixties, after a series of personal losses and continuing institutional frustrations, Murray entered General Theological Seminary in [[beacon-ny|New York]] and, in 1977, was ordained an Episcopal priest — the first African American woman to be so ordained. Murray’s first Eucharist was celebrated at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, [[asheville|North Carolina]] — the church where Murray’s grandmother (the daughter of an enslaved woman and her white owner) had been baptized in 1854. The integration of legal-civil-rights work, theological thought, and contemplative-pastoral life is among the most distinctive 20th-century American religious lives.

The gender question

A note for honesty. Murray throughout life struggled with what we would now call gender [[eating-the-landscape|identity]]. Murray’s diaries and medical records document feelings of being male in a female body, the pursuit (unsuccessful) of hormone treatment in the 1940s, and substantial complication around the binary categories then available. Some contemporary scholars have argued that Murray was, in present-day terms, a trans man; others have argued that the contemporary categories should not be retroactively imposed. [[0mn1one|The platform]]‘s posture: name this honestly without claiming to settle a question Murray did not have the categories to settle, and recognize that Murray’s life is part of the long history of queer, gender-nonconforming, and trans Christianity that has been substantially under-recognized.

What this gives the platform

Three contributions:

1. A model of integrated life. Legal work, poetry, theology, ordained ministry, civil rights organizing, gender struggle — all of one piece. Murray’s Proud Shoes (1956), Song in a Weary Throat (1987, posthumous autobiography), and the substantial poetry are recognizably the work of one person who would not separate the dimensions of life.
2. An intersectional pioneer in religious-political thought. Jane Crow — the recognition that anti-Black racism and sexism intersect — is foundational for what would later be called intersectionality. Murray was making the argument decades before the academic vocabulary caught up.
3. A continuing teaching from [[black-church|the Black church]] tradition’s queer dimension. The contemplative-justice tradition Thurman and Cone articulated in their distinctive ways has substantial queer Black voices — Murray, Bayard Rustin, James Baldwin, others — whose contributions have been substantially under-recognized. [[0mn1one|The platform]] takes this seriously.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[black-church]]
• Parallels: [[howard-thurman]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Pauli Murray. Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family. Harper, 1956. Source class: book / family memoir.
2. Pauli Murray. Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage. Harper, 1987 (posthumous; reissued as Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet, University of Tennessee Press, 1989). Source class: book / autobiography.
3. Pauli Murray. States’ Laws on Race and Color. Women’s Division of Christian Service, Methodist Church, 1950. Source class: book / legal compendium.
4. Pauli Murray. Dark Testament and Other Poems. Silvermine, 1970. Source class: book / poetry.
5. Sarah Azaransky. The Dream Is Freedom: Pauli Murray and American Democratic Faith. Oxford, 2011. Source class: book / scholarly biography.
6. Rosalind Rosenberg. Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray. Oxford, 2017. Source class: book / scholarly biography.
7. My Name Is Pauli Murray (documentary, 2021, Amazon Studios). Source class: documentary.

Lenses still to grow

• The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice in Durham, NC, as a continuing institution.
• Murray’s poetry as a body of work in its own right.
• The Ginsburg-Murray legal lineage — the Reed v. Reed connection in detail.
• Bayard Rustin as a parallel queer Black contemplative-civil-rights figure.
• The continuing recovery of Murray’s legacy in the 2010s and 2020s.