Black Sis-tory: Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, a pioneer in civil and women's rights

Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, civil rights activist, legal scholar, Episcopal priest, author, and poet most certainly would have denounced recent presidential executive orders reversing decades-old civil rights and gender equality protections, causes that she had fiercely championed. No doubt, she* would be at the forefront of legal battles to challenge them.

Murray’s personal and political conflicts mirror the racism and sexism endured by her family, during and after slavery ended in the South. In 1844, her mixed-race great-grandmother, Harriet Day, gave birth to a daughter, Cornelia, the result of repeated rapes by Sidney Smith, one of two sons of enslaver Dr. James Strudwick Smith. Another son, Frank, fathered Harriet’s three other daughters. Eventually, their aunt, Mary Ruffin Smith, would purchase her nieces and their mother. Upon Mary’s death, Harriet’s children inherited her land.

In 1923, her father, William Murray, a patient at Crownsville State Hospital, died after a white guard bludgeoned him with a baseball bat. Murray had experienced severe depression after his wife, Agnes Fitzgerald Murray, died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 35. He also suffered the long-term effects of typhoid fever.

Fifteen years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, while traveling on an old Greyhound from New York to Durham, Murray, and a female companion, asked to move from broken seats at the back of the bus to empty seats behind the driver because her friend was experiencing hip pain. In response, according to The Carolina Times the driver pushed Murray back, and growled, “Y’all, have to move back.” When they refused, they were arrested and jailed.

 Pursuing Education

In pursuit of a college education, Murray sought admission to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill but was denied because of her race. In 1941, she entered Howard University School of Law where she met with discrimination as the only female in the class.

Murray grappled with gender identity throughout her life, by today’s conventions, she might have identified as non-binary or gender fluid. The National Museum of African American History and Culture website states, “… she resisted the term ‘lesbian.’ She associated negative stereotypes with lesbians and saw herself as a man attracted to what she called "bisexual" women, (or feminine women whom she believed were attracted to her masculinity).” 

According to the website, Women and the American Story, she eventually “changed her name to Pauli, cut her hair and wore pants instead of skirts. “In private, Pauli began to see herself as a man. However, she continued to present as a woman … (and) spent hours at the library reading the latest research about gender and sexuality. She went to counseling and asked doctors to examine her body. She suffered regular mental breakdowns and struggled to understand her feelings.” 

Despite her internal conflicts, Murray excelled while at Howard. During a civil rights seminar, Murray argued for overturning Plessy vs Ferguson on the grounds that segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause. She developed her arguments in a paper, which her professor sent to Thurgood Marshall’s team; consequently, her legal arguments were cited in the landmark 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which led to the desegregation of public schools.

In 1944, Murray graduated first in her class and received a Rosenwald Fellowship to pursue graduate studies. She dreamed of attending Columbia University or Harvard Law, however, neither institution accepted women.

Five years later, Murray earned a Master of Law degree from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1956, she was the first Black person to earn a JSD (Doctor of the Science of Law) degree from Yale Law School.

Early Life

Anne Pauline Murray was born in segregated Baltimore, Maryland on November 20, 1910, the fourth of six children, to nurse Agnes Fitzgerald and educator William Murray. Her enormous intellect and drive were evident at an early age. “By the age of five, (she) had taught (herself) to read. Later, Murray was the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, the president of the literary society, class secretary, a member of the debate club, a top student, and the forward on the basketball team.

After her mother’s death in 1914, Murray was sent to Durham, North Carolina to live with her aunt and grandparents in Durham, North Carolina. After receiving a high school diploma, Murray moved to New York City and enrolled in Hunter College—at the time, a women’s college. She dubbed it, “the poor girl’s Radcliffe.”

She lived uptown in Harlem, where she encountered Negro artists and intellectuals, including writer Langston Hughes, sociologist W.E.B. DuBois, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, and entertainers Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. 

In 1933, she graduated from Hunter with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature.

Making History

Murray played pivotal roles in two revolutionary movements of the 20th century: The Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Rights Movement. With Betty Friedan and other feminists, she cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW). The Pauli Murray Center notes “she later moved away from a leading role because (she) did not believe that NOW appropriately addressed the issues of Black and working-class women.”

In 1940, the Worker’s Defense League (WDL) hired her to assist in its campaign to pardon Odell Waller, a Black sharecropper convicted by a jury of white citizens for shooting his white landlord, Oscar W. Davis, following a dispute over money. She traveled the country advocating for his cause and raising money for legal fees. “I identified, because six months earlier, I had been arrested in Virginia.”

Despite the WDL’s advocacy on his behalf, Waller was executed in Virginia on July 2, 1942. Waller’s case sparked Murray’s interest in law “…if I'm going to be messing around with these cases, I might as well study law." 

Her legal career included serving as a board member for the American Civil Liberties Union. While there, she wrote a brief on White v. Crook, which found that an all-male jury system was unconstitutional.

Likewise, Murray worked closely with labor organizer A. Philip Randolph, political and gay rights activist Bayard Rustin. Along with Rustin, James Farmer, and George Houser, she confounded the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE.

However, she complained to Randolph and Rustin that she was “ … ncreasingly perturbed over 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’s skill as a writer of prose and poetry is evident in her collection of poems, Dark Testament and Other Poems, and two memoirs, Proud Shoes: Story of an American Family, which explored her mixed family heritage, and, posthumously, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage.

On December 9, 1977, at age 62, she became an ordained priest, among the first generation of women priests and the first African American woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest.

In her personal life, Murray shared a 20-year interracial relationship with Irene “Renee” Barlow, though they never lived in the same house. Barlow died of a brain tumor in 1973.

In 1985, Murray died of pancreatic cancer in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

A 2021 Amazon documentary, My Name is Pauli Murray, documents her trailblazing career and monumental legacy.

*Although the Pauli Center for History and Justice website adopts the pronouns, “sh/e,” “he,” and “their” in writing about Murray, with all due respect, I have chosen “she” and “her” to facilitate readability.

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