Pauli Murray

Activist, lawyer, and religious leader

• Born: November 20, 1910
• Birthplace: Baltimore, Maryland
• Died: July 1, 1985
• Place of death: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

An attorney, activist, and educator, Murray also was the first African American woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest. She was a founding member of the National Organization for Women and a pioneering scholar in the field of Black feminist studies.

Early Life

Anna Pauline Murray was born on November 20, 1910, in Baltimore, Maryland. When she was three years old, her mother died of a sudden hemorrhage on the brain. Because of his mental illness, Murray’s father was unable to care for her and her siblings. The children were split among relatives, and Murray was adopted by her mother’s sister Pauline Dame, a teacher in Durham, North Carolina.

In Durham, Murray lived with her aunts Pauline and Sallie; her grandfather Robert Fitzgerald, a Civil War veteran; and his wife Cornelia, the multiracial daughter of a North Carolina plantation aristocrat. Murray flourished under the tutelage of her elders, who instilled in her a deep pride in her multiracial heritage and a strong commitment to racial equality. In 1926, Murray graduated as valedictorian from Hillside High School, where she had been a member of the debate team, manager of the basketball team, and editor of the school newspaper. She received a full scholarship to Wilberforce University but refused to attend a segregated institution. Instead, Murray set her sights on Columbia University. Columbia, however, did not admit women at the time. After completing an extra year of high school to meet the entrance requirements, Murray entered Hunter College in 1928. She earned her degree in 1933.

Attending college during the Great Depression presented major economic challenges for Murray, who often went hungry and struggled to find work. Motivated partly by these desperate circumstances, Murray married William Roy Wynn in 1930. Neither Murray nor Wynn was ready for marriage, and they quickly drifted apart.

Life’s Work

From 1941 to 1944, Murray attended Howard University Law School, where she was trained by famed civil rights attorneys William Hastie, Leon Ransom, and Thurgood Marshall. She was an active participant in sit-ins organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to desegregate restaurants in the Washington, DC, area. During her time at Howard, Murray wrote a paper titled “Should the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy v. Ferguson Be Overruled?” This work played a pivotal role in the strategy used by Hastie and Marshall in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case. The only woman in her graduating class, Murray coined the term “Jane Crow” to define the sexism she experienced at Howard.

Denied admission to Harvard Law School on the basis of her sex, Murray opted to pursue a master’s degree from the University of California’s Boalt School of Law in Berkeley. After graduation, she became the first Black deputy attorney general for the state of California.

An avid writer and poet, Murray published two scholarly books, States’ Laws on Race and Color (1951) and Constitutional Law of Ghana (1960); two autobiographies, Proud Shoes: The Story of An American Family (1956) and Song in a Weary Throat (1987); a volume of poetry, Dark Testament and Other Poems (1970); and several law review articles.

In 1960, after a yearlong stint teaching constitutional law in Ghana, Murray entered the Doctor of Juridical Science Program at Yale Law School. While a student, she served on the Committee on Political and Civil Rights, a subsidiary of President John F. Kennedy’s President’s Commission on the Status of Women. In that role, Murray was instrumental in ensuring the word “sex” was included in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 1965, Murray received her JSD. from Yale, becoming the first African American to do so. In 1966, she became one of the founding members of the National Organization for Women (NOW).

From 1968 to 1973, Murray served as professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, until she left to pursue a master of divinity degree from General Theological Seminary. In 1977, she was ordained as the first Black woman Episcopal priest. She ministered in several parishes until her death in 1985.

Significance

Murray contributed to several major social movements in the twentieth century. She was a labor organizer during the 1930s, a civil rights activist from the 1940s to the 1960s, a champion of Ghanaian independence in the 1960s, and a pioneering feminist scholar and religious leader in the 1970s and 1980s. She helped formulate the strategy used in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case to desegregate America’s public schools. Her scholarly articles on Black feminism are considered canonical in the field of study, and her work combating sexual discrimination improved women’s access to jobs and religious and educational opportunities. A documentary of Pauli's life called My Name is Pauli Murray, released in 2021, also brought attention to Murray as a member of the LGBTQ community, living at a time when those outside of the gender binary were not well understood or accepted.

Bibliography

Gilmore, Glenda. Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

Murray, Pauli. Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Pauli Murray: Selected Sermons and Writings. Edited by Anthony Pinn. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2006.

Pinn, Anthony. Becoming “America’s Problem Child”: An Outline of Pauli Murray’s Religious Life and Theology. Eugene, Oreg.: Pickwick, 2008.

Scott, Anne Firor, ed. Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware: Forty Years of Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Thulin, Lila. "The Trailblazing, Multifaceted Activism of Lawyer-Turned-Priest Pauli Murrary." Smithsonian Magazine, 19 Oct. 2021, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-trailblazing-multifaceted-activism-of-lawyer-turned-priest-pauli-murray-180978890/. Accessed 11 Apr. 2022.