Pauli Murray
Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray was an American civil rights activist, advocate, legal scholar and theorist, author and – later in life – an Episcopal priest. Murray's work influenced the civil rights movement and expanded legal protection for gender equality.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Murray was essentially orphaned and then raised mostly by her maternal aunt in Durham, North Carolina. At age 16, she moved to New York City to attend Hunter College, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1933. In 1940, Murray sat in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus with a friend, and they were arrested for violating state segregation laws. This incident, and her subsequent involvement with the socialist Workers' Defense League, led her to pursue her career goal of working as a civil rights lawyer. She enrolled in the law school at Howard University, where she was the only woman in her class. Murray graduated first in the class of 1944, but she was denied the chance to do post-graduate work at Harvard University because of her gender. She called such prejudice against women "Jane Crow", alluding to the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. She earned a master's degree in law at University of California, Berkeley, and in 1965 she became the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School.
As a lawyer, Murray argued for civil rights and women's rights. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall called Murray's 1950 book States' Laws on Race and Color, the "bible" of the civil rights movement. Murray was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to serve on the 1961–1963 Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. In 1966, she was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women. Ruth Bader Ginsburg named Murray as a coauthor of the ACLU brief in the landmark 1971 Supreme Court case Reed v. Reed, in recognition of her pioneering work on gender discrimination. This case articulated the "failure of the courts to recognize sex discrimination for what it is and its common features with other types of arbitrary discrimination." Murray held faculty or administrative positions at the Ghana School of Law, Benedict College, and Brandeis University.
In 1973, Murray left academia for activities associated with the Episcopal Church. She became an ordained priest in 1977, among the first generation of women priests and the first African-American woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest. In addition to her legal and advocacy work, Murray published two well-reviewed autobiographies and a volume of poetry. Initially published in 1970, the poetry collection, Dark Testament, was reissued in 2018.
Murray's sexual and gender identity did not fit within the prevailing norms. She had a brief, annulled marriage to a man, and several deep relationships with women. In her younger years, she occasionally had passed as a teenage boy.
Early life
Murray was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 20, 1910. Both sides of her family were of mixed racial origins, with ancestors including Black slaves, White slave owners, Native Americans, Irish, and free Black people. The varied features and complexions of her family were described as a "United Nations in miniature". Murray's parents, schoolteacher William H. Murray and nurse Agnes Murray, both identified as Black. In 1914, Agnes died of a cerebral hemorrhage when her daughter was three. After Murray's father began to have emotional problems, some think as a result of typhoid fever, relatives took custody of his children.Three-year-old Pauli Murray was sent to Durham, North Carolina, to live with her mother's family. There, she was raised by her maternal aunts, Sarah Fitzgerald and Pauline Fitzgerald Dame, as well as her maternal grandparents, Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald. She attended St. Titus Episcopal Church with her mother's family, as had her mother before Murray was born. When she was 12, her father was committed to the Crownsville State Hospital for the Negro Insane, where he received no meaningful treatment. Pauli had wanted to rescue him, but in 1923, he was bludgeoned to death by a white guard with a baseball bat.
Murray lived in Durham until age 16, when she moved to New York City to finish high school and prepare for college. There she lived with the family of her cousin Maude. The family was passing for white in their white neighborhood. Murray's presence discomfited Maude's neighbors, however, as Murray was more visibly of partial African descent. She graduated with her second high school diploma and honors from Richmond Hill High School in 1927, and enrolled at Hunter College for two years.
Murray married William Roy Wynn, known as Billy Wynn, in secret on November 30, 1930, but soon came to regret the decision. The historian Rosalind Rosenberg wrote:
Murray and Wynn only spent a few months together before both leaving town. They did not see one another again before Murray contacted him to have their marriage annulled on March 26, 1949.
Inspired to attend Columbia University by a favorite teacher, Murray was turned away from applying because the university did not admit women, and she did not have the funds to attend its women's coordinate college, Barnard College. Instead she attended Hunter College, a free women's college of City University of New York, where she was one of the few students of color. Murray was encouraged in her writing by one of her English instructors, from whom she earned an "A" for an essay about her maternal grandfather. This became the basis of Murray's later memoir, Proud Shoes, about her mother's family. Murray published an article and several poems in the college paper. She graduated in 1933 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English.
Murray further continued her education in New York City at Jay Lovestone's New Workers School on West 33rd Street, taking, in Rosenberg's words, "night classes with Lovestone and others... including Marxist Philosophy, Historical Materialism, Marxian Economics, and Problems of Communist Organization."
Jobs were difficult to find during the Great Depression. Murray took a job selling subscriptions to Opportunity, an academic journal of the National Urban League, a civil rights organization based in New York City. Poor health forced her to resign, and her doctor recommended that Murray seek a healthier environment.
Murray took a position at Camp Tera, a "She-She-She" conservation camp. Established at the urging of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, these federally-funded camps paralleled the all-male Civilian Conservation Corps camps formed under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal to provide employment to young adults while improving national infrastructure. During her three months at the camp, Murray's health recovered. She also met Eleanor Roosevelt. Later they had correspondence that affected both of them. Murray clashed with the camp's director, however. The director had found a Marxist book from a Hunter College course among Murray's belongings, and questioned Murray's attitude during the First Lady's visit. The camp director also disapproved of Murray's cross-racial relationship with Peg Holmes, a white counselor. Murray and Holmes left the camp in February 1935, and began traveling the country by walking, hitchhiking, and hopping freight trains.
Murray later worked for the Young Women's Christian Association.
1938–1945: Early activism and law school
Murray applied to a PhD program in sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1938, but was rejected because of her race. All schools and other public facilities in the state were segregated by state law, as was the case across the South. The case was broadly publicized in both white and black newspapers. Murray wrote to officials ranging from the university president to President Roosevelt, releasing their responses to the media in an attempt to embarrass them into action. The NAACP initially was interested in the case, but later declined to represent her in court, perhaps fearing that her long residence in New York state weakened her case. NAACP leader Roy Wilkins opposed representing her because Murray had already released her correspondence, which he considered "not diplomatic". Concerns about her sexuality also may have played a role in the decision; Murray often wore pants rather than the customary skirts of women and was open about her relationships with women.In early 1940, Murray was walking the streets in Rhode Island, distraught after "the disappearance of a woman friend". She was taken into custody by police. She was transferred to Bellevue Hospital in New York City for psychiatric treatment. In March, Murray left the hospital with Adelene McBean, her roommate and girlfriend, and took a bus to Durham to visit her aunts.
In Petersburg, Virginia, the two women moved out of broken seats in the black section of the bus, where state segregation laws mandated they sit, and into the white section. Inspired by a conversation they had been having about Gandhian civil disobedience, the two women refused to return to the rear even after the police were called. They were arrested and jailed. Murray and McBean initially were defended by the NAACP, but when the pair were convicted only of disorderly conduct rather than violating segregation laws, the organization ceased to represent them. The Workers' Defense League, a socialist labor rights organization that also was beginning to take civil rights cases, paid her fine. A few months later the WDL hired Murray for its administrative committee.
With the WDL, Murray became active in the case of Odell Waller, a black Virginia sharecropper sentenced to death for killing his white landlord, Oscar Davis, during an argument. The WDL argued that Davis had cheated Waller in a settlement and as their argument grew more heated, Waller had shot Davis in legitimate fear of his life. Murray toured the country raising funds for Waller's appeal. She wrote to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on Waller's behalf. Roosevelt in turn wrote to Virginia Governor Colgate Darden, asking him to guarantee that the trial was fair; she later persuaded the president to privately request Darden to commute the death sentence. Through this correspondence, Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt began a friendship that would last until the latter's death two decades later. Despite the efforts of the WDL and the Roosevelts, however, the governor did not commute Waller's sentence. Waller was executed on July 2, 1942.