Pauli Murray

Pauli Murray

The Reverend Dr. Anna Pauline (Pauli) Murray (November 20, 1910 – July 1, 1985) was an American civil rights activist, women's rights activist, lawyer, and writer. She was also the first black woman ordained as an Episcopalian priest.

She was born in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1914 her mother Agnes Fitzgerald Murray died of a cerebral hemorrhage; since her father was unable to care for her, she went to Durham, North Carolina, where she was raised by her aunt, Pauline Fitzgerald Dame, and her maternal grandparents, Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald. In 1923 her father was murdered.

In 1933 Pauli Murray graduated from Hunter College; she had previously been rejected from Columbia University because they did not admit women at that time. After her graduation from Hunter College, she was rejected from the University of North Carolina because she was African-American. She attempted to challenge this with the help of the NAACP, but they rejected the case due to her being a resident of New York.

In 1941 she began attending Howard University law school with hopes of becoming a civil rights lawyer. In 1942, while still in law school, she became one of the founders of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). During her time in law school she also published two important articles on civil rights, an article about the Harlem race riot and an article called "Negroes Are Fed Up". Murray was the only woman in her law school class at Howard, and it was there that she first became aware of sexism. For example, on her first day of class a professor remarked that he did not know why women went to law school. Despite this, she was elected Chief Justice of the Howard Court of Peers, the highest student position at Howard, and in 1944 she graduated first in her class. However, although men who graduated first in the class had been given the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship for graduate work at Harvard University, Murray was rejected from Harvard because of her gender. This occurred despite President Roosevelt writing a letter in support of her, after Murray herself had written to Eleanor Roosevelt.

She instead attended the University of California’s law school at Berkeley, where her master’s thesis was The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment, the first master's thesis ever published on that topic. It was published later as Black Theology and Feminist Theology: A Comparative View, in the Anglican Theological Review. After only three weeks of study Murray passed the California bar exam, although her graduate law advisor had insisted shortcomings in her background would cause her to fail. In 1950 she published "States' Laws on Race and Color," which Thurgood Marshall called “the Bible for civil rights lawyers.” The NAACP used her arguments while arguing the Brown v. Board of Education case.

She was appointed to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women in 1961, for which she prepared a memo entitled A Proposal to Reexamine the Applicability of the Fourteenth Amendment to State Laws and Practices Which Discriminate on the Basis of Sex Per Se. In 1963 she became one of the first to criticize the sexism of the civil rights movement, in her speech "The Negro Woman and the Quest for Equality". In that speech, among other grievances, she criticized the fact in the 1963 March on Washington no women were invited to make one of the major speeches or to be part of its delegation of leaders who went to the White House. In 1965 Murray published her most famous article (coauthored by Mary Eastwood), "Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII", in the George Washington Law Review; it discussed Title VII as it applied to women, and drew comparisons between discriminatory laws against women and Jim Crow laws. She earned her JD degree from Yale in 1965, the first African American to do so; her dissertation was titled, Roots of the Racial Crisis: Prologue to Policy. In 1966 she cofounded the National Organization for Women and helped draft its statement of purpose. From 1968-1973, she was the Distinguished Professor of Law and Politics at Brandeis University.

In 1970 her essay "The Liberation of Black Women" appeared in the book Voices of the New Feminism; it analyzed how black women suffered from racism and sexism.

In 1977 she became the first black woman ordained as an Episcopal priest.

She never stated she was a lesbian, but her writings have been interpreted to say that she was.

A vote at the 2012 General Convention of the Episcopal Church named her to Holy Men, Holy Women, a book of the church that Bishop Michael Curry of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina said lists "people whose lives have exemplified what it means to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and make a difference in the world." This makes her an Episcopal saint.