Pauli Murray was the first Black person to earn a JSD (Doctor of the Science of Law) degree from Yale Law School, a founder of the National Organization for Women and the first Black person perceived as a woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest.
Pauli Murray’s legal arguments and interpretation of the U.S. Constitution were winning strategies for public school desegregation, women’s rights in the workplace, and an extension of rights to LGBTQ+ people based on Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.1
After their mother's death in 1914, Murray was sent to live with their aunt, Pauline Fitzgerald Dame, and grandparents, Robert George and Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald, in Durham, North Carolina.
My grandparents had brought up their five daughters and one son to do whatever work would help them remain independent. It was part of Grandfather’s philosophy that everyone should have at least two trades to fall back on when times were hard.2
As I grew older and came to understand what [segregation] meant, I carried on my own private protest. I walked almost everywhere to stay off the Jim Crow streetcars and I would not go downtown to the theaters because that meant climbing the back stairs to the colored “peanut gallery.” But sometimes even family solidarity fell victim to the color bar. Once, when a fair-skinned relative from the North came to visit and took me to town one day for company, she made me stand outside while she went into the stores on Main Street. She said they would give her better service if they did not know she was colored. Aunt Pauline was furious when she heard about this and would not let me go anywhere with that relative again.
Race was the atmosphere one breathed from day to day, the pervasive irritant, the chronic allergy, the vague apprehension which made one uncomfortable and jumpy. We knew the race problem was like a deadly snake coiled and ready to strike, and that one avoided its dangers only by never-ending watchfulness.
In 1941, Murray enrolled in the law school at Howard University.
One day during class discussion, in a flash of poetic insight, I advanced a radical approach that few legal scholars considered viable in 1944—namely, that the time had come to make a frontal assault on the constitutionality of segregation per se instead of continuing to acquiesce in the Plessy doctrine while nibbling away at its underpinnings on a case-by-case basis and having to show in each case that the facility in question was in fact unequal. In essence I was challenging the traditional NAACP tactic of concentrating on the equal side of the Plessy equation.
While in law school, Murray led sit-ins at local segregated restaurants.
The demonstration began at 4 P.M. on Saturday afternoon, April 22, 1944... we began to stroll into Thompson’s in twos and threes, separated by ten-minute intervals. When we were refused service, we carried our empty trays to vacant tables, maintaining strict silence; students had been instructed not to be drawn into verbal harangues and all questions were referred to a designated representative. Three white participants polled the customers inside the cafeteria and found that of ten people questioned, seven favored serving Negroes and only three objected. Outside, we set up a picket line, walking in single file far enough apart not to block the sidewalk and carrying signs, one of which read: “Are You for HITLER’S Way (Race Supremacy) or the AMERICAN Way (Equality)? Make Up Your Mind!
In 1960, Murray traveled to Ghana.
I came to Africa... to see for myself black people in their own homeland and come to grips with the pervasive myth of innate racial inferiority that stigmatizes all people of discernible African descent in the United States.... Since coming to Ghana I have traveled a bit in West Africa, immersed myself in its history, and observed the life of its peoples. ... I find that my peculiar racial history has made me irrevocably an American, a product of the New World... America is “home” to me, however alienated or disinherited I have felt at times.
Even if my tawny color did not make me stand out from the masses of black Africans, my unconscious movements reveal my origins. On my second day in Ghana, a young workman at the law school confronted me with the question, “Tell me, Madame, are you English lady or American lady?” “What do you think?” I responded. “I think you are American lady,” he said. Curious, I asked him, “How do you know?”...“I tell by your walk; American people walk different from English people.” An Israeli diplomat later confirmed this observation, assuring me that he could pick out an American walking along the street from a distinctive relaxed hip movement.
Murray returned to the United States.
In 1965 and 1966, Title VII was the principal issue that fueled the movement, especially among business and professional women, as we battled against public attitudes ranging from ridicule to disregard of the new law... The idea of a national civil rights organization for women was beginning to circulate within our network, although none of us had any clear ideas as to the form it would take...In the absence of organized group actions, we had to rely upon maximizing our individual efforts. Mary Eastwood and I coauthored a law review article entitled “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII” ... We equated the evil of antifeminism (Jane Crow) with the evil of racism ( Jim Crow), and we asserted that “the rights of women and the rights of Negroes are only different phases of the fundamental and indivisible issue of human rights.” ... Our article broke new ground and was widely cited.
In not a single one of these little campaigns was I victorious. In other words, in each case, I personally failed, but I have lived to see the thesis upon which I was operating vindicated. And what I very often say is that I’ve lived to see my lost causes found.
Information in this article is from the Pauli Murray Center.
All quotes are from Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage, by Pauli Murray.
She is one of my biggest inspirations! Thank you for this beautiful piece about her.