Every American generation has its heroes, its profiles in courage, its personages fighting to save and advance the soul of democracy. In the 20th century, perhaps no one better represented that than the incomparable Pauli Murray. For more than 50 years, Murray was a prolific civil rights pioneer, plowing new territory for Blacks, women and LGBTQ populations.
And yet, as writer Kathryn Schulz has said about her in a 2017 New Yorker profile, Murray’s lifelong fate was “to be both ahead of her time and behind the scenes.”
Born in 1910 and orphaned by the age of 12, Anna Pauline Murray was raised in Durham, North Carolina by her aunt and maternal grandparents in a mixed-race, multi-generational environment that prized education and conferred on her the family legacy of deep engagement in human rights issues.
Even as a youngster, Murray deplored the segregation in the South. She chose to walk, rather than ride in city buses where she would have been expected to sit in the “colored section,” and she refrained from going to movie theaters where she would have been relegated to the balcony.
Murray also grappled with gender identity issues from a young age. She preferred boy’s clothes as a youngster, and used the phrase “he/she personality” to describe herself to her family.*
After graduating from high school at the age of 15, she headed for New York. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Hunter College and entered into a brief marriage that confirmed for her she did not fit that era’s conventional definition of a woman. So, she dove into reading up on “sexual deviance” and investigated gender affirming treatments and the possibility of taking male hormones. The medical solutions she sought were unavailable to her at that time, but she did switch from her feminine birth name of Anna Pauline to the more gender-neutral Pauli.
Murray moved to Harlem, became friends with Langston Hughes, and dreamed of being a writer – but the Great Depression forced her to consider alternatives.
Traveling back down South to visit family in 1940, Murray was arrested for refusing to sit in the back of a bus – 15 years before Rosa Parks’ more famous episode in Montgomery.
When she entered law school at Howard University as the only female student, Murray coined the term “Jane Crow” to describe the discrimination she encountered.
She was on hand in 1942 when James Farmer and Bayard Rustin formed Congress for Racial Equality – CORE – and joined them in employing nonviolent tactics to challenge racial discrimination.
After graduating at the top of her class from Howard, she went on to earn a Master of Laws degree from the University of California, writing her thesis on equal opportunity in employment.
Later she returned to the East Coast and compiled a book on “States’ Laws on Race and Color” that Thurgood Marshall, then the director of the NAACP’s legal department, called the bible for civil rights lawyers.
Further proof of her incisive intellect: a provocative paper she’d written back in law school that challenged Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” doctrine was dug out of the files ten years later by one of her professors at Howard. He shared it with the team litigating against racial discrimination in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, and they used it as the basis for their argument.
Pauli Murray
and the process of
becoming
by Barbara Lloyd McMichael
The Pauli Murray in the World mural was created as a part of the Face Up Project led by artist Brett Cook. in Durham, NC.