In another case on a different matter, a young lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg used an article Murray had written for a law review to argue that women, also, were covered by the Equal Protection Clause.
And in the 1960s, Murray’s outspoken opinion that women needed an advocacy organization resulted in Betty Friedan reaching out to her, and their co-founding of the powerhouse National Organization for Women.
In short, Murray lived her assertion that “one woman plus a typewriter equals a movement.”
Those are just some of Murray’s bona fides. But only recently is the intersectionality and enduring resonance of her work becoming fully appreciated.
Not only are scholars beginning to write entire books about her, but the simple frame house where she grew up and first absorbed those foundational values of equality and justice was named a National Treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2015, and designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service a year later.
This in itself is significant, because it’s calculated that of the 95,000 entries in the National Register of Historic Places, only 2 percent focus on the experience of Black Americans. In 2018, the National Trust launched an African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund to identify and help preserve more places where significant African American history has happened.
Today the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice is working to rehabilitate Murray’s childhood home as an educational site that will help visitors connect history to contemporary human rights issues.
Barbara Lau, director of the Center, notes that Murray’s family history provides a rich basis for their work.
“These people had a commitment to the ideal of democracy and believed that democracy would continue to evolve,” she said in a recent phone interview.
In her final years, Murray embraced a new endeavor. She left the law behind and studied to become an Episcopal priest. In 1977, she was the first African American woman to be ordained in the church. Although she lived in New York City, Murray returned to North Carolina to administer her first Eucharist – at the chapel where her grandmother, born into enslavement, had been baptized a century before.
Over her own lifetime, Pauli Murray was an activist for civil rights and women’s rights, an author and poet, a legal scholar, an LGBTQ community member, and an Episcopal priest. She worked ceaselessly to break down binary categories and barriers to opportunity, insisting on a world where she – and anyone else – could show up, be counted, and reach their potential.
The Center that now bears her name intends to embrace and further this open-hearted attitude, encouraging present and future generations to continue Pauli’s work against discriminatory practices.
“Pauli really understood this notion of ‘becoming’ throughout her life,” Lau said. “There’s this idea that with the right push, the right advocacy, that democracy would continue to become more inclusive, more perfect, more powerful.
“It would embrace the agency of everybody.”
* Note: After experimenting with ‘he/she’ terminology early on, Murray used the pronoun ‘she’ in her later writings. The gender-neutral term ‘they’ did not come into common usage until some time after Murray died in 1985. See the discussion of “Pronouns and Pauli Murray” here.
Barbara Lloyd McMichael is a freelance writer living in the Pacific Northwest