Pauli Murray, Architect of History
This article uses she/her pronouns in keeping with Murray’s own writings, but Murray was a transmasculine and gender-nonconforming lesbian. Read the full article online at thegavoice.com.
Some say Pauli Murray is the most important American activist you’ve never heard of. An iconoclastic, socialist-leaning, genderfluid feminist and Black civil rights activist, Murray broke barriers in every aspect of her life. The barriers Murray broke and paths she created single-handedly, quite literally, changed history.
Murray is, in many respects, the one-name answer to why we need LGBTQ History Month. Murray’s quest to find herself as someone who variously identified as a woman, a man and neither ran parallel to Murray’s quest for racial and gender parity in American society and law.
Murray’s was a life of firsts; she was the first Black woman law school graduate at Howard University, the first Black person to earn a JSD (Doctor of the Science of Law) degree from Yale Law School, and the first Black woman ordained as an Episcopal priest.
Murray’s legal writings were the predicate for Thurgood Marshall’s segregation-shattering 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Her name was also listed as co-author on the brief argued by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1971’s Reed v. Reed. Years later, Ginsburg said, “We knew when we wrote that brief that we were standing on her shoulders.”
Murray’s associations were as disparate as they were intriguing. Murray was a lifelong friend and confidant (but not lover) of Eleanor Roosevelt, whom Murray met while working at a conservation camp. She was a friend of James Baldwin, with whom she shared space at the MacDowell writers’ colony the first year that Black writers were admitted. Murray also co-founded the
National Organization for Women with Betty Friedan.
Born in 1910 in Baltimore as Anna Pauline Murray, she was orphaned early in life. Her mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage when she was only three and her father was soon committed to a local asylum where he was beaten to death by a white guard when Murray was 12.
Raised in the Deep South by her maternal grandparents and maternal aunt Pauline, Murray aspired to go to college and set her sights on Columbia. At 16, she moved to New York City, where she lived with another aunt. But that aunt and her family lived in a white neighborhood and were passing as white. Murray’s presence as a Black teen in their home was a source of conflict with the neighbors, so she was soon on her own.
Murray’s life was, in many respects, defined by who she wasn’t: not white, not male, not wealthy. She was easily pulled into a fight against injustices. In 1940, while traveling with then-girlfriend Adelene McBean in Petersburg, Virginia, the couple refused to take broken seats at the back of the bus — 15 years before Rosa Parks’ historic refusal. Both Murray and McBean were arrested and charged.
Yet Murray was already deeply invested in civil rights actions. She had applied to Columbia and was told they did not admit women. She tried to fight it but attended Hunter College instead. After her graduation, Murray applied to the Ph.D. program in sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, but was informed the school did not accept Negro students.
It was while attending Howard University law school as the only female student that Murray authored her defining treatise on “Jane Crow.” In 1944 she graduated first in her class but was denied the Julius Rosenwald Fellowships for postgraduate work at Harvard University, despite a letter of support from sitting President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Murray went on to earn a Master of Law degree from Berkeley in 1945, writing her thesis on employment rights.
At various times in her early life, Murray identified as a man and dressed in androgynous clothing throughout most of her life. As the Pauli Murray Center details, “Murray actively used the phrase ‘he/she personality’ during the early years of their life. Later in journals, essays, letters and autobiographical works, Pauli employed ‘she/her/hers’ pronouns.”
Murray wrote that she was attracted to “extremely feminine and heterosexual women,” and her decades-long relationship with Irene “Renee” Barlow was the most sustaining of her life. Yet that partnership was also a source of conflict for her. She destroyed most of their correspondence and wrote of their relationship in third-person narrative in her memoirs.
One could write pages on Pauli Murray and still barely scratch the surface of her remarkable life. The complicated nature of her personal struggles has deep resonance now, highlighting the perils of discrimination against women, people of color and LGBTQ people.
Perhaps this quote of Murray’s is in the end the most significant: “If anyone should ask a Negro woman in America what has been her greatest achievement, her honest answer would be, ‘I survived!’”
Read more about Murray at the Pauli Murray Center archive: PauliMurrayCenter.com. “My Name is Pauli Murray,” a documentary following Murray’s life, is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime.
Victoria A. Brownworth is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated, award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, DAME, The Advocate, Bay Area Reporter and Curve.