Film is a revelatory portrait of the most pioneering legal activist you never heard of
‘My Name Is Pauli Murray’ Rated: PG-13 for disturbing/ violent images and mature thematic elements. Running time: 91 minutes. 666 1⁄2(out of four)
If anyone deserves to have a moment, it’s Pauli Murray. In fact, as “My Name is Pauli Murray” demonstrates, the poet, activist, legal scholar, teacher and Episcopal priest at the center of this illuminating documentary deserves to have millions of moments.
While they were researching their hit film “RBG,” directors Betsy
West and Julie Cohen discovered that Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited Murray with helping to shape her legal reasoning on the issue of sex discrimination. Intrigued, the team began to research Murray, and found a warm, charismatic and courageous figure who was routinely decades ahead of her time.
Fifteen years before civil rights activist Rosa Parks helped instigate the Montgomery Bus Boycott, for example, Murray was arrested for sitting in the Whites-only section of a bus in Petersburg, Va. Although the action didn’t get as much press as later efforts, it spurred Murray to pursue a legal career, during which she anticipated
the Brown v. Board of Education decision, her scholarship forming the foundation
of Thurgood Marshall’s pivotal argument 10 years later.
“My Name is Pauli Murray” delivers a lively, revelatory litany of all the things Murray got right first, in a career that was driven by equal parts intellectual curiosity and call to service. As Brittney Cooper, a Rutgers University associate professor explains to her class in the film, “I can’t begin to cover all her accomplishments and all her dopeness.”
Murray, who was born in Baltimore and grew up in Durham, N.C., also was gay and gender nonconforming. Although she had a meaningful decades-long relationship with Irene Barlow in adulthood, the most painful passages of “My Name is Pauli Murray” recount her struggles with homophobia and an androgynous identity that today is widely understood as being something other than cisgender. (Some of the sources in “My Name is Pauli Murray” insist on referring to Murray as they/them to honor a figure they consider a trans pioneer.)