The Educational Odyssey of Pauli Murray: A Champion of Justice
Pauli Murray, a name synonymous with groundbreaking achievements in civil rights, law, and theology, embarked on an educational journey that defied the norms of their time. Their pursuit of knowledge and equality led them to become a pioneering figure, leaving an indelible mark on American history. This article delves into the educational history of Pauli Murray, highlighting the challenges they faced and the triumphs they achieved in their quest for justice.
Early Life and Education: Foundations in North Carolina and New York
Born Anna Pauline Murray in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 20, 1910, Pauli Murray's early life was marked by significant loss. After their mother's death in 1914 and their father's subsequent confinement to a state hospital, Murray was sent to Durham, North Carolina, to live with their aunt, Pauline Fitzgerald Dame, and maternal grandparents, Robert George and Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald. This move to the segregated South shaped Murray's understanding of racial injustice and fueled their determination to challenge the status quo.
Murray's drive for excellence was partially motivated by a keen awareness of the serious discrimination African Americans and women faced, especially in the heavily segregated South where Jim Crow laws were enforced.
After graduating from Hillside High School in 1926 with a certificate of distinction, Murray moved to New York City. In 1927, Murray moved to New York to attend Hunter College but struggled to stay employed and make ends meet. S/he attended Hunter College and financed their studies with various jobs, ultimately graduating in 1933 with a degree in English Literature. Nevertheless, the young student contributed to the growing intellectual discourse on civil rights, befriending Langston Hughes and following leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois. During this time Murray started to publish poems and prose and began using the name Pauli, a gender-neutral name that affirmed what she described as her “he/she personality.” Coming of age before the term transgender was coined, she was gender-nonconforming in hair and dress and appealed (unsuccessfully) to doctors for hormone replacement therapy. Murray would struggle with the conflicting feelings of what she called “an inverted sex instinct” throughout her lifetime. Murray graduated from Hunter in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression and with few prospects for employment.
Confronting Discrimination: The University of North Carolina and Early Activism
Murray's commitment to racial equality led them to apply to the sociology department at the all-white University of North Carolina (UNC) in 1938. Despite having deep familial ties to the school-which included two alumni, a board of trustees member, and a scholarship founder-and a fortuitous Supreme Court ruling that should have allowed admittance, Murray's application was denied because she was Black. This rejection, widely publicized in both white and black newspapers, marked a turning point in Murray's life and solidified their resolve to fight against segregation.
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Denied admission at UNC, Murray went to work for the Workers Defense League and participated in a 1940 campaign to save the life of Odell Waller, a Black sharecropper accused of murdering a white farmer (the campaign failed, and he was executed in 1942). Committed to continuing her work to advance racial equality, she enrolled at the Howard University School of Law in 1941.
Murray's activism extended beyond academia. In 1940, fifteen years before the infamous Montgomery Bus Boycott, Murray refused to move to the back of a segregated bus in Virginia during a trip home to Durham for Easter and was subsequently thrown in jail. This type of experience, and Murray’s relentless determination to stand up for civil rights and the downtrodden, would go on to inform her career as an activist, organizer, and attorney.
Howard University Law School: Facing "Jane Crow"
In 1941, Murray enrolled at the law school at Howard University with the intention of becoming a civil rights lawyer. After hearing Murray speak at a Worker’s Defense League rally, the young lawyer Thurgood Marshall wrote a letter of recommendation to Howard University School of Law, where he was an alumnus, and in 1941 Murray was awarded a scholarship. She was the only woman in that class of law students, and one professor’s claim that he “didn’t understand why a woman would want to go to law school” added more fuel to Murray’s fire. It was there, she later wrote in Song in a Weary Throat, that she became a feminist: I had entered law school preoccupied with the racial struggle and single-mindedly bent upon becoming a civil rights attorney, but I graduated an unabashed feminist as well. She referred to this type of prejudice against women as “Jane Crow,” an allusion to the pervasive Jim Crow laws.
While at Howard, Murray participated in civil rights protests in an attempt to desegregate public facilities. In 1942, while still in law school, Murray joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). That year she published an article, "Negro Youth's Dilemma", that challenged segregation in the US military, which continued during the Second World War. She also participated in sit-ins challenging several Washington, DC, restaurants with discriminatory seating policies.
Academic Excellence and Further Education: Berkeley and Yale
Pauli Murray graduated at the top of their law school class from Howard University in 1944. Murray was elected chief justice of the Howard Court of Peers, the highest student position at Howard. It was at Howard that s/he also became acutely aware of the oppression s/he faced as a Black person perceived as a woman, coining the term “Jane Crow,” to describe their experience.
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The Rosenwald Fellowship was awarded to the valedictorian, and previous top graduates had used the fellowship to attend Harvard University. Despite winning the fellowship, Murray was rejected from Harvard Law School due to sexism - echoing previous rejections that Murray experienced. Harvard wrote, “Your picture and the salutation on your college transcript indicate that you are not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School.” In response, she fired back: Gentlemen, I would gladly change my sex to meet your requirements, but since the way to such change has not been revealed to me, I have no recourse but to appeal to you to change your minds on this subject. Are you to tell me that one is as difficult as the other? Harvard declined to change its mind (the Law School admitted its first female students in 1950), even after a direct appeal from President Roosevelt.
Instead, Murray went to the University of California Boalt School of Law where s/he received an LLM (Master of Laws) degree. Their master’s thesis was titled The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment.
In 1960, Murray traveled to Ghana to explore their African cultural roots and teach law. While there, s/he co-authored a book, The Constitution and Government of Ghana, with Leslie Rubin. When Murray returned, s/he enrolled at Yale Law School where s/he studied for the JSD degree and mentored several young women activists, including Marian Wright Edelman, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Patricia Roberts Harris who all became leaders in their own right. In 1965 she became the first Black person to receive a doctorate in law from Yale University, with a dissertation entitled “Roots of the Racial Crisis: Prologue to Policy” (1965).
Legal Scholarship and Influence: States' Laws on Race and Color
After graduation, Murray returned to New York City and provided support to the growing civil rights movement. Their book, States’ Laws on Race and Color, was published in 1951 thanks to the United Methodist Women who commissioned this work as a service to the movement and part of their Charters for Racial Justice. The proposed “small pamphlet” turned into a brilliantly written 776-page book, States’ Laws on Race and Color, that was published in 1950 and disseminated widely to colleges, universities, and law offices. Thurgood Marshall, head of the legal department at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), described the book as the “Bible” for civil rights litigators. The book also is commonly cited as the foundation for the arguments posed in the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education.
Murray argued for civil rights lawyers to challenge state segregation laws as unconstitutional directly, rather than trying to prove the inequality of so-called "separate but equal" facilities, as was argued in some challenges. Her approach was influential to the NAACP arguments in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), by which they drew from psychological studies assessing the effects of segregation on students in school.
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Contributions to the Women's Rights Movement
President John F. Kennedy appointed Pauli Murray to the Committee on Civil and Political Rights as a part of his Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. In 1963, she became one of the first to criticize the sexism of the civil rights movement, in her speech "The Negro Woman in the Quest for Equality". In a letter to civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, she criticized the fact that in the 1963 March on Washington no women were invited to make one of the major speeches or to be part of its delegation of leaders who went to the White House, among other grievances.
Pauli Murray joined Betty Friedan and others to found the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, but later moved away from a leading role because s/he did not believe that NOW appropriately addressed the issues of Black and working-class women. In 1964, Murray wrote an influential legal memorandum in support of the National Woman's Party's successful effort (led by Alice Paul) to add "sex" as a protected category in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In 1971 Ruth Bader Ginsburg cofounded the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. In Ginsburg’s brief in Reed v. Reed (1971), she listed Murray as a coauthor; although Murray was not a part of the case, her inclusion was Ginsburg’s acknowledgment of the roots of the intellectual framework of her argument.
Academic Appointments and Theological Studies
From 1968 to 1973, Dr. Pauli Murray served as a faculty member at Brandeis University teaching an early American Studies program. She developed Brandeis’s first courses on African American studies and women’s studies. to become an Episcopal priest.
Murray then entered the General Theological Seminary in New York City and earned a master’s degree in divinity in 1976. She was ordained an Episcopal priest at Washington National Cathedral the next year, becoming the first African American woman to hold such a position.
Legacy and Recognition
Pauli Murray died of cancer in Pittsburgh on July 1, 1985. Their autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, was published posthumously in 1987. The book was re-released as Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest and Poet in 1987, and was republished under its original title with a new introduction by Patricia Bell-Scott in 2018. Their book of poetry, Dark Testament and Other Poems with a new introduction by Elizabeth Alexander, originally published in 1970 has also, like the autobiography, been reissued by Liveright Publishing, an imprint of W.W. Norton.
The legal analysis and research by the activist, lawyer, nonbinary Black feminist, poet, and Episcopalian priest formed the basis of the legal argument against the “separate but equal” doctrine in the case of Brown v. Board of Education.
In 2012 the 77th General Convention of the Episcopal Church named her to its compendium of prayers, guidelines, procedures, and descriptions of common saints, Holy Women, Holy Men: Celebrating the Saints, thus anointing her an Episcopal saint. Mint honored Murray’s achievements with her inclusion in its American Women Quarters Program; her commemorative quarter was issued in 2024.
Pauli Murray’s career paralleled the country’s uneven progress on the reform of racial and gender-based discrimination. Pauli Murray College honors Pauli Murray, a remarkable civil rights and women’s rights advocate, who contributed immensely to the dismantling of segregation and discrimination. Pauli pioneered a vision for a society that values diversity and rallies around our common human virtues.
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