Pauli Murray was brilliant, outspoken, and committed to achieving dignity and equality for all under the law. Pauli was born the fourth of six children to a nurse and an educator on November 20, 1910, in Baltimore, Maryland. After the death of her mother and the psychiatric institutionalization of her father, she spent their childhood with her Aunt Pauline (for whom she were named) in Durham, North Carolina. Two other aunts also took a keen interest in her upbringing. She graduated at the top of her class from Hillside High School in 1926. After graduating from Hillsdale High School, Murray moved to New York City to continue her education and improve her chances of getting into college. While pursuing higher education, Pauli Murray encountered the common types of racism and sexism.
Because she was female, she could not attend her first choice, Columbia University. Unable to afford Columbia’s sister school Barnard College Murray enrolled at Hunter College, a free women's college of City University of New York, where she was one of the few students of color. Murray was encouraged in her writing by one of her English instructors, from whom she earned an "A" for an essay about her maternal grandfather. Pauli graduated with honors from Hunter College where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1933. During the Great Depression, Murray worked with both the Women’s Auxiliary of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and with the Works Progress Administration (WPA). She became a member of the peace and justice organization, Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR).
Attending college during the Great Depression presented major economic challenges for Murray, who often went hungry and struggled to find work. Motivated partly by these desperate circumstances, Murray married William Roy Wynn in 1930. Neither Murray nor Wynn was ready for marriage, and they quickly drifted apart. Inspired to study law as a means to address injustice, she was denied admission to the University of North Carolina of Law in 1938 because of her race. All schools and other public facilities in the state were segregated by state law, as was the case across the South. Pauli’s failed attempt to study at the all-White University of North Carolina garnered national attention and established her reputation as a civil rights activist.
In 1940, Murray and fellow F.O.R member Adelene McBean had to give up their seats in the front White section of a segregated bus in Petersburg, Virginia and move to the back. Inspired by a conversation they had been having about Gandhian civil disobedience, the two women refused to return to the rear and were arrested and jailed. Murray and McBean initially were defended by the NAACP, but when the pair were convicted only of disorderly conduct rather than violating segregation laws, the organization ceased to represent them. The Workers' Defense League (WDL), a socialist labor rights organization that also was beginning to take civil rights cases, paid her fine. A few months later the WDL hired Murray for its administrative committee.
Following in her father’s footsteps, Murray enrolled at Howard University’s law school in 1941, becoming the only woman in her class, where she was trained by famed civil rights attorneys William Hastie, Leon Ransom, and Thurgood Marshall. At Howard, Murray experienced sexism and coined the term “Jane Crow” to describe the discrimination she faced as a woman. 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 lunch counter sit-ins in Washington, DC during her time at Howard, challenging several restaurants with discriminatory seating policies.
These activities preceded the more widespread sit-ins during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Murray finished first in her class at Howard Law School. It was customary for top students to continue their legal studies at Harvard Law School with the assistance of the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship program. Harvard rejected her because of her gender, despite a letter of support from sitting President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After receiving her law degree at Howard University, she later earned a master's degree in law from the University of California at Berkeley in 1945. Her master's degree thesis was entitled "The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment", which argued that "the right to work is an inalienable right". It was published in Berkeley Law's flagship California Law Review.
After earning her degree Pauli Murray was hired as the state's first African American deputy attorney general in January of the following year. That year, the National Council of Negro Women named her its "Woman of the Year" and Mademoiselle magazine did the same in 1947. In 1949, Murray was the unsuccessful Liberal Party candidate for a seat in the New York City Council from Brooklyn. Murray was the first Black woman hired as an associate attorney at the Paul, Weiss law firm in New York City, working there from 1956 to 1960. She first met Ruth Bader Ginsburg at Paul, Weiss, when Ginsburg was briefly a summer associate there. In her 1951 book, "States’ Laws on Race and Color, Murray" offered a definitive framework for challenging state segregation laws throughout the nation.
Thurgood Marshall, then the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, used her book as a one of several resources to attorneys working on civil rights cases. It was of particular value to Marshall’s team in preparation for the Brown v Board of Education school desegregation case in 1954. Two years later Murray published "Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family", a biographical study of her family in North Carolina. In 1963 she became one of the first to criticize the sexism in the Civil Rights Movement, in her speech "The Negro Woman in the Quest for Equality". In 1960 Murray jumped at the chance to become a senior lecturer at the Ghana School of Law. The next year she secured a fellowship to work at Yale University for a doctorate of laws. There she was astonished to discover that her courses made no mention of gender discrimination.
Murray became the first African-American to receive Yale’s degree of Doctor of Juridical Science. In 1961, US President John F. Kennedy appointed Murray to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. She returned to the US and studied at Yale Law School. In 1965, she became the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from the school. Her dissertation was titled, "Roots of the Racial Crisis: Prologue to Policy". In 1966, she was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), which she hoped could act as an NAACP for women's rights. Later in 1966, she and Dorothy Kenyon of the ACLU successfully argued a case White v. Crook in the federal district court which ruled that women have an equal right to serve on juries.
When future Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then with the ACLU, wrote her brief for Reed v. Reed, the 1971 Supreme Court case that extended the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause to women for the first time, she added Murray and Kenyon in recognition of their pioneering work on gender discrimination, which articulated the "failure of the courts to recognize sex discrimination for what it is and its common features with other types of arbitrary discrimination." She taught at Brandeis from 1968 to 1973, receiving tenure in 1971 as a full professor in American studies and appointed as Louis Stulberg Chair in Law and Politics. Increasingly inspired, Pauli Murray, at the age of 62, when many people are planning retirement, Pauli Murray decided to become an Episcopal priest.
She received a Master of Divinity in 1976 with her thesis, "Black Theology and Feminist Theology: A Comparative Review", spending the final year and a half of her course at Virginia Theological Seminary. In 1978, Murray was ordained in Washington, after the Episcopal Church decided to admit women to the priesthood. She was the first Black woman in the U.S. to become an Episcopalian priest. In performing her first Holy Eucharist at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, where her grandmother, a slave, had been baptized, Murray finally believed that “All the strands of my life had come together.” Murray served primarily in Baltimore, but also in Washington, D.C. and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she died on July 1, 1985. In 2012 she was named a saint in the Episcopal Church. Pauli Murray was a brilliant, complex, driven woman, who stood up, spoke and fought for the equal rights of all.