By Sunayana Prabhu
RED BANK – At the end of women’s history month in March, the Red Bank Public Library hosted its ongoing Let’s Talk About Race series to amplify the name and legacy of an iconic yet astoundingly unheard-of civil rights attorney and Episcopal priest, Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray.
What surprised everyone at the race talk held virtually via Zoom March 29, was how obscure the trailblazing African American gender and race champion was, even while Ruth Bader Ginsburg publicly credited her as an inspiration.
“I am hoping that Pauli Murray will be a household name,” said Patricia White, program committee member of the Red Bank Public Library. White opened the race talk by introducing Murray’s monumental contributions to both the civil rights and women’s rights movements. A writer, poet, lawyer, activist, tenured professor at Brandies University and Episcopal priest toward the end of her life, Murray donned many hats, but her biggest contribution was in helping dismantle segregation and discrimination.
“She saw things that her contemporaries either dismissed or laughed at or just plain ignored,” White said, noting Murray was way ahead of her time. Citing one incident, White said when Murray was at Howard Law School in the early 1940s, she wrote a paper arguing the 1896 Supreme Court ruling Plessy v. Ferguson that set the rule of “separate but equal” should be overturned. During the early civil rights movement when activists were fighting to improve the conditions of segregated institutions, Murray challenged the whole construct of “separate but equal,” saying it was faulty and by definition, unfair. She argued that by keeping people separate, they were being treated unequally.
Ahead of her time, she challenged her mocking teachers and classmates that the ruling would be overturned.
Ten years later in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that separate but equal was indeed unconstitutional. It was Murray’s seminal study of segregation laws throughout the United States that had formed much of the basis for the legal work of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund that went into the case.
“I decided that it was not I that was wrong, but this society that was wrong, and that anytime a society penalizes an individual because of biological attributes, whether it be race per se, or whether it be sex, per se, that society is going to be challenged,” Murray said at a Harvard Law forum. The clip – from “Democracy Now” hosted by Amy Goodman – was replayed during the race talk.
Murray’s journey is featured in the recent documentary, “My Name Is Pauli Murray.”
Murray earned her college degree from Hunter College in New York and shortened her name to Pauli from Anna Pauline to embrace a more androgynous identity. Murray championed women’s rights but at the same time as a young woman experienced feelings now identified as gender dysphoria. “She always felt that she was a male in a female’s body, and that’s a big, big part of her story,” White noted.
Her struggles with gender identity are documented in personal letters that can be found in the archives of Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library.
Murray was determined to go to law school after her arrest for disorderly conduct in 1940 in Virginia. She had refused to give up her seat on a bus 15 years before Rosa Parks challenged the rule of bus segregation that triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
In 1944, Murray graduated as the sole woman in her Howard University School of Law class.
Following graduation, Murray was denied a post-graduate fellowship at Harvard Law School because the school did not accept women in the program at the time. In a letter to Harvard after being rejected, Murray wrote, “I would gladly change my sex to meet your requirements. But since the way to sex change has not been revealed to me, I have no recourse but to appeal to you to change your minds.”
Murray ultimately completed her post-graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and soon after published “States’ Laws on Race and Color,” regarded as the “bible” of civil rights work. She went on to receive her J.S.D. (Doctor of Juridical Science) from Yale University, the first African American to receive this degree. She is also the first African American to have a building named after her at Yale.
Toward the end of her life, Murray entered the priesthood in the Episcopal Church.
Episcopal Bishop Michael Curry spoke about Murray’s legacy (a clip of which was played during the talk). “She’s an unsung hero for the rights and the equity of women, an unsung hero for the rights and equality and equity of all people in this country. An unsung hero for the rights of LGBTQ people in this country. She anticipated it. She saw it before it happened, and she worked for something that she would never see but she did it so that some of us might actually see it,” Curry said.
White also shared excerpts from a Time magazine interview with Ginsberg, where she acknowledged that most of her legal work was done “standing on her (Murray’s) shoulders, because she was the one that sparked the idea that the 14th Amendment should protect the rights of men and women, boys and girls… (it) should let them be free.”
Although there is growing awareness of Murray and her activism, most participants during the race talk said they had never heard about her. Al James, a participant after the session said his two children studying at Howard University have “never mentioned” Murray and wanted to know how she became a subject of the race talk. White and library staff members Linda Hewitt and Claire Phelps said Rev. Diane Watson-Kendall of Pilgrim Baptist Church suggested Murray after watching the documentary “Amend” on Netflix, a six-part series about the 14th Amendment with an episode that features Murray.
Another participant, Linda Oppenheim, said she appreciated the efforts of the library in highlighting Murray’s life and work. She also said the one thing that really struck her in Murray’s comments to Harvard Law School was that “essentially she was describing ‘intersectionality.’ That word hadn’t been coined (yet), but she clearly was talking about that.”
After the presentation White shared a few books for anyone interested in learning more about Murray: the biography “Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray” by Rosalind Rosenberg; “Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family” was written by Murray about her grandparents; “Song In a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage” is Murray’s memoir.
Barbara Withers, another participant, also suggested “The Firebrand And The First Lady” by Patricia Bell-Scott, about Murray’s friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt.
Murray was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1910 and died at the age of 74 in 1985. Aside from struggles with her gender identity and the “double discrimination that black women face,” White said she endured chronic depression and anxiety throughout her life and suffering from a young age. “Her mother died when she probably was only 3 and soon her father ended up in a psychiatric facility. And he was only there for a couple of years when he died. He was beaten to death.” White said Murray’s circumstances were “completely tragic” but her understanding of the nonviolent civil resistance based on her readings of Mahatma Gandhi and her personal battles only “propelled her” to success despite the odds.
White closed the presentation with questions, asking people to reflect on the following:
– In the face of adversity, what causes some to fail and others to overcome?
– What should be the response of the individual or the community to injustice?
– When is it necessary to question the status quo?
– How can literature serve as a vehicle for social change?
The article originally appeared in the April 13 – 19, 2023 print edition of The Two River Times.
