Pauli Murray was breaking barriers from a young age. Held back by what Murray dubbed “Jane Crow,” s/he* was a staunch advocate for the rights of women and people of color and fought tirelessly for civil rights. As a poet, writer, activist, organizer, legal theorist, and priest, Murray was directly involved in, and helped articulate, the intellectual foundations of two of the most …
Jan 13, 2022 · Jan 13, 2022. Paula DiGiacomo, who had been first assistant district attorney for more than 25 years, is the first woman to serve as the county's DA. She succeeds Francis Schultz, who was elected...
Sep 14, 2021 · At the height of President Bill Clinton’s ‘90s impeachment scandal, Susan Carpenter-McMillan was a staple on every news program. After Paula Jones accused Clinton of exposing himself and ...
At Howard, Pauli led student protests and helped form the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). She focused her studies on civil rights and wrote her thesis on how laws excluded people based on race.
74 years (1910–1985)Pauli Murray / Age at death
Pauli Murray was a civil rights and women's rights activist, lawyer, educator, author and poet, and the first African-American woman to become an Episcopal priest. Born in Baltimore, Murray was raised in Durham by her aunt, Pauline Fitzgerald Dame, and her maternal grandparents.
As a civil rights activist, feminist and attorney, Pauli Murray influenced Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And with a single word in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, she bent the arc of the moral universe.Jun 26, 2020
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.
Yale Law School1965Howard University School of Law1941–1944Hunter College1933The General Theological SeminaryUC Berkeley School of LawPauli Murray/College
Pauli's Story In 1965, Pauli became the first African-American to receive a JSD degree from Yale Law School. ... Late in life, Pauli became the first African-American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest, and received an honorary degree from the Yale Divinity School in 1979.
Agnes Fitzgerald MurrayWilliam H. MurrayPauli Murray/Parents
Pauli MurrayIn 1977, Murray became the first African American woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest. Pauli Murray was born Anna Pauline Murray in Baltimore, Maryland.Jan 26, 2021
She referred to this type of prejudice against women as “Jane Crow,” an allusion to the pervasive Jim Crow laws. She subsequently became an active member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and contributed to the growing dialogue on the intersection of racial and gender-based discrimination.
The professor for whom Murray wrote the paper was on the team arguing segregation in education was a constitutional violation. While at Howard, Murray also organized sit-ins in Washington D.C. to desegregate restaurants and urged classmates to go south to fight for civil rights.
The church was also where Murray’s grandmother was baptized. Pauli Murray died of cancer in Pittsburgh on July 1, 1985. Murray’s autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, was published posthumously in 1987.
As a poet, writer, activist, organizer, legal theorist, and priest, Murray was directly involved in, and helped articulate, the intellectual foundations of two of the most important social ...
Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage (New York: Harper & Row, 1987). (Reissued in 2018 with a new introduction by Liveright Publishing, a division of W.W. Norton & Company) “Pauli’s Writing,” The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, https://www.paulimurraycenter.com/paulis-writing.
In addition to her legal work, Murray wrote two volumes of autobiography and a collection of poetry. Her first autobiographical book, Proud Shoes (1956), traces her family's complicated racial origins, particularly focusing on her maternal grandparents, Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald. Cornelia was the daughter of a slave who had been raped by her white owner and his brother. Born into slavery, the mixed-race girl was raised by her owner's sister and educated. Robert was a free black man from Pennsylvania, also of mixed racial ancestry; he moved to the South to teach during the Reconstruction Era. Newspapers, including The New York Times, gave the book very positive reviews. The New York Herald Tribune stated that Proud Shoes is "a personal memoir, it is history, it is biography, and it is also a story that, at its best, is dramatic enough to satisfy the demands of fiction. It is written in anger, but without hatred; in affection, but without pathos and tears; and in humor that never becomes extravagant."
Three-year-old Pauli Murray was sent to Durham, North Carolina, to live with her mother's family. There, she was raised by her maternal aunts, Sarah (Sallie) Fitzgerald and Pauline Fitzgerald Dame (both teachers), as well as her maternal grandparents, Robert and Cornelia (Smith) Fitzgerald.
Anna Pauline " Pauli " Murray (November 20, 1910 – July 1, 1985) was an American civil rights activist who became a lawyer, women's rights activist, Episcopal priest, and author. Drawn to the ministry in 1977, Murray was the first African-American woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest, ...
In an essay entitled "Pauli Murray and the Pro nominal Problem", transgender scholar-activist Naomi Simmons-Thorne lends support behind the emerging view of Murray as an early transgender figure in U.S. history. In her essay, she calls upon historians and scholars to complement this growing interpretation through the use of masculine pronouns to reflect Murray's masculine perception of self. Simmons-Thorne is not the first academic to draw attention to the issue of Murray's pronouns, however. Historian Simon D. Elin Fisher has also challenged the historical and textual practices of assigning Murray female pronouns through their pronominal use of 's/he' in some of their writings. Simmons-Thorne, however, makes exclusive use of "he-him-his" pronouns in reference to Murray. She conceives of the practice as one of many " de-essentialist " trans historiographical methods capable of "interrupt [ing] the logic of biological determinism" and "the constraints of cissexism operating historically." Her view is a radical departure from biographers and scholars like Rosenberg (often cisgender), and conventional practices more broadly, which generally refer to Murray through the use of "she-her-hers" pronouns.
After passing the California bar exam in 1945, Murray was hired as the state's first black 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.