Pauli Murray
Encyclopedia
The Reverend Dr. Anna Pauline (Pauli) Murray (November 20, 1910 – July 1, 1985) was an American
civil rights
advocate, women's rights
activist and feminist, lawyer
, writer
, poet
, teacher
, and ordained priest
.
Through her numerous works, Murray demonstrated that knowledge has to be used in order to achieve justice and freedom, and in order to give back to society. Murray was raised in the segregated South, where she learned to live as a multiracial woman, for she was black, white, and Cherokee Indian. Murray later described herself as "biologically and psychologically integrated in a world where the separation of the races was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States" (Leland, The Chapel Hill Newspaper).
During her work she discovered enlightenment, for she later said: "I had never thought of white people as victims of oppression, but now I heard echoes of the black experience when I listened to white workers tell their personal stories of being evicted, starved out, beaten, and jailed.... Seeing the relationship between my personal cause and the universal cause of freedom released me from a sense of isolation, helped me to rid myself of vestiges of shame over my racial history, and gave me an unequivocal understanding that equality of treatment was my birthright and not something to be earned."
Murray received recognition for her service to society before her death in the form of being named "Woman of the Year" by the National Council of Negro Women in 1946; being awarded the Eleanor Roosevelt Award from the Professional Women's Caucus in 1971; and receiving honorary degrees from Dartmouth, Radcliffe, and Yale, as well as other colleges and universities.
The Pauli Murray Award was established in 1990 by Orange County, North Carolina
(where her grandmother was a slave and her great-grandfather was a slave owner), to commemorate her life's work.
The Pauli Murray Project, part of the Duke Human Rights Center at Duke University
, seeks to build a better Durham, North Carolina
by engaging a diversity of residents to lift up Murray's vision and legacy. The project supports community dialogues, documentation of important Durham stories, and efforts to employ history as a tool for engagement with social justice issues.
When Pauli Murray was 3 years old, her mother died, and she went to live with her maternal aunt and grandparents, the Fitzgeralds, in Durham, North Carolina
. The rest of her siblings went to live with her father's sister and unmarried brother in Baltimore. Her father was unable to take care of them because he suffered from long-term effects of typhoid fever. As a child, Murray's ambition was to have her father released from the hospital and get the family back together when she was of age. Her ambition was shattered when a hospital employee allegedly killed her father in 1923.
Pauli Murray learned about her mother through stories people told her: her mother's beauty, her dark flashing eyes, her high spirit, her quick temper, and her forgiving nature. Stories about her parents conveyed both love and sadness into her development and were a great source of power for Murray. As a grown woman, Murray described these stories as if they were "From a realm beyond my senses," for to her "they both inspired and gave me my first stern lessons in the meaning of adversity" (Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 1).
Pauline Fitzgerald was 40 years old when she took Pauli Murray to live with her. Pauline would take her niece to the school were she taught. Murray learned along with other third-graders until she was old enough to enroll in school herself.
Murray was confirmed in the Episcopal Church when she was 9 years old, and in that same year she was adopted by her Aunt Pauline. Murray graduated from Hillside High School in Durham at the age of 15.
William Henry Murray was a graduate of Howard University and was a teacher and principal in the Baltimore public schools. He suffered from long-term effects of typhoid fever and was allegedly killed by a hospital attendant in 1923.
Mother
Agnes Georgiana (Fitzgerald) Murray was a graduate of Hampton Training School for Nurses. She died in 1914 of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Maternal Grandmother
Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald was the daughter of an attorney, Sidney Smith, and a slave, Harriet Day, who was part Cherokee Indian. Cornelia was raised in the Smith household where her father spent a lot of time with her. Cornelia instilled in Pauli Murray a deep pride in her heritage.
Maternal Grandfather
Robert Fitzgerald was a native of Delaware. He was the son of a half-Irish free black and a white farm girl. He graduated from the Ashmun Institute in Pennsylvania and later served in the Union forces during the Civil War. He went to North Carolina to teach the freed slaves after the war, and there met Cornelia Smith.
Maternal Aunt
Pauline Fitzgerald was a schoolteacher. She was 43 years old when she took in Pauli Murray to live with her. She died in 1955 of cancer.
law school because of her race. She and her aunt moved to New York in the hope she would be admitted to Columbia University, but she found out Columbia did not admit women. Later she talked to the admissions officer at Hunter College, but she did not have enough high school courses for admissions, so she studied at the New York public school to gain credentials. Murray graduated from Richmond Hill High in 1927 as one of the 25 to graduate with honors. She entered the freshmen class at Hunter College in the fall of 1928. She had to leave school during her sophomore year, because the stock market crashed and she lost her job.
In 1931, when Murray was in California looking for work, she received a letter form her Aunt Pauline that she was sick and worried. Murray returned to New York by traveling like a homeless boy. Once her aunt was better, she took a job and resumed her studies. In January 1933, Murray graduated from Hunter College
with a major in English and a minor in history. She was one of four black students who graduated that semester.
In the 1930s, Murray worked for the Works Progress Administration
(WPA) as a teacher in the New York City public school system with the Remedial Reading Project. She also worked with the WPA Workers' Education Project.
of segregated buses. She was charged with disorderly conduct and creating a public disturbance. She and her friend were jailed for three days, found guilty, and paid a fine. While she was in jail, she and McBean drafted a "Statement of Facts" about their case. Their draft was praised by their attorneys for its accuracy.
Murray enrolled at Howard University Law School during the fall of 1941 wanting to become a civil rights lawyer. She was working on Odell Waller's case and published "All for Mr. Davis: The Story of Sharecropper Odell Waller" in which she explained the case to the nation. Even though all her appeals failed and Waller was executed in 1942, the Supreme Court struck down the Virginia poll tax two decades later in the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution
.
As a senior at Howard, Murray was elected president of her class and chief justice of the Court of Peers. In 1943, employing one of the earliest uses of non-violent tactics, she and a group of female students from Howard successfully organized the first sit-in demonstration resulting in the desegregation of a cafeteria in Washington, D.C.
Murray graduated from Howard as valedictorian
in 1944.. As her senior law thesis she examined the Supreme Court's civil rights decisions in the late 19th century. This was of great significance because her argument "separate but equal" doctrine voiced the minority individual. This argument was also greatly important because 10 years later the lawyers for Oliver Brown used her argument to help win the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case, in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that the doctrine of "separate but equal" would no longer apply to America's education.
Murray sought admission to Harvard University
for an advanced law degree but was denied admission because she was a woman. She then studied at the University of California, Berkeley
, where she received her Master of Laws
(LLM) degree. She was admitted to the State Bar of California
on January 2, 1946.
While working as a law clerk, Murray gained admission to the New York Bar and opened a law office in the city. She became the first black deputy attorney general of California on January 1946. In that same year, when in the Morgan v. Virginia case the United States Supreme Court held the Virginia Jim Crow statue invalid, Murray was vindicated.
In 1949, Murray ran for a New York City Council seat for Brooklyn's 10th senatorial district as candidate for the Liberal Party where she came in second place for the democratic candidate.
In 1956, Murray was hired as an associate attorney in the nationally prestigious law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison in New York City. She worked there until 1960 as the only female attorney in the firm. Here she experienced discrimination for being a woman.
In 1951, Murray began her graduate study at Yale Law School
; in 1965, she received her Doctor of Juridical Science
degree. She was the first black person awarded this degree by Yale, and in 1972 she was named Louis Stulberg
Professor of Law and Politics at Brandeis.
A contemporary and friend of Eleanor Roosevelt
, Murray was a professor of American studies
at Brandeis University
from 1968 to 1973 and also taught law in Ghana
. She was the author of the 1950 book "States' Laws on Race and Color," which catalogued state statutes discriminating against African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, and other groups.
Pauli Murray first protested against the Jim Crow laws of the South when as a young girl she refused to ride the segregated bus and would walk wherever she needed to go. She also refused to go to a segregated college after she graduated from high school. She stood up against racial discrimination when she applied to the graduate school at the University of North Carolina in 1938. She received a rejection letter from the admission office informing her that "members of your race are not admitted to the University" (Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 115). Being only the second black student to apply to the university she received a lot of attention from the media, which resulted in having a lot of black students applying to the university. Later in 1951 when the university accepted several black students, Murray realized that she had an important role as a member of the struggle for equality and equal opportunity. The acceptance of those black students to the university was so important to Murray that she described it as "a symbol of acceptance stretching back to my Grandmother Cornelia and her relationship to the Chapel Hill Smiths, whose position as benefactors of the university from which I was excluded had intensified my feeling of being disinherited" (Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 128).
While still a law student at Howard, Murray and her fellow classmates organized and led successful sit-in demonstrations aimed at desegregating restaurants in Washington, D.C.
Murray continued fighting racial discrimination when she worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
and joined the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE). Murray contributed to the NAACP's litigation strategy in Brown v. Board of Education
.
In 1961, Murray was appointed to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women
(PCSW). While serving on the commission and studying at Yale Law School, Murray authored a series of papers outlining a legal strategy for challenging sex discrimination by states. She compared gender discrimination to the Jim Crow laws, calling it "Jane Crow," the twin. These arguments were first published in an article co-authored with Mary Eastwood entitled "Jane Crow and the Law."
Murray analyzed state laws and compiled a catalog of ways in which women were kept from legal equality. She argued that these injustices could be overturned with a Supreme Court ruling based on the Fifth Amendment
and Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
. Murray firmly believed that these amendments guaranteed women the rights and protections they needed.
In 1962, Murray was selected as a member of the Committee on Civil and Political Rights. This committee was one of seven study committees set up by the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. The committee used Murray's letter "A Proposal to Reexamine the Applicability of the Fourteenth Amendment to State Laws and Practices Which Discriminate on the Basis of Sex Per Se" as substance for its final report.
Murray described her feelings about gender discrimination: "In my preoccupation with the brutalities of racism, I had failed until now to recognize the subtler, more ambiguous expressions of sexism. I soon learned that women were often the objects of ridicule disguised as a joke."
In 1964, Murray campaigned for the inclusion of sex discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
. Through her efforts and the efforts of her peers, both houses of Congress passed the bill and it became law that year. Murray also knew that the statute would require active enforcement if the treatment of women, especially African American women, was to change.
In 1966, Murray was a founder of the National Organization for Women
as one of the 28 women and men attending the Third National Conference of the Commission on the Status of Women, the successor to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women.
In 1970, Murray was one of the founders of the Women's Rights Law Reporter
, the first legal periodical to focus exclusively on women's rights. She testified on discrimination against women before the 91st Congress of the United States.
in September 1973. She was the only black woman and the oldest student enrolled.
Murray received the Master of Divinity
degree from the General Theological Seminary in 1976. On January 8, 1977, at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., Murray became the first black woman ordained a priest in the 200-year history of the Protestant Episcopal Church.
Murray celebrated her first Holy Eucharist at the Chapel of the Cross Episcopal Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
, on February 13, 1977. The archives of the church's records show her grandmother, Cornelia Smith (Fitzgerald), as a "servant child" who had been baptized there on December 20, 1854. The event was so commemorative that it was recorded on national television by Charles Kuralt of CBS on his "On the Road" program.
Through her dedicated and innovative leadership in the ministry, Murray was a priest of a "floating parish" where she lived in Alexandria, Virginia, and a priest at the Church of the Holy Nativity in Baltimore, Maryland. Murray retired from the priesthood in January 1984 and moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
.
While Murray was a student at Hunter College, she wrote an essay about her grandfather, Robert Fitzgerald. This essay would later inspire her to write Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family. It was in school that she published her first article, "A Working Student," in her college's magazine.
In the spring of 1931, Murray wrote her first published poem, "Song of the Highway". The poem appeared in the anthology newspaper Color in 1934.
Murray's article "Negroes Are Fed Up" appeared in the Common Sense magazine, while her article about the Harlem race riot in 1943 was published in the Socialist Call.
In 1943, Murray finished her most famous poem "Dark Testament," in which she found common ground in the history of black and white Americans and put forth the fact that blacks must accept the challenge of their existence, and that whites must work to restore America's professed ideals about universal brotherhood.
In 1951, Murray published her first book, States' Laws on Race and Color (Studies in the Legal History of the South). Thurgood Marshall acclaimed the importance of her book for he called it the Bible for the civil rights lawyers who fought against segregation laws.
Murray and James Baldwin were the first black writer residents at the famous MacDowell Colony
for artists in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
In 1956 Murray published Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family, a biography of her maternal grandparents and also the story of brave black Americans who dealt with racial conflict. Proud Shoes established a new genre in American literature, the Afro-American family history. Proud Shoes was reprinted in 1978.
In 1970, Murray's collection of poetry, Dark Testament and Other Poems, was published. The collection includes 47 poems dealing with topics such as historical events and personages, love, death, friendship, and the universal difficulties of life.
In 1971, Murray published "Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII" in the George Washington Law Review.
Murray's autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, was published posthumously in 1987. It received both the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the Christopher Award and, in 1989, was reprinted as Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet.
Other titles include:
on July 1, 1985, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
. Funeral rights were held on July 5 in Washington, D.C., at the National Cathedral. Her obituary was featured in The New York Times.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
advocate, women's rights
Women's rights
Women's rights are entitlements and freedoms claimed for women and girls of all ages in many societies.In some places these rights are institutionalized or supported by law, local custom, and behaviour, whereas in others they may be ignored or suppressed...
activist and feminist, lawyer
Lawyer
A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...
, writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
, poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, teacher
Teacher
A teacher or schoolteacher is a person who provides education for pupils and students . The role of teacher is often formal and ongoing, carried out at a school or other place of formal education. In many countries, a person who wishes to become a teacher must first obtain specified professional...
, and ordained priest
Priest
A priest is a person authorized to perform the sacred rites of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in particular, rites of sacrifice to, and propitiation of, a deity or deities...
.
Through her numerous works, Murray demonstrated that knowledge has to be used in order to achieve justice and freedom, and in order to give back to society. Murray was raised in the segregated South, where she learned to live as a multiracial woman, for she was black, white, and Cherokee Indian. Murray later described herself as "biologically and psychologically integrated in a world where the separation of the races was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States" (Leland, The Chapel Hill Newspaper).
During her work she discovered enlightenment, for she later said: "I had never thought of white people as victims of oppression, but now I heard echoes of the black experience when I listened to white workers tell their personal stories of being evicted, starved out, beaten, and jailed.... Seeing the relationship between my personal cause and the universal cause of freedom released me from a sense of isolation, helped me to rid myself of vestiges of shame over my racial history, and gave me an unequivocal understanding that equality of treatment was my birthright and not something to be earned."
Murray received recognition for her service to society before her death in the form of being named "Woman of the Year" by the National Council of Negro Women in 1946; being awarded the Eleanor Roosevelt Award from the Professional Women's Caucus in 1971; and receiving honorary degrees from Dartmouth, Radcliffe, and Yale, as well as other colleges and universities.
The Pauli Murray Award was established in 1990 by Orange County, North Carolina
Orange County, North Carolina
Orange County is a county located in the U.S. state of North Carolina. As of the 2010 census, the population was 133,801. Its county seat is Hillsborough...
(where her grandmother was a slave and her great-grandfather was a slave owner), to commemorate her life's work.
The Pauli Murray Project, part of the Duke Human Rights Center at Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
, seeks to build a better Durham, North Carolina
Durham, North Carolina
Durham is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. It is the county seat of Durham County and also extends into Wake County. It is the fifth-largest city in the state, and the 85th-largest in the United States by population, with 228,330 residents as of the 2010 United States census...
by engaging a diversity of residents to lift up Murray's vision and legacy. The project supports community dialogues, documentation of important Durham stories, and efforts to employ history as a tool for engagement with social justice issues.
Childhood
Pauli Murray was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1910, to William Henry and Agnes Georgiana (Fitzgerald) Murray. She was the fourth of six children. Anna Pauline Murray got her name from her father's mother, Anne Price Murray, and her mother's sister, Pauline Fitzgerald Dame.When Pauli Murray was 3 years old, her mother died, and she went to live with her maternal aunt and grandparents, the Fitzgeralds, in Durham, North Carolina
Durham, North Carolina
Durham is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. It is the county seat of Durham County and also extends into Wake County. It is the fifth-largest city in the state, and the 85th-largest in the United States by population, with 228,330 residents as of the 2010 United States census...
. The rest of her siblings went to live with her father's sister and unmarried brother in Baltimore. Her father was unable to take care of them because he suffered from long-term effects of typhoid fever. As a child, Murray's ambition was to have her father released from the hospital and get the family back together when she was of age. Her ambition was shattered when a hospital employee allegedly killed her father in 1923.
Pauli Murray learned about her mother through stories people told her: her mother's beauty, her dark flashing eyes, her high spirit, her quick temper, and her forgiving nature. Stories about her parents conveyed both love and sadness into her development and were a great source of power for Murray. As a grown woman, Murray described these stories as if they were "From a realm beyond my senses," for to her "they both inspired and gave me my first stern lessons in the meaning of adversity" (Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 1).
Pauline Fitzgerald was 40 years old when she took Pauli Murray to live with her. Pauline would take her niece to the school were she taught. Murray learned along with other third-graders until she was old enough to enroll in school herself.
Murray was confirmed in the Episcopal Church when she was 9 years old, and in that same year she was adopted by her Aunt Pauline. Murray graduated from Hillside High School in Durham at the age of 15.
Family
FatherWilliam Henry Murray was a graduate of Howard University and was a teacher and principal in the Baltimore public schools. He suffered from long-term effects of typhoid fever and was allegedly killed by a hospital attendant in 1923.
Mother
Agnes Georgiana (Fitzgerald) Murray was a graduate of Hampton Training School for Nurses. She died in 1914 of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Maternal Grandmother
Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald was the daughter of an attorney, Sidney Smith, and a slave, Harriet Day, who was part Cherokee Indian. Cornelia was raised in the Smith household where her father spent a lot of time with her. Cornelia instilled in Pauli Murray a deep pride in her heritage.
Maternal Grandfather
Robert Fitzgerald was a native of Delaware. He was the son of a half-Irish free black and a white farm girl. He graduated from the Ashmun Institute in Pennsylvania and later served in the Union forces during the Civil War. He went to North Carolina to teach the freed slaves after the war, and there met Cornelia Smith.
Maternal Aunt
Pauline Fitzgerald was a schoolteacher. She was 43 years old when she took in Pauli Murray to live with her. She died in 1955 of cancer.
Early Adulthood
After graduating from high school, Pauli Murray was denied admission into the University of North CarolinaUniversity of North Carolina
Chartered in 1789, the University of North Carolina was one of the first public universities in the United States and the only one to graduate students in the eighteenth century...
law school because of her race. She and her aunt moved to New York in the hope she would be admitted to Columbia University, but she found out Columbia did not admit women. Later she talked to the admissions officer at Hunter College, but she did not have enough high school courses for admissions, so she studied at the New York public school to gain credentials. Murray graduated from Richmond Hill High in 1927 as one of the 25 to graduate with honors. She entered the freshmen class at Hunter College in the fall of 1928. She had to leave school during her sophomore year, because the stock market crashed and she lost her job.
In 1931, when Murray was in California looking for work, she received a letter form her Aunt Pauline that she was sick and worried. Murray returned to New York by traveling like a homeless boy. Once her aunt was better, she took a job and resumed her studies. In January 1933, Murray graduated from Hunter College
Hunter College
Hunter College, established in 1870, is a public university and one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Hunter grants undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees in more than one hundred fields of study, and is recognized...
with a major in English and a minor in history. She was one of four black students who graduated that semester.
In the 1930s, Murray worked for the Works Progress Administration
Works Progress Administration
The Works Progress Administration was the largest and most ambitious New Deal agency, employing millions of unskilled workers to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads, and operated large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects...
(WPA) as a teacher in the New York City public school system with the Remedial Reading Project. She also worked with the WPA Workers' Education Project.
Lawyer
Pauli Murray first became interested in a career in law when she was arrested in Virginia in March 1940. She was on a trip to Durham with her friend, Adelene McBean, in the Greyhound bus, when she refused to follow the Jim Crow lawsJim Crow laws
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans...
of segregated buses. She was charged with disorderly conduct and creating a public disturbance. She and her friend were jailed for three days, found guilty, and paid a fine. While she was in jail, she and McBean drafted a "Statement of Facts" about their case. Their draft was praised by their attorneys for its accuracy.
Murray enrolled at Howard University Law School during the fall of 1941 wanting to become a civil rights lawyer. She was working on Odell Waller's case and published "All for Mr. Davis: The Story of Sharecropper Odell Waller" in which she explained the case to the nation. Even though all her appeals failed and Waller was executed in 1942, the Supreme Court struck down the Virginia poll tax two decades later in the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution
Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Twenty-fourth Amendment prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax...
.
As a senior at Howard, Murray was elected president of her class and chief justice of the Court of Peers. In 1943, employing one of the earliest uses of non-violent tactics, she and a group of female students from Howard successfully organized the first sit-in demonstration resulting in the desegregation of a cafeteria in Washington, D.C.
Murray graduated from Howard as valedictorian
Valedictorian
Valedictorian is an academic title conferred upon the student who delivers the closing or farewell statement at a graduation ceremony. Usually, the valedictorian is the highest ranked student among those graduating from an educational institution...
in 1944.. As her senior law thesis she examined the Supreme Court's civil rights decisions in the late 19th century. This was of great significance because her argument "separate but equal" doctrine voiced the minority individual. This argument was also greatly important because 10 years later the lawyers for Oliver Brown used her argument to help win the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case, in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that the doctrine of "separate but equal" would no longer apply to America's education.
Murray sought admission to Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
for an advanced law degree but was denied admission because she was a woman. She then studied at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, where she received her Master of Laws
Master of Laws
The Master of Laws is an advanced academic degree, pursued by those holding a professional law degree, and is commonly abbreviated LL.M. from its Latin name, Legum Magister. The University of Oxford names its taught masters of laws B.C.L...
(LLM) degree. She was admitted to the State Bar of California
State Bar of California
The State Bar of California is California's official bar association. It is responsible for managing the admission of lawyers to the practice of law, investigating complaints of professional misconduct, and prescribing appropriate discipline...
on January 2, 1946.
While working as a law clerk, Murray gained admission to the New York Bar and opened a law office in the city. She became the first black deputy attorney general of California on January 1946. In that same year, when in the Morgan v. Virginia case the United States Supreme Court held the Virginia Jim Crow statue invalid, Murray was vindicated.
In 1949, Murray ran for a New York City Council seat for Brooklyn's 10th senatorial district as candidate for the Liberal Party where she came in second place for the democratic candidate.
In 1956, Murray was hired as an associate attorney in the nationally prestigious law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison in New York City. She worked there until 1960 as the only female attorney in the firm. Here she experienced discrimination for being a woman.
In 1951, Murray began her graduate study at Yale Law School
Yale Law School
Yale Law School, or YLS, is the law school of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Established in 1824, it offers the J.D., LL.M., J.S.D. and M.S.L. degrees in law. It also hosts visiting scholars, visiting researchers and a number of legal research centers...
; in 1965, she received her Doctor of Juridical Science
Doctor of Juridical Science
Doctor of Juridical Science, Doctor of the Science of Law, Scientiae Juridicae Doctor , abbreviated J.S.D. or S.J.D., is a research doctorate in law and equivalent to the PhD It is offered primarily in the United States, where it originated, and in Canada...
degree. She was the first black person awarded this degree by Yale, and in 1972 she was named Louis Stulberg
Louis Stulberg
Louis Stulberg was president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union from 1966 to 1975.-Early life:Louis Stulberg emigrated with his parents from Poland to Canada in 1904. In 1915, he became a cutter and joined Local 83 of the ILGWU...
Professor of Law and Politics at Brandeis.
A contemporary and friend of Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was the First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945. She supported the New Deal policies of her husband, distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and became an advocate for civil rights. After her husband's death in 1945, Roosevelt continued to be an international...
, Murray was a professor of American studies
American studies
American studies or American civilization is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the study of the United States. It traditionally incorporates the study of history, literature, and critical theory, but also includes fields as diverse as law, art, the media, film, religious studies, urban...
at Brandeis University
Brandeis University
Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...
from 1968 to 1973 and also taught law in Ghana
Ghana
Ghana , officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country located in West Africa. It is bordered by Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south...
. She was the author of the 1950 book "States' Laws on Race and Color," which catalogued state statutes discriminating against African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, and other groups.
Civil Rights
Pauli Murray first protested against the Jim Crow laws of the South when as a young girl she refused to ride the segregated bus and would walk wherever she needed to go. She also refused to go to a segregated college after she graduated from high school. She stood up against racial discrimination when she applied to the graduate school at the University of North Carolina in 1938. She received a rejection letter from the admission office informing her that "members of your race are not admitted to the University" (Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 115). Being only the second black student to apply to the university she received a lot of attention from the media, which resulted in having a lot of black students applying to the university. Later in 1951 when the university accepted several black students, Murray realized that she had an important role as a member of the struggle for equality and equal opportunity. The acceptance of those black students to the university was so important to Murray that she described it as "a symbol of acceptance stretching back to my Grandmother Cornelia and her relationship to the Chapel Hill Smiths, whose position as benefactors of the university from which I was excluded had intensified my feeling of being disinherited" (Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 128).
While still a law student at Howard, Murray and her fellow classmates organized and led successful sit-in demonstrations aimed at desegregating restaurants in Washington, D.C.
Murray continued fighting racial discrimination when she worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP, is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909. Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to...
and joined the Congress of Racial Equality
Congress of Racial Equality
The Congress of Racial Equality or CORE was a U.S. civil rights organization that originally played a pivotal role for African-Americans in the Civil Rights Movement...
(CORE). Murray contributed to the NAACP's litigation strategy in Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 , was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which...
.
Women's Rights
When Murray graduated from Howard University law school, she won the Rosenwald fellowship for graduate study at Harvard University. But Harvard would not accept her because it did not accept women into its law school. Murray noticed that her male colleagues at Howard found her rejection amusing and thought nothing of it. Thus this led her to feel militant about the injustices of gender discrimination. Murray knew that if she wanted to fight gender discrimination, first she had to become a lawyer, so she entered the Boalt Hall of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.In 1961, Murray was appointed to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women
Presidential Commission on the Status of Women
The Presidential Commission on the Status of Women was established to advise the President of the United States on issues concerning the status of women. It was created by John F. Kennedy's executive order 10980 signed December 14, 1961.-Background:...
(PCSW). While serving on the commission and studying at Yale Law School, Murray authored a series of papers outlining a legal strategy for challenging sex discrimination by states. She compared gender discrimination to the Jim Crow laws, calling it "Jane Crow," the twin. These arguments were first published in an article co-authored with Mary Eastwood entitled "Jane Crow and the Law."
Murray analyzed state laws and compiled a catalog of ways in which women were kept from legal equality. She argued that these injustices could be overturned with a Supreme Court ruling based on the Fifth Amendment
Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which is part of the Bill of Rights, protects against abuse of government authority in a legal procedure. Its guarantees stem from English common law which traces back to the Magna Carta in 1215...
and Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments.Its Citizenship Clause provides a broad definition of citizenship that overruled the Dred Scott v...
. Murray firmly believed that these amendments guaranteed women the rights and protections they needed.
In 1962, Murray was selected as a member of the Committee on Civil and Political Rights. This committee was one of seven study committees set up by the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. The committee used Murray's letter "A Proposal to Reexamine the Applicability of the Fourteenth Amendment to State Laws and Practices Which Discriminate on the Basis of Sex Per Se" as substance for its final report.
Murray described her feelings about gender discrimination: "In my preoccupation with the brutalities of racism, I had failed until now to recognize the subtler, more ambiguous expressions of sexism. I soon learned that women were often the objects of ridicule disguised as a joke."
In 1964, Murray campaigned for the inclusion of sex discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a landmark piece of legislation in the United States that outlawed major forms of discrimination against African Americans and women, including racial segregation...
. Through her efforts and the efforts of her peers, both houses of Congress passed the bill and it became law that year. Murray also knew that the statute would require active enforcement if the treatment of women, especially African American women, was to change.
In 1966, Murray was a founder of the National Organization for Women
National Organization for Women
The National Organization for Women is the largest feminist organization in the United States. It was founded in 1966 and has a membership of 500,000 contributing members. The organization consists of 550 chapters in all 50 U.S...
as one of the 28 women and men attending the Third National Conference of the Commission on the Status of Women, the successor to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women.
In 1970, Murray was one of the founders of the Women's Rights Law Reporter
Women's Rights Law Reporter
The Women's Rights Law Reporter is a journal of legal scholarship published by an independent student group at Rutgers School of Law—Newark. The journal provides a forum for exploring law and public policy relating to women’s rights and gender. The journal is published quarterly...
, the first legal periodical to focus exclusively on women's rights. She testified on discrimination against women before the 91st Congress of the United States.
Episcopal Priest
Murray belonged to an Episcopal Christian church. She left the church for a year in 1966 because it refused to include women in active roles during services. But when her friend Renee Barlow was diagnosed with cancer, she started to question human destiny. When Barlow died in 1973, there was no priest available, so Murray ministered to Barlow as she had done with her Aunt Pauline. After this experience, Murray felt it was her calling to commit herself to total service to the church. She applied for admission into the holy orders and entered the General Theological SeminaryGeneral Theological Seminary
The General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church is a seminary of the Episcopal Church in the United States and is located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan in New York....
in September 1973. She was the only black woman and the oldest student enrolled.
Murray received the Master of Divinity
Master of Divinity
In the academic study of theology, the Master of Divinity is the first professional degree of the pastoral profession in North America...
degree from the General Theological Seminary in 1976. On January 8, 1977, at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., Murray became the first black woman ordained a priest in the 200-year history of the Protestant Episcopal Church.
Murray celebrated her first Holy Eucharist at the Chapel of the Cross Episcopal Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Chapel Hill is a town in Orange County, North Carolina, United States and the home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UNC Health Care...
, on February 13, 1977. The archives of the church's records show her grandmother, Cornelia Smith (Fitzgerald), as a "servant child" who had been baptized there on December 20, 1854. The event was so commemorative that it was recorded on national television by Charles Kuralt of CBS on his "On the Road" program.
Through her dedicated and innovative leadership in the ministry, Murray was a priest of a "floating parish" where she lived in Alexandria, Virginia, and a priest at the Church of the Holy Nativity in Baltimore, Maryland. Murray retired from the priesthood in January 1984 and moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh is the second-largest city in the US Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Allegheny County. Regionally, it anchors the largest urban area of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley, and nationally, it is the 22nd-largest urban area in the United States...
.
Writer
As a 15-year-old, Murray wrote The Angel of the Desert, a novel that was stereotypical and lurid. Her characters included a blond, blue-eyed protagonist and a wicked, dark-haired sister. Her novel was published in a serial form in the Carolina Times, the black-owned newspaper in Durham.While Murray was a student at Hunter College, she wrote an essay about her grandfather, Robert Fitzgerald. This essay would later inspire her to write Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family. It was in school that she published her first article, "A Working Student," in her college's magazine.
In the spring of 1931, Murray wrote her first published poem, "Song of the Highway". The poem appeared in the anthology newspaper Color in 1934.
Murray's article "Negroes Are Fed Up" appeared in the Common Sense magazine, while her article about the Harlem race riot in 1943 was published in the Socialist Call.
In 1943, Murray finished her most famous poem "Dark Testament," in which she found common ground in the history of black and white Americans and put forth the fact that blacks must accept the challenge of their existence, and that whites must work to restore America's professed ideals about universal brotherhood.
In 1951, Murray published her first book, States' Laws on Race and Color (Studies in the Legal History of the South). Thurgood Marshall acclaimed the importance of her book for he called it the Bible for the civil rights lawyers who fought against segregation laws.
Murray and James Baldwin were the first black writer residents at the famous MacDowell Colony
MacDowell Colony
The MacDowell Colony is an art colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, U.S.A., founded in 1907 by Marian MacDowell, pianist and wife of composer Edward MacDowell. She established the institution and its endowment chiefly with donated funds...
for artists in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
In 1956 Murray published Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family, a biography of her maternal grandparents and also the story of brave black Americans who dealt with racial conflict. Proud Shoes established a new genre in American literature, the Afro-American family history. Proud Shoes was reprinted in 1978.
In 1970, Murray's collection of poetry, Dark Testament and Other Poems, was published. The collection includes 47 poems dealing with topics such as historical events and personages, love, death, friendship, and the universal difficulties of life.
In 1971, Murray published "Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII" in the George Washington Law Review.
Murray's autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, was published posthumously in 1987. It received both the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the Christopher Award and, in 1989, was reprinted as Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet.
Other titles include:
- Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware: Forty Years of Letters in Black and White
- Pauli Murray: Selected Sermons and Writings (selected and with an introduction by Anthony B. Pinn)
Death
Pauli Murray died of pancreatic cancerPancreatic cancer
Pancreatic cancer refers to a malignant neoplasm of the pancreas. The most common type of pancreatic cancer, accounting for 95% of these tumors is adenocarcinoma, which arises within the exocrine component of the pancreas. A minority arises from the islet cells and is classified as a...
on July 1, 1985, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh is the second-largest city in the US Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Allegheny County. Regionally, it anchors the largest urban area of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley, and nationally, it is the 22nd-largest urban area in the United States...
. Funeral rights were held on July 5 in Washington, D.C., at the National Cathedral. Her obituary was featured in The New York Times.
External links
- Oral History Interview with Pauli Murray from Oral Histories of the American South at UNC-Chapel Hill
- Pauli Murray Project at the Duke Human Rights Center, Duke University
- Biography from American Civil Liberties Union: Women Who Put Women's Rights on the ACLU Agenda
- Biography from NCWriters.org
- Pauli Murray Award by Orange County, North Carolina
- Pauli Murray Papers at Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University