Legal Visionary Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray and the Fight Against "Jane Crow"

Author’s Note: The Pauli Murray Center currently advises the use of she/hers, he/his, and they/them pronouns interchangeably when “discussing Pauli Murray in general.” Read more from the Center about the “evolving issue” of representing Dr. Murray’s gender identity and self-expression in scholarship.

Civil rights and women’s rights activist, lawyer, scholar, poet, and Episcopal priest Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray was the first to use the term “Jane Crow” to describe the racism and misogyny African-American women faced in the post-Reconstruction era leading up to the civil rights movement. Their work and activism helped shape legal ideas and arguments for gender and racial equality in the decades leading up to the civil rights movement.

Early Life

The Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.

Anne Pauline Murray was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 20, 1910, the fourth of six children to schoolteacher William H. Murray and nurse Agnes Fitzgerald Murray. The Murray family were descendants of enslaved African Americans, free Black people, white enslavers, and American Indians. After their mother Agnes died in 1914, three-year-old Pauli Murray was sent to live with grandparents and was raised by their aunt, godmother, and namesake Pauline in Durham, North Carolina.

Pauli Murray, a gifted and high-achieving student, finished high school by the age of sixteen. S/he was inspired by a beloved high school teacher to attend Columbia University; however, Murray was denied admittance as the university didn’t accept women at the time. After the rejection, Murray wrote the first of many letters to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which one Murray scholar good-humoredly referred to as “confrontations by typewriter.”

Murray moved to New York City at sixteen to attend Hunter College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1933. During their time in New York, Murray befriended Langston Hughes and met other prominent Harlem Renaissance poets and artists. They spent much of the Depression publishing poetry and working odd jobs. Murray took a position in 1935 at a federally-funded “She-She-She” conservation camp, established by Eleanor Roosevelt, to provide young American women with employment and to spur national infrastructure.

At the conservation camp, Murray met and developed a relationship with Peg Holmes, a white counselor. Murray was open about their relationship with women, despite never referring to themselves as a lesbian. Their longest relationship was with Irene “Renee” Barlow, whom Murray met in 1956 at law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. Murray was less candid in public about it, but often referred to their experience with questioning their gender identity in autobiographical writings and correspondence. Murray changed their legal first name to “Pauli” in the 1930s, and scholars have discovered that Murray sought, but did not find, gender-affirming care during the 1940s.

Education & Career

Pauli Murray began attending Howard University Law School in 1941 by recommendation from Thurgood Marshall, who had seen Murray speak; Murray was the only woman in their class. Murray applied for and was denied a fellowship at Harvard Law School because of their gender, despite a letter of recommendation from then-President Roosevelt. Instead, Murray completed a post-graduate fellowship at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Murray lived in Ghana from 1960-1964, while working at the Ghana School of Law. They were the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science from Yale Law School in 1965. After completing their doctorate, Dr. Murray took teaching positions at Benedict College and Brandeis University.

Activism

The Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.

In 1940, Murray and a friend sat in the whites-only section of a bus on their way from New York City to Durham and were arrested, a full fifteen years before Rosa Parks’ Montgomery bus boycott. Murray, a lifelong hater of segregation, not only wrote articles and delivered speeches on the subject, but also organized sit-ins in the 1940s while at Howard, decades before the sit-ins of the civil rights movement. In 1950, s/he published States’ Laws on Race and Color, later referred to as the “bible” of Jim Crow laws by NAACP Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall. A paper written by Murray in their final year at Howard was the first to argue for using the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson. Professor Spottswood Robinson would refer to the paper a decade later while helping craft the NAACP’s winning argument in Brown v. Board of Education.

Murray was appointed in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. They were one of the first to criticize the sexism within the civil rights movement with their speech, “The Negro Woman in the Quest for Equality.” Murray’s landmark article “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII” in the George Washington Law Review provided the first comprehensive overview of sex discrimination within American law. In 1966, s/he co-founded the National Organization for Women. Dr. Murray was also named by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as co-author of a brief on the 1971 case Reed v. Reed.

Priesthood & Later Life

Dr. Murray left their position at Brandeis University in 1973 to attend General Theological Seminary, where they received a Master of Divinity in 1976. Murray then became the first woman-identified African American ordained as a Episcopal priest and was among the first generation of women Episcopal priests. Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray passed away on July 1, 1985, of pancreatic cancer at the age of 74. S/he was named an Episcopal Saint in 2012. Murray published a volume of poetry, Dark Testament in 1970, as well as two autobiographies: Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family in 1956, and Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, published posthumously in 1987.

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