Pauli Murray: Postwar Revolutionary

 



Pauli Murray
Pauli Murray (Google Images)

Born Anna Pauli Murray.

Her mother passed away when she was three years old.

And so she moved to North Carolina to live with her Pauline, who was a teacher.

Her father suffered from depression after her mother’s passing and was murdered by a white guard in a mental hospital.

The six children they had together, we're separated amongst the family.

Transgender was not a term prior to the 1960s, so she did not know how to identify what she struggled with as far as with her gender and her sexuality.

As a child, she wore boy clothes and she preferred to play with the boy toys.  In her adulthood, she preferred short hair over long hair and male slacks over skirts.

When it came to nickname, she wanted to be called Paul or P. Before settling on the gender-neutral name of Pauli.

Pauli Murray
Pauli Murray (Google Images)


She graduated from high school at the age of 15. Her refusal to attend a historically black college or university was because she did not want to be a part of the segregated school system.

However, she experienced racial and gender discrimination as well as economic discrimination when attempting to go to college. Her dream college was Columbia University. But they didn't accept her because she was a woman. Their sister school, Barnard College, was too expensive for her to attend so she enrolled in Hunter College, which was racially diverse woman's college that offered free tuition.

While in school, she rented a room at the Harlem YWCA and took our jobs to pay for rent. She often skipped meals and wore hand me downs to save money.

In 1938, she applied to the University of North Carolina and received a rejection letter where they said that members of her race were not admitted at the school. In response, Pauli contacted the President of the United States as well as the first Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. They weren't really able to do much to assist with her rejection from the school. However Eleanor Roosevelt and she became good friends.

In 1941, she began Howard University Law School where she was the only woman admitted in her class.

She coined the term Jane Crow to describe the double discrimination she experienced as a poor mixed-race woman in America. She formed CORE, which stands for Congress of Racial Equality at Howard University.

Her academic focus was on civil rights. Her thesis was on how laws excluded people based on race.

Once she graduated in 1945 from law school, she became Deputy Attorney General for California. She was the first black person to graduate with a doctorate and judicial science from Yale in 1965.

In 1966, she formed NOW, which stands for National Organization for Women, with a friend.

After her secret same sex lover passed away in 1973, she enrolled in seminary and was the first black woman priest ordained by the Episcopal Church in 1977.

By the time she passed away on July 1, 1985, writing was one way that she was about to obtain peace with struggles with social economic hardships, race, gender, and sexuality. Her first book, State laws on Race and Color was published in 1945 and was referenced by Thurgood Marshall.in the famous case Brown versus Board of Education. She co-wrote Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII in 1965. Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family was published in 1978 about her family. Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet was published after she passed away in 1989.

Works Cited

 

Azaransky, Sarah, The Dream Is Freedom: Pauli Murray and American Democratic Faith (2011; online edn, Oxford Academic, 22 Sept. 2011), Accessed March 15, 2023 Oxford Academics 

Jennings, Terry Catasús, and Stevens-Holsey, Rosita. Pauli Murray: The Life of a Pioneering Feminist and Civil Rights Activist. (New York: Bonnier Publishing USA, 2022), Accessed March 15, 2023 ProQuest Ebook Central.

Murray, Pauli and Mary Eastwood, Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII (1965)

Murray, Pauli, Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet (1989)

Murray, Pauli, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family, (1978)

Murray, Pauli, States’ Laws on Race and Color, (1947)

Rosenberg, Rosalind, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2017). Accessed March 15, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central.


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