Pauli Murray

Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray (November 20, 1910 – July 1, 1985) was an American civil rights activist, advocate, legal scholar and theorist, author and – later in life – an Episcopal priest. Murray's work influenced the civil rights movement and expanded legal protection for gender equality. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Murray was essentially orphaned and then raised mostly by her maternal aunt in Durham, North Carolina. At age 16, she moved to New York City to attend Hunter College, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1933. In 1940, Murray sat in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus with a friend, and they were arrested for violating state segregation laws. This incident, and her subsequent involvement with the socialist Workers' Defense League, led her to pursue her career goal of working as a civil rights lawyer. She enrolled in the law school at Howard University, where she was the only woman in her class. Murray graduated first in the class of 1944, but she was denied the chance to do post-graduate work at Harvard University because of her gender. She called such prejudice against women "Jane Crow", alluding to the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. She received a fellowship from the Rosenwald Fund which enabled her to earn a master's degree in law at University of California, Berkeley. In 1965 she became the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School. As a lawyer, Murray argued for civil rights and women's rights. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall called Murray's 1950 book States' Laws on Race and Color, the "bible" of the civil rights movement. Murray was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to...