Pauli Murray and the Credit She Never Received
Near Raleigh Durham, North Carolina
In nineteen seventy-one, Ruth Bader Ginsburg submitted the American Civil Liberties Union's brief to the United States Supreme Court in a case called Reed v. Reed. The brief argued that the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause applied to sex discrimination the same way it applied to race. When Ginsburg submitted it, she put two names on the cover that had nothing to do with the Reed case itself: Dorothy Kenyon and Pauli Murray. She put them there because they had written the intellectual architecture she was building on. The argument was theirs. Ginsburg wanted the record to say so.
Pauli Murray was born in Baltimore in nineteen ten and raised in Durham, North Carolina, in the home of a maternal aunt on Carroll Street. Murray's mother had died when Murray was three. Murray attended Hillside High School in Durham, graduated from Hunter College in New York, and earned a law degree from Howard University in nineteen forty-four, the only woman in the graduating class.
At Howard, Murray coined a phrase. The intersection of racial and gender discrimination, the double burden carried by Black women, Murray called Jane Crow. The term named something that existing civil rights law had not yet thought to address. Murray argued that the Fourteenth Amendment was being applied too narrowly, that its logic extended to every form of arbitrary exclusion, and that a legal strategy along those lines could dismantle both Jim Crow and Jane Crow.
Thurgood Marshall read Murray's arguments carefully. Scholars have documented how Murray's legal memos at Howard shaped the approach Marshall used in building toward Brown v. Board of Education.
Murray was also a person whose gender identity was more complex than the categories available in the nineteen thirties and forties allowed. In private correspondence now held at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, Murray described a felt sense of living in a body that did not match who she was, sought hormone therapy and was denied, and used male pronouns in some private writing. Murray's romantic relationships across her life were with women. The Pauli Murray Center in Durham interprets this history explicitly.
In nineteen seventy-seven, at the age of sixty-six, Murray was ordained as an Episcopal priest, the first Black woman to receive that ordination in the denomination's history. She chose for her first Eucharist a church in Chapel Hill where her grandmother, born enslaved, had been baptized.
Murray died in nineteen eighty-five. The family home on Carroll Street in Durham was designated a National Historic Landmark in December two thousand sixteen.
