Pauli Murray's First Eucharist

The Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill is an Episcopal church that has stood on Franklin Street since eighteen forty-eight. For most of its history it was a church that served white Episcopalians. Enslaved people were baptized there, in a separate ceremony, in the years before the Civil War. Among those baptized was a woman named Cornelia, an enslaved person held by the Smith family. Cornelia was Pauli Murray's grandmother.

On February thirteenth, nineteen seventy-seven, Pauli Murray stood at the altar of the Chapel of the Cross and administered the Eucharist for the first time as an ordained Episcopal priest. Murray was sixty-six years old. The ordination had taken place five weeks earlier, making Murray the first Black woman to be ordained as a priest in the history of the Episcopal Church.

Murray had chosen this church deliberately, and the choice carried its full weight. The building where her grandmother had been baptized as an enslaved person was the building where Murray, sixty years after Cornelia's death, would say the words of the communion and offer the bread and cup to the congregation. The continuity between those two events, across slavery, emancipation, Jim Crow, legal segregation, and the long fight for women's ordination in the Episcopal Church, was not accidental. Murray understood exactly what she was doing.

Murray had spent decades fighting on two legal fronts simultaneously, the fight against racial discrimination and the fight against sex discrimination, often without acknowledgment that both fights were hers to lead. At Howard Law she was the only woman in her class. She watched the civil rights movement treat gender as secondary. She watched the women's movement treat race as secondary. She held both at once.

The Chapel of the Cross still stands on Franklin Street. A historical marker commemorates what happened there on February thirteenth, nineteen seventy-seven.