Pauli Murray was a lawyer, scholar, poet, and priest whose legal reasoning ran years ahead of the courts. Murray’s student work at Howard University argued for a direct attack on “separate but equal,” and the concept of “Jane Crow” — discrimination compounded by race and sex — gave civil rights and feminist lawyers a framework they would use for decades. In 1977 Murray became the first African American woman ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church.
At a Glance
- Born
- 20 November 1910, Baltimore, Maryland
- Died
- 1 July 1985, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- Birth name
- Anna Pauline Murray
- Known for
- “Jane Crow and the Law” (1965); States’ Laws on Race and Color (1951); Proud Shoes (1956); co-founder of the National Organization for Women (1966)
- HBCU ties
- Howard University (Law degree, graduated first in the class, 1944)
- Fields
- Law · Civil Rights · Religion · Literature
- Era
- Civil Rights Era
Early Life
Anna Pauline Murray was born in Baltimore on 20 November 1910. Murray’s mother died in 1914, and the child was sent to Durham, North Carolina, to be raised by an aunt, Pauline Fitzgerald Dame, a schoolteacher, in a household that included the Fitzgerald grandparents. Murray’s father, William Murray, was later committed to Crownsville State Hospital in Maryland, where he was beaten to death by a white attendant.
The Fitzgerald family history — a grandmother, Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald, born into slavery as the daughter of an enslaved woman and a white slaveholder’s son, and a grandfather, Robert Fitzgerald, a free Black Union veteran who taught freedpeople in North Carolina — became the subject of Murray’s later family memoir. Murray graduated from Durham’s Hillside High School at sixteen, moved to New York, and earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Hunter College in 1933.
In 1938 Murray applied to graduate school in sociology at the University of North Carolina and was rejected because of race. The rejection, publicized in the Black press and in letters to university and national officials, became an early public test of segregation in Southern higher education.
Life and Work
In 1940, traveling by bus from New York to Durham, Murray and a friend, Adelene McBean, were arrested in Petersburg, Virginia, after refusing to move to broken seats in the segregated section. Murray then worked with the Workers Defense League on the case of Odell Waller, a Black sharecropper sentenced to death in Virginia, an experience that led directly to law school. At Howard University School of Law, Murray helped organize student sit-ins at segregated Washington restaurants and in 1944 graduated first in the class. A seminar paper that year proposed challenging Plessy v. Ferguson head-on as a violation of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, an approach the NAACP’s lawyers later pursued in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
Harvard Law School rejected Murray’s application for graduate study because it did not admit women. Murray instead earned an LL.M. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1945. Commissioned by the Women’s Division of the Methodist Church, Murray compiled States’ Laws on Race and Color (1951), a state-by-state survey of segregation statutes that civil rights lawyers used as a reference; Thurgood Marshall reportedly called it the bible of their work. In 1956 Murray published Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family and joined the New York law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
After teaching at the Ghana School of Law in 1960, Murray served on a committee of President John F. Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women and pressed the argument that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause barred sex discrimination. With Mary Eastwood, Murray published “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII” in the George Washington Law Review in 1965, the same year Murray became the first African American to earn the doctor of juridical science degree at Yale Law School. In 1966 Murray was among the founders of the National Organization for Women.
When Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the American Civil Liberties Union’s brief in Reed v. Reed (1971), the first case in which the Supreme Court struck down a law for discriminating on the basis of sex, she listed Murray and Dorothy Kenyon as co-authors in recognition of their earlier arguments. Murray taught American studies at Brandeis University from 1968 to 1973, offering some of its first courses in African American and women’s studies, and published the poetry collection Dark Testament and Other Poems in 1970.
Murray then left the academy for the church, studying at General Theological Seminary in New York. On 8 January 1977, at Washington National Cathedral, Murray was ordained to the Episcopal priesthood, the first African American woman to hold that office, and soon celebrated a first Eucharist at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the church in which Murray’s enslaved grandmother had been baptized.
Legacy
Murray died of cancer in Pittsburgh on 1 July 1985. An autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat, was published posthumously in 1987 (later reissued as Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet). Murray’s papers, held at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, document a lifelong struggle with gender identity that Murray did not discuss publicly; many historians and the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice now use they/them pronouns when writing about Murray.
Recognition has come largely after death. The Pauli Murray Family Home in Durham was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2016, Yale University opened Pauli Murray College in 2017, the Episcopal Church added Murray to its calendar of commemorations in 2012, and the U.S. Mint featured Murray on a 2024 quarter in its American Women Quarters program.
Legal scholars now treat Murray as a bridge between the civil rights and women’s rights movements. The recognition that Black women faced discrimination that neither race law nor sex law alone could capture anticipated the later theory of intersectionality, and Murray’s constitutional arguments reached the Supreme Court years before their author was credited.
Pauli Murray showed that discrimination by race and by sex could compound each other, and built legal arguments that the courts adopted years before crediting their author. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 20 November 1910 Born Anna Pauline Murray in Baltimore, Maryland.
- 1933 Graduates from Hunter College in New York.
- 1938 Rejected by the University of North Carolina graduate school because of race.
- 1940 Arrested in Petersburg, Virginia, for refusing to move to a segregated bus seat.
- 1944 Graduates first in the class at Howard University School of Law.
- 1951 Publishes States’ Laws on Race and Color.
- 1965 Earns J.S.D. at Yale; publishes “Jane Crow and the Law” with Mary Eastwood.
- 1966 Co-founds the National Organization for Women.
- 8 January 1977 Ordained an Episcopal priest at Washington National Cathedral.
- 1 July 1985 Dies in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Sources and Further Reading
- Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
- Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).
- Yale Law School, “Historical Profile: Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray ’65 JSD.” Link
- NCpedia, “Murray, Anna Pauline (Pauli).” Link
- National Women’s History Museum, “Pauli Murray.” Link
- Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, “The Pioneering Pauli Murray: Lawyer, Activist, Scholar and Priest.” Link
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