61 Facts About Pauli Murray

In 1940, Pauli Murray sat in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus with a friend, and they were arrested for violating state segregation laws.

Pauli Murray enrolled in the law school at Howard University, where she was the only woman in her class.

Pauli Murray graduated first in her class, but she was denied the chance to do post-graduate work at Harvard University because of her gender.

Pauli Murray called such prejudice against women "Jane Crow", alluding to the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States.

Pauli Murray earned a master's degree in law at University of California, Berkeley, and in 1965 she became the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School.

In 1973, Pauli Murray left academia for activities associated with the Episcopal Church.

Pauli Murray became an ordained priest in 1977, among the first generation of women priests and the first African-American woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest.

Pauli Murray had a brief, annulled marriage to a man, and several deep relationships with women.

Pauli Murray was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 20,1910.

Three-year-old Pauli Murray was sent to Durham, North Carolina, to live with her mother's family.

Pauli Murray attended St Titus Episcopal Church with her mother's family, as had her mother before Murray was born.

Pauli Murray had wanted to rescue him, but in 1923, he was bludgeoned to death by a white guard with a baseball bat.

Pauli Murray lived in Durham until the age of 16, at which point she moved to New York to finish high school and prepare for college.

Pauli Murray's presence discomfited Maude's neighbors as Pauli Murray was more visibly of partial African descent.

Pauli Murray graduated with her second high school diploma and honors from Richmond Hill High School in 1927, and enrolled at Hunter College for two years.

Pauli Murray married William Roy Wynn, known as Billy Wynn, in secret on November 30,1930, but soon came to regret the decision.

Pauli Murray was encouraged in her writing by one of her English instructors, from whom she earned an "A" for an essay about her maternal grandfather.

Pauli Murray published an article and several poems in the college paper.

Pauli Murray graduated in 1933 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English.

Pauli Murray took a job selling subscriptions to Opportunity, an academic journal of the National Urban League, a civil rights organization based in New York City.

Poor health forced her to resign, and her doctor recommended that Pauli Murray seek a healthier environment.

Pauli Murray took a position at Camp Tera, a "She-She-She" conservation camp.

Pauli Murray applied to PhD program in sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1938, but was rejected because of her race.

Pauli Murray wrote to officials ranging from the university president to President Roosevelt, releasing their responses to the media in an attempt to embarrass them into action.

NAACP leader Roy Wilkins opposed representing her because Pauli Murray had already released her correspondence, which he considered "not diplomatic".

In early 1940, Pauli Murray was walking the streets in Rhode Island, distraught after "the disappearance of a woman friend".

Pauli Murray was transferred to Bellevue Hospital in New York City for psychiatric treatment.

Pauli Murray wrote to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on Waller's behalf.

In 1942, while still in law school, Pauli Murray joined the Congress of Racial Equality.

Pauli Murray participated in sit-ins challenging several Washington, DC, restaurants with discriminatory seating policies.

Pauli Murray was elected chief justice of the Howard Court of Peers, the highest student position at Howard, and in 1944 she graduated first in her class.

Pauli Murray's master's degree thesis was entitled "The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment", which argued that "the right to work is an inalienable right".

In 1949, Pauli Murray was the unsuccessful Liberal Party candidate for a seat in the New York City Council from Brooklyn.

Pauli Murray was the first Black woman hired as an associate attorney at the Paul, Weiss law firm in New York City, working there from 1956 to 1960.

Pauli Murray was the firm's second Black associate after Bill Coleman.

Pauli Murray first met Ruth Bader Ginsburg at Paul, Weiss, when Ginsburg was briefly a summer associate there.

Pauli Murray was an outspoken activist at the forefront of the civil rights movement, alongside such leaders as Martin Luther King Jr.

Pauli Murray coined the term Jane Crow, which demonstrated Murray's belief that Jim Crow laws negatively affected African-American women.

In 1950, Pauli Murray published States' Laws on Race and Color, an examination and critique of state segregation laws throughout the nation.

Pauli Murray drew on psychological and sociological evidence as well as legal, an innovative discussion technique for which she had previously been criticized by Howard professors.

Pauli Murray argued for civil rights lawyers to challenge state segregation laws as unconstitutional directly, rather than trying to prove the inequality of so-called "separate but equal" facilities, as was argued in some challenges.

Pauli Murray's approach was influential to the NAACP arguments in Brown v Board of Education, by which they drew from psychological studies assessing the effects of segregation on students in school.

In 1964, Pauli Murray wrote an influential legal memorandum in support of the National Women's Party's successful effort to add "sex" as a protected category in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Pauli Murray lived in Ghana from 1960 to 1961, serving on the faculty of the Ghana School of Law.

Pauli Murray returned to the US and studied at Yale Law School, in 1965 becoming the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from the school.

Pauli Murray's dissertation was titled, "Roots of the Racial Crisis: Prologue to Policy".

Pauli Murray served as vice president of Benedict College from 1967 to 1968.

Pauli Murray left Benedict to become a professor at Brandeis University.

Pauli Murray taught at Brandeis from 1968 to 1973, receiving tenure in 1971 as a full professor in American studies and appointed as Louis Stulberg Chair in Law and Politics.

Pauli Murray later wrote that her time at Brandeis was "the most exciting, tormenting, satisfying, embattled, frustrated, and at times triumphant period of my secular career".

Pauli Murray was ordained to the diaconate in 1976 and, after three years of study, in 1977 she became the first African-American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest and was among the first generation of Episcopal women priests.

On July 1,1985, Pauli Murray died of pancreatic cancer in the house she owned with lifelong friend Maida Springer Kemp in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In 2018, Pauli Murray was chosen by the National Women's History Project as one of its honorees for Women's History Month in the United States.

Also in 2018, Pauli Murray was made a permanent part of the Episcopal Church's calendar of saints.

In January 2021, a biographical documentary entitled My Name Is Pauli Murray premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

Pauli Murray will be an honoree on an American Women quarter in 2024.

Pauli Murray wanted a "monogamous married life", but one in which she was the man.

Pauli Murray wore her hair short and preferred pants to skirts; due to her slight build, there was a time in her life when she was often able to pass as a teenage boy.

Pauli Murray's papers helped me to understand how her struggle with gender identity shaped her life as a civil rights pioneer, legal scholar, and feminist.

The second was with Irene "Renee" Barlow, an office manager at Paul, Weiss, where Pauli Murray worked as an associate attorney from 1956 to 1960.

Pauli Murray published a collection of her poetry, Dark Testament and Other Poems, in 1970.