# Pauli Murray Born Anna Pauline Murray on November 20, 1910 in Baltimore; died July 1, 1985 in Pittsburgh. American civil-rights lawyer, legal theorist, poet, memoirist, Episcopal priest, and one of the most consequential intellectual architects of the modern American framework for legally challenging both racial and sex discrimination — though almost entirely suppressed from the mainstream Civil Rights Movement record during her lifetime because of her gender and her then-illegible queer identity. ## Legal Architecture Murray's specific intellectual contributions to the body of American civil-rights legal doctrine are difficult to overstate: - **1944 Howard Law School thesis** — "Should the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy v. Ferguson Be Overruled?" — Murray's law-school thesis argued (against the strong consensus of her professors) that *Plessy v. Ferguson* (1896) and the "separate but equal" doctrine could be directly attacked under the [[Fourteenth Amendment]]. Her thesis framework became central to Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's *[[Brown v. Board of Education]]* (1954) strategy - **1950 book ***States' Laws on Race and Color**** — the first comprehensive compilation of state-by-state [[Jim Crow Era]] laws, used by NAACP litigators (including Thurgood Marshall) as a "Bible" for civil-rights litigation strategy - **1965 Yale Law Journal article "Jane Crow and the Law"** (with Mary Eastwood) — extended Fourteenth Amendment equal-protection analysis to sex discrimination. The article was a primary source for Ruth Bader Ginsburg's 1971 *Reed v. Reed* brief — the first Supreme Court case in which the Court extended equal-protection analysis to sex discrimination. Ginsburg credited Murray as one of two co-authors of the *Reed* brief specifically in recognition of Murray's intellectual contribution ## Civil Rights Career - **1940 arrest** in Petersburg, Virginia, for sitting in the white section of a Greyhound bus — 15 years before Rosa Parks. The arrest produced one of the earliest documented direct-action civil-rights cases of the modern era - **1944 Howard Law School** — graduated first in her class. Was rejected for graduate study at Harvard Law on the basis of her sex (rejection letter: "Your picture and the salutations on your transcripts indicate that you are not of the sex entitled to be admitted") - **1966** — co-founder, with Betty Friedan and others, of the **National Organization for Women (NOW)** ## Gender, Sexuality, and Identity Murray's gender and sexuality — which her contemporaries and biographers did not have current language for — have been increasingly understood in retrospect through a transgender or genderqueer framework. From her teenage years onward, Murray sought medical assistance for what she understood as a male identity, attempted to find doctors who would administer testosterone, and lived in long-term romantic relationships with women whom she described as her "wives." Her private papers explicitly refer to herself as a "boy-girl" and document persistent gender-identity distress. The contemporary scholarly consensus, developed substantially in Rosalind Rosenberg's 2017 biography *Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray*, is that Murray would likely have identified as transgender had the contemporary vocabulary been available during her lifetime. Murray used female pronouns publicly throughout her life; current writing about her typically respects that public usage while acknowledging the more complex private identity. ## Episcopal Priesthood Murray was ordained an **Episcopal priest in January 1977** at age 66 — the **first Black woman ordained in the Episcopal Church**. She had attended seminary in part as a response to the 1973 death of her longtime partner, Irene Barlow. Murray was canonized as a saint of the Episcopal Church in 2012. ## Place in the Vault Murray is the **canonical case study** of how 20th-century Civil Rights Movement organizational politics excluded and erased Black queer and gender-nonconforming figures whose intellectual contributions structurally underwrote movement victories. The half-century gap between her 1944 Howard thesis and her 21st-century recovery as a primary intellectual architect of both *Brown* and *Reed* (the foundations of modern race-equal-protection and sex-equal-protection doctrine) is among the most striking examples of historiographic suppression-and-recovery in American legal history. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Bayard Rustin]] - [[Civil Rights Movement]]