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Pauli Murray

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Born: November 19 1910

Died: 3030 06 19851985

The Reverend Dr. Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray was an American civil rights activist, women's rights activist, lawyer, and author. She was also the first black woman ordained an Episcopal priest.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Murray was raised mostly by her maternal grandparents. At the age of sixteen, she moved to New York to attend Hunter College, graduating with a B.A. in English in 1933. In 1940, Murray was arrested with a friend for violating Virginia segregation laws after they sat in the whites-only section of a bus. This incident, and her subsequent involvement with the socialist Workers' Defense League, inspired her to become a civil rights lawyer, and she enrolled at Howard University. During her years at Howard, she became increasingly aware of sexism, which she called "Jane Crow", the sister of the Jim Crow racial segregation laws. Murray graduated first in her class, but was denied the chance to do further work at Harvard University because of her gender. In 1965 she became the first African American to receive a J.S.D. from Yale Law School.

As a lawyer, Murray argued for civil rights and women's rights. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall called Murray's 1950 book States' Laws on Race and Color the "bible" of the civil rights movement. Murray served on the 1961 Presidential Commission on the Status of Women and in 1966 was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women. Ruth Bader Ginsburg later named Murray a coauthor on a brief for Reed v. Reed in recognition of her pioneering work on gender discrimination. Murray held faculty or administrative positions at the Ghana School of Law, Benedict College, and Brandeis University.

In 1973, Murray left academia for the Episcopal Church, becoming a priest, and was named an Episcopal saint in 2012. Murray struggled with issues related to her sexual and gender identity, describing herself as having an "inverted sex instinct"; she had a brief, annulled marriage to a man and several relationships with women, and in her younger years, occasionally passed as a teenage boy. In addition to her legal and advocacy work, Murray published two well-reviewed autobiographies and a volume of poetry.

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Pauli Murray

Pauli Murray

Books from Pauli Murray

Proud Shoes

Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage

Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet

All Out of Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality

Pauli Murray: Selected Sermons and Writings

States' Laws on Race and Color

Daughters of Africa

Dark Testament and Other Poems