This week focused on the tireless efforts of Civil Rights Attorneys. This last one’s life should be made into a movie. There’s racism, sexism and transgendered issues within this woman’s life, Interesting indeed…
Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray (November 20, 1910 – July 1, 1985) was an American civil rights activist, women’s rights activist, lawyer, and author. Drawn to the ministry, in 1977 Murray became the first black woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest and among the first group of women to become priests in this church. She also battled with gender identity issues for most of her life.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Murray was raised mostly by her maternal grandparents in Durham, North Carolina. At the age of sixteen, she moved to New York to attend Hunter College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1933. In 1940, Murray sat in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus with a friend, and they were arrested for violating state segregation laws. This incident, and her subsequent involvement with the socialist Workers’ Defense League, led to a career goal as a civil rights lawyer. She enrolled in the law school of Howard University, where she also became aware of sexism. She called it “Jane Crow”, alluding to the Jim Crow racial segregation laws. Murray graduated first in their class, but was denied the chance to do post-graduate work at Harvard University because of her gender. She earned a master’s 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.
As a lawyer, Murray argued for civil rights and women’s rights. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 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.
Murray struggled with her sexual and gender identity through much of her life. Her marriage as a teenager ended almost immediately with the realization that “when men try to make love to me, something in me fights”. Though acknowledging the term “homosexual” in describing others, Murray preferred to describe herself as having an “inverted sex instinct” that caused her to behave as a man attracted to women. She wanted a “monogamous married life”, but one in which she was the man. The majority of her relationships were with women whom she described as “extremely feminine and heterosexual”. In her younger years, Murray would often be devastated by the end of these relationships, to the extent that she was twice hospitalized for psychiatric treatment, in 1937 and in 1940.
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. In her twenties, she shortened her name from Pauline to the more androgynous Pauli. Murray pursued hormone treatments in the 1940’s to correct what she saw as a personal imbalance, and even requested abdominal surgery to test if she had “submerged” male sex organs
In 1973, Murray left academia for the Episcopal Church, becoming an ordained priest in 1977, among the first generation of women priests. Murray struggled in her adult life 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 deep relationships with women. In her younger years, she 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.
Murray was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1910. Both sides of her family were of mixed racial origins, with ancestors including black slaves, white slave owners, Native Americans, Irish, and free blacks. The varied features and complexions of her family were described as a “United Nations in miniature”. Murray’s parents—schoolteacher William H. Murray and nurse Agnes (Fitzgerald) Murray—both identified as black. In 1914, Agnes died of a cerebral hemorrhage. After her father began to have emotional problems as a result of typhoid fever, relatives took custody of the children and eventually William was committed to a psychiatric institution, where he received no meaningful treatment.
Three year old Pauli Murray was sent to Durham, North Carolina, to live with her mother’s family. There, her maternal aunts, Sarah (Sallie) Fitzgerald and Pauline Fitzgerald Dame (both teachers) as well as her maternal grandparents Robert and Cornelia (Smith) Fitzgerald raised her. She attended St. Titus Episcopal Church with her mother’s family, as had her mother before Murray was born. In 1923, her father, who had been committed to the Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland, died as a result of being beaten by a white guard. Murray had wanted to rescue him when she reached legal age, but was just thirteen.
Murray lived in Durham until the age of sixteen, at which point she moved to New York to finish high school and prepare for college. There she lived with the family of her cousin Maude; they were passing for white in their white neighborhood. Murray’s presence discomfited Maude’s neighbors, however, as Murray was more visibly of partial African descent. She nonetheless graduated with her second high school diploma and honors in 1927, and was able to enroll at Hunter College for two years.
Murray was briefly married in 1930, to a man she referred in her autobiography only as “Billy”, although they would not formally divorce for 18 years. She had the marriage annulled several months after it began.
Inspired to attend Columbia University by a favorite teacher, Murray was turned away because the university did not admit women; she did not have the funds to attend its partner women’s school of Barnard College. Instead she attended Hunter College, a free city university, where she was one of the few students of color. Murray was encouraged in her writing by one of her English instructors, who gave her an “A” for an essay about her maternal grandfather; this became the basis of her later memoir Proud Shoes (1956) about her mother’s family. Murray published an article and several poems in the college paper. She graduated in 1933 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English.
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 Murray seek a healthier environment.
She took a position at Camp Tera, a “She-She-She” conservation camp established at the urging of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to parallel the male Civilian Conservation Corps(CCC) camps formed under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to provide employment to young adults while improving infrastructure. During her three months at the camp, Murray’s health recovered and she met Eleanor Roosevelt, which would later lead to correspondence that changed her life. However, Murray clashed with the camp’s director who found a Marxist book from her Hunter College course in Murray’s belongings, questioned Murray’s stance during the First Lady’s visit, and disapproved of her cross-racial relationship with Peg Holmes, a white counselor. Murray and Holmes left the camp in February 1935, and began traveling the country by walking, hitchhiking, and hopping freight trains. Murray later worked for the Young Women’s Christian Association.