Pauli Murray

Agnes Murray died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1914, when her daughter was three. William Murray, a schoolteacher whose mind had begun to fail, was committed to the Crownsville State Hospital for the Negro Insane, and in 1923 a white guard beat him to death there with a baseball bat. The child was raised in Durham by two aunts and two grandparents in a house on Carroll Street. Columbia would not admit women and Barnard cost money the family did not have, so it was Hunter College, free, where an essay about her grandfather earned an A and became a book 23 years later. A secret marriage at 20 was finished within months. The Depression took the first job and bad health took the second.

Chapel Hill turned down her 1938 graduate application on grounds of race, and Murray released the correspondence, including her letters to Franklin Roosevelt, to embarrass the university in print. In March 1940 she and Adelene McBean moved out of a broken seat in the Black section of a Virginia bus and were jailed at Petersburg. That produced the career. At Howard Law, the only woman in the class, she gave the thing a name — Jane Crow — and graduated first in 1944. Harvard refused her the postgraduate fellowship because she was a woman. States' Laws on Race and Color, published in 1950, told civil rights lawyers to attack segregation statutes as unconstitutional outright instead of arguing over whether facilities were equal, and Thurgood Marshall called it the movement's bible.

She wrote back to Harvard that she would gladly change her sex to meet their requirements, but the way to such a change had not been revealed to her. The joke covered something she pursued in earnest. In the 1940s Murray sought hormone treatments and asked doctors to open her abdomen and look for undescended male organs. She had already been hospitalized twice for psychiatric treatment, in 1937 and 1940, after relationships with women ended. When the NAACP dropped the Chapel Hill case, her sexuality may have weighed against her alongside Roy Wilkins's complaint that releasing the letters had not been diplomatic. Her partner of nearly two decades, Irene Barlow, never appears in the memoir, and Murray destroyed Barlow's letters after she died in 1973.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who met her at Paul, Weiss, added Murray as a coauthor on the Reed v. Reed brief in 1971 in acknowledgment. That is how the reputation traveled for decades, inside other people's citations. The public version came late. The Durham house became a National Historic Landmark in 2016, Yale named a college for her in 2017, the Episcopal Church made her a saint in 2018, and a quarter carried her face in 2024. What to call her is unsettled. The biographer Rosalind Rosenberg reads Murray as a transgender man, while most writing keeps the feminine pronouns. In 2025 the National Park Service stripped that material from its pages and the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina objected.

Pauli Murray's life against the full span of the corpus.

• States' Laws on Race and Color book
  Thurgood Marshall called it the bible of the civil rights movement 1950
• Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family book
  Grown out of a Hunter College essay about her grandfather 1956
• The Constitution and Government of Ghana book
  Written with Leslie Rubin after a year on the Ghana School of Law faculty 1964
• National Organization for Women company
  Co-founded. She hoped it would work as an NAACP for women 1966
• White v. Crook case
  Argued with Dorothy Kenyon. A federal court struck down the exclusion of women from Alabama juries 1966
• Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage book
  The memoir, published two years after she died 1987

• 1923 aged ~13 Her father is beaten to death by a guard at Crownsville State Hospital He had been committed when she was 12 and received no meaningful treatment.
• 1933 aged ~23 Graduates from Hunter College in English Columbia did not take women and Barnard cost money she did not have.
• 1938 aged ~28 The University of North Carolina rejects her because of her race She published the replies, including President Roosevelt's, to force the issue into the papers.
• March 1940 aged 29 Jailed at Petersburg, Virginia, for refusing to move to the back of a bus She and Adelene McBean had been talking about Gandhi. She gave her name to police as Oliver.
• 1944 aged ~34 Graduates first in her class at Howard Law and is refused by Harvard for her sex Franklin Roosevelt wrote in support. Harvard declined anyway.
• 1950 aged ~40 Publishes States' Laws on Race and Color Its argument shaped the NAACP's approach in Brown v. Board of Education four years later.
• 1965 aged ~55 Becomes the first African American to take a doctorate in law at Yale The dissertation was Roots of the Racial Crisis: Prologue to Policy.
• 1966 aged ~56 Co-founds NOW and wins White v. Crook The Alabama ruling put women on juries. She was 55.
• July 1, 1985 aged 74 Dies of pancreatic cancer in Pittsburgh The Episcopal Church now keeps July 1 as her feast day.

• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. friendship that began over the Odell Waller case
• Thurgood Marshall 1908–1993
  First African American Supreme Court Justice and lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education. called her book the bible of the movement
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg 1933–2020
  Supreme Court Justice whose advocacy for gender equality made her a cultural icon. named her a coauthor on Reed v. Reed
• Betty Friedan 1921–2006
  Author of The Feminine Mystique and founding president of the National Organization for Women. co-founder of NOW
• A. Philip Randolph 1889–1979
  Labor and civil-rights leader who pressured presidents to desegregate defense work and the armed forces. challenged over the 1963 march leaving out women
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. published their correspondence