Taking it Back: The Legacy of Pauli Murray

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1. Barbara Lau on Pauli Murray

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2. United Methodist Women - Pauli Murray

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3. Tarheel Talk : Pauli Murray

[JDPriestly]

4. K&R. Thanks for posting. I recommend that everyone watch this. Great viewing.

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11. It's yet another story I should have known about long ago but only recently encountered

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5. Pauli Murray: Durham's First Saint

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6. Carolina Times Story on Pauli Murray Arrest in 1940

... Murray, who had lost a battle to enroll in the University of North Carolina in 1938, was living in New York at the time and was returning home to recover from an illness. She and Adelene McBean were arrested for their refusal to move to the back of the bus when asked by the driver. This was fourteen years before a similar incident in Montgomery, Alabama launched a nationwide movement ...

http://www.digitalnc.org/blog/carolina-times-story-pauli-murray-arrest-1940/

[JDPriestly]

7. Just great to watch the videos and read about her. Thanks.

What a hero.

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13. You're certainly welcome!

I'm delighted if you find this useful!

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8. When historians look back

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9. Black, queer, feminist, erased from history

WEDNESDAY, FEB 18, 2015 06:28 AM EST
BRITTNEY COOPER

... In 1944, she graduated as the valedictorian of her Howard University law class, producing a senior thesis titled “Should the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy Be Overruled?” Trained by William Howard Hastie and Leon Ransom at Howard, Pauli Murray had been witness to their early legal strategy of combating separate but equal doctrine by forcing states to either make black institutions equal to their white counterparts or integrate white institutions, if they failed to do so. However, she argued that Plessy v. Ferguson was inherently immoral and discriminatory and should be overturned. When she brought up this argument to her classmates, she noted that her suggestion was received with “hoots of derisive laughter.” Murray coined the term “Jane Crow” to name the forms of sexist derision she frequently encountered during her time at Howard. It was the piece she co-authored in 1965 called “Jane Crow and the Law” that Ginsburg cites as so influential in her thinking about legal remedies for sex discrimination. Nearly 10 years later, in 1953, Spottswood Robinson, Thurgood Marshall and others pulled out a copy of her senior paper and used it as a guide to strategize how they would argue the Brown v. Board case. They didn’t bother to mention this until about 10 years later, when she ran into Robinson at Howard Law School ...

... Pauli Murray was a gender nonconforming person, who favored a masculine-of-center gender performance during her 20s and 30s ... She was never in the closet; her family and friends and other civil rights leaders knew of her queer identity. But by the 1950s, Murray was an established and up-and-coming civil rights attorney. That, coupled with her past participation with the Communist Party in her early adulthood, made her a target of the Red Scare ...

... Murray’s open lesbian relationships and her gender nonconforming identity disrupted the dictates of respectability, making it easier to erase her five decades of important intellectual and political contributions from our broader narrative of civil rights.

By the end of her life, Murray chose to pursue her passion for Christianity and the ministry, becoming the first black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest in 1977 ...

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/18/black_queer_feminist_erased_from_history_meet_the_most_important_legal_scholar_youve_likely_never_heard_of/

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10. The Reverend Pauli Murray, 1910-1985

... Murray graduated from Hunter College in 1933. After a campaign to gain admission into the all-white University of North Carolina law school in 1938, she was denied entry due to her race. The next year she took a job with the Workers’ Defense League and went onto graduate from Howard University Law School in 1944. She was denied admission to Harvard University for an advanced law degree because of her gender. In 1945 Murray successfully completed her Masters of Law degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Her master's thesis was The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment, which Thurgood Marshal labeled the “bible” for civil rights lawyers. Twenty years later, she was the first African American to be awarded a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale University Law School.

... She was appointed to serve on the civil and political rights committee of the President's Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) in 1961. In the mid-1960s, Murray began serving as a member of the Equality Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) working to revise the ACLU policy on sex discrimination. She was also a founding member of the civil rights group of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 ...

Murray taught at Benedict College in North Carolina, in Ghana, and at Brandeis University until the death of her close friend Renee Barlau in 1973. After being denied the right to administer last rites to Barlau, Murray felt compelled to enter the priesthood. She began her studies at General Theological Seminary in 1976 and was ordained at the National Cathedral the following year. She served at Church of the Atonement in Washington D.C. from 1979 to 1981 and at Holy Nativity Church in Baltimore until her death in 1985 ...

http://www.episcopalarchives.org/Afro-Anglican_history/exhibit/leadership/murray.php

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12. Brooks Graebner: The Significance of Pauli Murray

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14. Mahalos for this. This is what I come to DU for.

Thank you!

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15. K & R! I always learn something important from your posts.