Pauli Murray

Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on the twentieth of November 1910, the fourth of six children. Her mother, Agnes Fitzgerald Murray, was a nurse; her father, William H. Murray, was a Howard University-educated schoolteacher who taught in the Baltimore public schools. Agnes died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1914, when Pauli was three. William, his health broken, was committed to the Crownsville State Hospital and, in 1923, was beaten to death by a hospital guard. Orphaned, Pauli was raised chiefly by an aunt, Pauline Fitzgerald Dame, and by grandparents Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald in Durham, North Carolina.

Murray became one of the sharpest legal minds of the century. Graduating first in the 1944 class at Howard Law, she named and confronted "Jane Crow" — the double bind of race and sex. Her 1950 survey, States' Laws on Race and Color, was called by Thurgood Marshall the "bible" of the civil-rights bar, and her arguments against "separate but equal" helped lay groundwork later drawn upon in Brown v. Board of Education.

She carried that vision into the women's movement, co-founding the National Organization for Women in 1966. Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited Murray as a co-author of the ACLU brief in Reed v. Reed (1971), the first case to strike down a law for sex discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause — a second landmark shaped by her thought.

In 1977 Murray became the first Black woman ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church. A lawyer, scholar, poet, and priest, she died in Pittsburgh on the first of July 1985. May her courage, and the doors she opened for others, be honored without end.