Pauli Murray

Anna Pauline Murray was born in Baltimore on the twentieth of November 1910, the fourth child of an African American teacher and a Howard University-educated father. Both parents died before Pauli was thirteen; Pauli was raised by an aunt in Durham, North Carolina.

Murray took an undergraduate degree at Hunter College in 1933 and applied to the University of North Carolina graduate school in 1938. The University denied admission on the basis of race. Murray's published account of the rejection — and the sustained legal-correspondence campaign that followed across the next two years — drew the personal attention of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; the two became sustained friends and political correspondents across the next twenty-five years.

Murray took a law degree at Howard University in 1944 — graduating first in the class, after which Murray applied to Harvard Law for graduate work and was rejected on the explicit grounds of gender. Murray completed graduate work at the University of California Berkeley (Master of Laws, 1945) and at Yale (Doctor of Juridical Science, 1965 — Yale's first awarded to an African American of any gender).

Murray's 1950 monograph States' Laws on Race and Color was the principal legal-research handbook of the Thurgood Marshall NAACP Legal Defense Fund team that argued Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Marshall called the book "the bible" of the civil-rights bar.

Murray co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 — the principal organization of the modern American women's-rights movement — alongside Betty Friedan and others.

Murray was ordained an Episcopal priest in January 1977 — at sixty-six — becoming the first African American woman ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church.

Murray died of pancreatic cancer in Pittsburgh on the first of July 1985, age seventy-four. The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice in Durham, North Carolina, preserves Murray's former home as a National Historic Landmark.

Murray is honored here as the legal theorist whose work shaped two Supreme Court civil-rights eras.