Pauli Murray was a gay black person, feminist, and eventually priest that was way ahead of her time. She was involved in and worked in conjunction with a number of Civil Rights Organizations as a student then as a lawyer. One of her most outstanding achievements has to be be her book, "States’ Laws on Race and Color," which was published in 1951. Thurgood Marshall, head of the legal department at the NAACP and eventually a Supreme Court Justice described her book as "the Bible for civil rights lawyers. "
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| Pauli Murray November 20, 1910 - July 1 1985 |
"In the early 1950s Murray, like many African Americans involved in the civil rights movement, suffered from McCarthyism. In 1952 she lost a post at Cornell University because the people who had supplied her references:
Eleanor Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall and Philip Randolph, were considered to be too radical."
In the early 1960s Murray worked closely with Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King but was critical of the way that men dominated the leadership of these civil rights organizations. In August, 1963, she wrote to Randolph and pointed out that she had:
“been increasingly perturbed over the blatant disparity between the major role which Negro women have played and are playing in the crucial grass-roots levels of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions.”
[She also informed Randolph that discrimination doesn't feel any better coming from black men toward black women than it does when discrimination is coming from white people toward black people.
Black women's treatment in the planning stages and during "The March On Washington" itself appears to indicate that A Phillip Randolph nor Dr. Martin Luther King paid attention to her (and others) complaints. ]
In 1966, she was a founding member of National Organization Of Women (N.O.W), along with Anna Hedgeman. Septima Clarke would also join N.O.W. eventually.
[In 1972(?) Attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg , now a Supreme Court Justice, named Murray a coauthor on a brief for Reed v. Reed in recognition of her pioneering work on gender discrimination. As a result, "the Supreme Court ruled for the first time in Reed v. Reed that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited differential treatment based on sex."]
In 1977 Murray became the first African American woman to become a Episcopal priest.
May Pauli Murray's name become as well known among black history enthusiasts as Thurgood Marshall's.
Thank you for everything Pauli.
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