As a civil rights activist, feminist and attorney, Pauli Murray influenced Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And with a single word in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, she bent the arc of the moral universe.auli Murray was in yet another fight of her life. In 1963, Congress was bitterly divided over a single word in the most important piece of civil rights legislation in a century.
TRAILBLAZING: THOUGH SHE FACED MANY OBSTACLES BECAUSE OF HER GENDER AND RACE, MURRAY NEVER STOPPED FIGHTING FOR EQUALITY. IN 1946, MADEMOISELLE MAGAZINE HONORED HER AS ONE OF THE YOUNG WOMEN OF THE YEAR.Murray was the one tasked with getting enough groups on the same side so that the legislation would pass. “She reframed the sex amendment as being really crucial to racial justice,” Mayeri says, “not antithetical to it.
DREAMER: IN ADDITION TO HER GROUNDBREAKING CIVIL RIGHT WORK, MURRAY LATER BECAME THE FIRST BLACK WOMAN ORDAINED AS AN EPISCOPALIAN PRIEST IN 1977.ven from a very young age, Pauli Murray was always challenging the status quo. “She’s a person that lived an intersectional life before the term even existed,” says David J. Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition.
“Lionesses like her make it possible for me to say to a coworker, ‘My wife and I are going on a vacation,’” says Lule Demmissie, president of Ally Invest. HIDDEN IDENTITY: “SHE DID FEEL LIKE SHE HAD A MAN’S BRAINS IN A WOMAN’S BODY," RECALLS HER GREAT-NIECE, “[BUT] SHE WAS NOT VERY OPEN ABOUT IT.”“People like Betty Friedan benefited from her,” says Carson. “She was the creative legal thinker for many. But she could never have the prominence of a Thurgood Marshall. She could never rise up the ranks because of the limitations of all parts of her identity.
It took death to finally set Pauli Murray free. Towards the end of her battle with pancreatic cancer in the early 1980s, she donated her files to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, including notes about how she struggled with her sexuality and gender identity. “She chose to keep those in her archives,” says Sarah Azaransky, the author of a book about Murray,It was a side of her life that even Murray’s family didn’t see until her death.
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