Pauli Murray

Pauli Murray

Written by Becky Stone

Accepting challenges? Pauli Murray faced them repeatedly. She did not go looking for them. They found her. And when they found her, she took them head on. Armed with intelligence, a gift for words, and a fierce determination to make things right, Pauli sat down at her typewriter and “spoke” her mind.

Pauli wanted a higher education from a Northern college. She aimed for Barnard, but did not have the money or high school credentials from Hillside High School in Durham, N.C. to meet their requirements. She managed to do another year of high school in Brooklyn and get into and earn a degree from Hunter College in New York. It was not long before Murray met the challenge of applying to graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, only to be rejected because of her race. Thus began her correspondence with the Dean of the graduate school, and the President of the university arguing her position as a qualified North Carolina born candidate. Only a year before her application, President Franklin Roosevelt spoke at the school claiming that Chapel Hill was a progressive school. Murray took exception to that with good reason and wrote President Roosevelt a letter arguing her point of view. She sent a copy of that letter to his wife, thinking that if the President never saw her letter, his wife would read it. His wife did read it and responded. Thus began a lifelong friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. But still, Murray, after consulting with NAACP attorneys, had to give up on her personal battle with Chapel Hill. Only a few years later, Murray challenged segregation on public transportation, was arrested, and met again with NAACP attorneys to see if they would consider her case to challenge Jim Crow. They did not take on her case, but they were impressed with her arguments and she was impressed with the process. They suggested she apply to Howard Law School and implied that she would get in. She did and Murray took on the challenge of going to school in a predominantly male profession. Murray confronted sexism at school and racism in the Washington DC community. She named the sexism “Jane” Crow, brother to “Jim”. She began organizing sit-ins at local restaurants that would not serve Negroes. She earned top honors at school and was the first woman to receive them. And when Murray finished law school at the top of her class, she received the Rosenwald Fellowship that traditionally led to graduate study at Harvard. Only - - Harvard rejected her application on the basis of her sex. Murray began a letter writing campaign that led to controversial meetings and votes at the highest level of that educational institution. She almost won, but almost doesn’t count in anyone’s mind.

Pauli Murray earned her juridical doctorate at the Boalt School of Law at the University of California in Berkeley. It was one of her trips back to Howard University that Murray asked an old professor what ever happened to that paper she finished for his class while she was studying in California. She learned that Professor Robinson still had it. He brought it out for her to see. He commented that her paper was the seminal idea used by the NAACP attorneys in Brown v Board of Education Topeka KS. The same idea for which she had been derided when she presented it to her senior seminar classmates at Howard. Finally, Murray, in this one instance, had met the challenge of segregation successfully.

Other challenges confronted her. Attorneys and civil rights organizations went to Murray for advice, strategies, information. Murray was instrumental in developing arguments in landmark cases involving women’s rights, she played roles in the establishment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Organization for Women. She served as chair of a committee on the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. She was well-known in legal circles. She taught at several colleges, including in Ghana where she assisted in the writing of that country’s constitution. And yet, Murray was to face one last public challenge – the church. Murray was angry and disappointed when she realized that leadership in her spiritual home, the Episcopal Church, was denied to women. It was her spiritual needs that led her to seminary, but while studying she felt the calling to become a priest. Again she protested by writing letters to those in power and forced them to face this incongruity, this abuse of power that made women “the other” and treated them as if they were spiritually bankrupt and emotionally incapable of leadership. The discussion was heated and intense, but after two General Conventions, the Episcopal Church ordained its first group of women, and Pauli. Murray, the only African-American woman, was among them.

Facing challenges was a must-do for Pauli Murray, but her impetus was not personal glory of accomplishments. It meant little if she achieved these things only for her own benefit. All of these victories were important to her because they set the stage for success for all the women, all the people of color, all the citizens of this great country and that made it worth the struggle.