Last month, a story from a year earlier about Pauli Murray crossed my path. From Mississippi Today re: Jan 5, 1939:
“News broke that Pauli Murray had applied to a Ph.D. program at the University of North Carolina, sparking white outrage across the state.
“‘Members of your race are not admitted to the university,’ her rejection letter read.
“‘The days immediately following the first press stories were anxious ones for me,’ she recalled. ‘I had touched the raw nerve of white supremacy in the South.’
“A year later, she was jailed twice in Virginia for refusing to give up her seat on a Greyhound bus. She graduated first in her class at Howard University School of Law, but Harvard University wouldn’t accept her because of her gender. (Harvard didn’t admit women until 1950.) Instead, she became the first Black student to receive Yale Law School’s most advanced degree.”
The story goes on, noting that she co-founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942.
She had an evolution about race. In the 1950s, “she researched her ancestry. ‘If you call me Black, it’s ridiculous physiologically, isn’t it? I’m probably 5/8 white, 2/8 Negro — repeat American Negro — and 1/8 American Indian,’ she said. ‘I began years before Alex Haley did. I’m always ahead of my time.'”
But “during her time as a professor in Ghana in the early 1960s, she began to accept that ancestry, she said. ‘The difficulty is coming to terms with a mixed ancestry in a racist culture,’ she said.
NOW
In 1977, she helped found the National Organization of Women. From the NOW.org site. “Here’s an archived page from the Obama White House celebrating NOW Founding Day as a ‘This Day In History!’
“Pauli Murray and Betty Friedan made more history with NOW’s first Statement of Purpose. It’s one of the first declarations of intersectionality as a social justice goal.”
That same year, “she became the first Black woman to serve as an Episcopal priest.
“‘Being a priest is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,’ she said. ‘The first 48 hours were the most difficult of my life. I found myself on the receiving end of tremendous human problems I didn’t know how to handle.’
She died in 1985. In 2012, the Episcopal church named her a saint. “
Her memoir, published posthumously in 1987, was Song in a Weary Throat, a well-received book that was republished in 2018.
Also: see here: Finding Pauli Murray: The Black Queer Feminist Civil Rights Lawyer Priest who co-founded NOW, but that History Nearly Forgot. In 2024, the U.S. Mint Released a Quarter Honoring Murray’s Achievements.
