Dr. Pauli Murray
Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray born on November 20, 1910 was a Civil Rights activist who became a lawyer, a women's rights activist, Episcopal priest, and author. Drawn to the ministry, in 1977 Murray was the first Black woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest, in the first year that any women were ordained by that church.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, orphaned when she was young, and raised by her maternal grandparents in Durham, North Carolina, Anna moved to New York City to attend Hunter College. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1933.
In 1940, Murray sat in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus with a friend, and they were arrested for violating state segregation laws. This incident, and her subsequent involvement with the socialist Workers' Defense League, led her to pursue her career goal of working as a civil rights lawyer. She enrolled in the law school at Howard University, where she also became aware of sexism.
She called it "Jane Crow", alluding to the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation. Murray graduated first in her class, but she was denied the chance to do post-graduate work at Harvard University because of her gender. She earned a master's degree in law at University of California, Berkeley, and in 1965 she became the first Black to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School.
As a lawyer, Murray argued for civil rights and women's rights. The NAACP’s Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall called Murray's 1950 book, States' Laws on Race and Color, the "bible" of the civil rights movement.
Murray served on the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, appointed by John F. Kennedy (1961–1963), and 1966 she was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women. Ruth Bader Ginsburg named Murray as a co-author of a brief on the 1971 case Reed v. Reed, in recognition of her pioneering work on gender discrimination. This case articulated the "failure of the courts to recognize sex discrimination for what it is and its common features with other types of arbitrary discrimination.”
Murray held faculty or administrative positions at the Ghana School of Law, Benedict College, and Brandeis University. In 1973, Murray left academia for the Episcopal Church. She became an ordained priest in 1977, among the first generation of women priests. Murray struggled in her adult life with issues related to her sexual and gender identity, describing herself as having an "inverted sex instinct".
She had a brief, annulled marriage to a man and several deep relationships with women. In her younger years, she occasionally had passed as a teenage boy. A 2017 biographer retroactively classified her as transgender.
In addition to her legal and advocacy work, Murray published two well-reviewed autobiographies and a volume of poetry. Her volume of poetry, Dark Testament, was republished in 2018.
On July 1, 1985, Pauli Murray died of pancreatic cancer in the house she owned with lifelong friend, Maida Springer Kemp, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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It was Pauli Murray’s fate to be both ahead of her time and behind the scenes. Her home in Durham, NC has been added as a National Historic Site/Landmark .=
2017 – Designated NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARK by the Department of the Interior/National Park Service
2015 – Named a “NATIONAL TREASURE” by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
2015 – New Partnership with Iron Mountain to preserve the house and make Pauli’s story accessible to a wide audience
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"Reverend Dr. Pauli Murray was an American civil rights advocate, feminist, lawyer and ordained priest. She is best known for furthering the civil rights and feminist causes. She is the co-founder of NOW, the National Organization for Women and was the first woman to be awarded a J.D.S degree from Yale"
."A talented writer and editor of non-fiction and poetry, Pauli Murray had several books published. Showing great versatility in her early works, she tackled complex issues as the editor of 1951's State's Laws on Race and Color, and shared her own story in 1956's Proud Shoes. Later in her career, she explored such diverse topics as Constitution and Government of Ghana (1961) and Human Rights U.S.A. (1967). She also had poetry published, including 1970's Dark Testament and Other Poems."
Source
Read More Here: https://www.biography.com/people/pauli-murray-214111
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Several other Links with Information about the Life of Dr. Pauli Murray are below.
https://paulimurrayproject.org/pauli-murray/biography/
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New Yoker Article= https://www.newyorker.com/.../the-many-lives-of-pauli...