David Hunt:

Pauli Murray has been described as “the most important person you’ve never heard of.” 

Murray, who died in 1985 at the age of 74, played a leading role in some of the most consequential movements of the 20th century. Murray was a pioneering Black legal scholar whose ideas laid the foundation for Supreme Court decisions overturning segregation and outlawing discrimination based on sex. A pioneering feminist and cofounder of the National Organization for Women. A pioneering spiritual leader, the first queer saint in the Episcopal Church. 

A writer, poet, labor organizer and human rights activist. Murray was jailed for refusing to move to the back of a bus in Virginia in 1940, 15 years before Rosa Parks inspired the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama with a similar act of civil disobedience.

To an America divided and dispirited by racism, demoralized by sexism and shackled by a suffocating conformity, Pauli Murray brought fresh eyes and a powerful voice for change. But change would not come quickly, or easily.

“We cannot heal until we face the truth,” Murray wrote.

Ironically, the inconvenient truth of Murray’s life and legacy is now in dispute.

I’m David Hunt. Pauli Murray wasn’t always Pauli Murray. Born Anna Pauline Murray in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1910, Murray changed their first name to Pauli — spelled P A U L I — in the 1930s, at a time when they were first questioning their gender identity.

Murray sought but was denied hormone therapy and other gender affirming care. Given the option, Murray might have lived life as a transgender man. But that was not to be. 

We don’t know how Murray would define their gender identity or their sexuality if they were alive today — or even what pronouns they would use. I’m using they/them pronouns for Murray in this program to reflect the fluid nature of Murray’s gender expression.

Historian Angela Thorpe Mason, who has studied Murray’s personal journals and other writings, says the civil rights leader’s gender identity was constrained by the failures of the medical profession and the strictures of the law.

Mason:

Pauli Murray really began expansively exploring a fluid gender identity in their twenties. So, in the 1930s. This is a time where it was dangerous enough to be a black person. It could be dangerous to be a woman, to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, was even more dangerous. And in poly's lived experience, it was quite literally criminal. Pauli Murray was, um, arrested and in institutionalized in the thirties and forties for how they chose to express a male gender identity. And so that's the, the, the harrowing and terrifying lived experience that Paulie Murray navigated and just early attempts to live out a male gender identity. And so I think with that context in mind, it helps me to understand why Pauli sort of positioned this journey as private.

Hunt:

I met Mason at Murray’s childhood home in Durham, North Carolina, where Mason is executive director of the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice. The home, built by Murray’s grandfather in 1898, was named a national treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2015, and a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. government in 2016. 

The center is also, very much a community treasure, offering dozens of tours, dialogues, exhibitions and educational programs to residents of this multicultural, progressive Southern city, where research labs, universities and hospitals have replaced the once-thriving tobacco industry as the major employers.

Although Durham clearly has progressed in the years since Murray lived here, the U.S. government — under President Donald Trump — seems determined to move in the opposite direction, to embrace a simpler time, when the lines between men and women, blacks and whites, foreigners and Americans, us and them, were sharply defined and rigorously policed. 

A case in point: The National Park Service, responsible for promoting the Pauli Murray homesite as a national landmark, has scrubbed its website of the inconvenient truth of Murray’s queer identity. 

Mason picks up the story.

Mason:

I first caught wind of this happening sort of at the department of the interior level with the changes that were made to Stonewalls website, the Stonewall National Monument website, a new national monument, mind you. And so I figured something was probably gonna come down the pipeline to the Pauli Murray Center … And so, um, I got a Google alert just a few days ago that, um, indeed some language related to Pauli Murray had been scrubbed from National Park Service pages. After doing some, um, additional digging, I learned that at least one entire biography of Pauli Murray has been completely wiped from the National Park Service. And then, um, language, uh, related to Pauli’s LGBTQIA plus identity has been shifted on other pages. Specifically q and t have been taken out of L-G-B-T-Q, um, on other pages related to Pauli Murray.

Hunt:

Mason immediately went into action, issuing a media release on behalf of the center, condemning the Park Service changes. "We equally condemn the federal government's actions, and stand firm in ours,” Mason said. “The Pauli Murray Center will be a space for us to continue to articulate what we know to be true."

Mason also reached out to the community, asking people to lodge protests with their congressional representatives, and to visit the center, to take part in its programs and to support it financially. That may be the best the way to preserve Murray’s legacy.

Mason:

Pauli Murray was — as one of my board members so eloquently put it during our grand opening— a pain in the ass <laugh> … Pauli Murray was vocal. Pauli Murray was consistent in their advocacy … Pauli Murray was also incredibly mission focused. Pauli Murray knew what they were on this earth to do, which was a big mission to upend race-based and sex-based discrimination. In this moment where we are navigating a federal agency working diligently to obscure Pauly Murray's contributions, we must be invited to step into truth and speak truth to power … Pauli was a queer, gender non-conforming trans person who contributed transformative work to the civil rights movement, to human rights work, to the feminist movement. Recognizing that I think is important within the context of American history, but also I think puts up a mirror to our, transgender, nonconforming human rights workers who are on the front lines of justice work today. And again, that is lifesaving. To say that there is an ancestor that is reflecting back to you is powerful and affirming and, um, reminds people that they're here for a reason, and they deserve to exist.

Hunt:

You’re listening to This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine. I’m David Hunt.

It's unfortunate that Pauli Murray’s contributions to social justice are not more generally recognized and appreciated. Consider this: I took a master’s level course on the history of the Black civil rights movement a decade ago. At North Carolina State University, not 25 miles from Murray’s childhood home. But I learned nothing in that course about Murray’s life and work. 

What I might have learned is how central Murray was to America’s struggle for equality and social justice throughout much of the 20th century — and how their ideas resonate today.

Angela Thorpe Mason explains.

Mason:

I like to describe Polly as an architect because anywhere you look, you could make the argument that Polly did it first or that Polly built the foundation for it, whatever it is … Wherever you look quite literally there, Pauli Murray is.

Hunt:

Murray fundamentally shaped how we understand equality and American constitutional jurisprudence. As a student at Howard University in 1944, Murray advanced a novel legal strategy to use the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to challenge Plessy vs. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that had legalized racial segregation in public accommodations. Plessy had provided the legal groundwork for the so-called Jim Crow laws that were enacted throughout the United States — and especially in the Southern states — restricting where Blacks could live, work, study, dine, travel and sleep.

Civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall adopted Murray’s legal approach in 1954 in Brown vs. Board, the successful bid to overturn Plessy. And he cited Murray’s 1951 book, “States' Laws on Race and Color,” as the bible of civil rights litigators. The book included an exhaustive compilation of Jim Crow statutes in 48 states and the District of Columbia.

Murray’s scholarship also influenced the movement for gender equality. In 1971 Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, followed Murray’s legal playbook, convincing the high court to apply the Equal Protection Clause to strike down, for the first time, a law discriminating against women, in the landmark case Reed vs. Reed.

Murray also worked to extend protections in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to cover gender. That led — eventually — to a 2020 Supreme Court decision granting employment protections to LGBTQ people.

Murray was ahead of their time in another respect. Decades before scholar Kimberlee Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality to describe the double bind of simultaneous racial and gender prejudice, Murray came up with a catchier term: Jane Crow. Murray coined that term in the 1940s, after being rejected for admission to two schools — The University of North Carolina because of racism and Harvard as a result of sexism.

Murray was never a single-issue activist. After joining with Betty Friedan and others to found the National Organization for Women in 1966, Murray moved away from a leadership role because the organization did not, in Murray’s estimation, appropriately addressed the issues of Black and working-class women.

Mason:

Polly Murray did a lot of things. Polly Murray, um, was was somebody who, um, was really thoughtful about like, what does it look like to, to push outside of these boxes? Like they didn't stay in boxes, so they felt a calling again to live out that mission of upending race and sex-based discrimination. But how they did it was expansive, so tried a lot of different things, contributed to a lot of different organizations, walked away from a lot of different organizations, but still with that mission, um, in mind. And so yeah, Polly gave so much to the world and was foundational to so much that we're benefiting from today.

Hunt:

Much of Murray’s work was done privately, thoughtfully, sitting at a manual typewriter. “One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement,” Murray wrote. Murray employed that typewriter, which is on display at the Pauli Murray Center, to chronicle the story of their family, to write essays on race relations, to compose dissertations on law and politics, to explore Black theology and feminist theory, and to craft poetry.

You can trace Murray’s personal, professional and spiritual journey through the thousands of words they set down in type. It was a journey that led to Murray’s ordination as a priest in the Episcopal Church in 1977.

Mason:

Polly evolves as an elder to a point of literally being like, this is above me now. This is a God issue. And so I'm going to see if perhaps these issues can be fixed spiritually with the help of God and with the help of faith … 

They're beginning to pull all of the threads of their consciousness together. Um, they're finally at a place where their identities don't feel like they're fighting against one another. And Polly begins to say, like, each piece of my identity matters, I can't be fractured. Um, that's where we start getting Polly offering the concept of just like wholeness as a human right. Um, and that Elder Polly's really interesting to me because she feels like she's failed … you know, she offers something really profound in an interview like that.

Hunt:

That interview, from the end of Murray’s life, is preserved on the Pauli Murray Center’s website.

Murray:

I'd like to say here, if you will notice the questions you've been asking me about my activities and the things that I were, was involved in that, in not a single one of these little campaigns was I victorious. In other words, in each case I personally failed, but I have lived to see the thesis upon which I was operating, uh, vindicated. And what I say very often is that I've lived to see my lost causes found.

Hunt:

Murray’s words are – perhaps – relevant for our time. A time when hard won victories of the past have come under renewed attack, victories made possible by the courage and resolve of people like Pauli Murray. 

As the United States government moves to erase the history and memory of the queer, trans and gender nonconforming elders who came before us, it’s important to preserve their voices and reaffirm their causes, now our causes, which are not lost. Not by a long shot.

Murray:

Hope is a crushed stalk between clenched fingers. Hope is a bird's wing broken by a stone. Hope is a word in a tuneless Diddy, a word whispered with the wind. A dream of 40 acres and a mule, a cabin of one's own, and a moment to rest. A name and place for one's children and children's children at Last Hope is a song in a weary throat. Give me a song of hope and a world where I can sing it. Give me a song of faith and a people to believe in it. Give me a song of kindliness and a country where I can live it. Give me a song of hope and love and a brown girl's heart to hear it.

Hunt:

That was the late human rights leader Pauli Murray, reading from her book Dark Testament and Other Poems.

I’d like to thank Angela Thorpe Mason, executive director of the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, for talking with me for this program. You can learn more about the center at paulimurraycenter.com. For This Way Out, I’m David Hunt.