When Americans think of the civil rights movement, they often picture Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. thundering from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Yet, history has largely overlooked the woman whose legal and moral vision shaped much of the movement’s foundation — Pauli Murray, the Baltimore-born lawyer, scholar, and activist whose ideas became the blueprint for dismantling segregation and challenging gender discrimination in America.
Born in 1910, Murray lived at the intersection of multiple identities: Black, Native American, feminist, and self-described non-binary, decades before terms like “intersectionality” entered the public lexicon. Her life was marked by defiance against both racism and sexism at a time when either could cost one their livelihood — or life.
She refused to ride segregated buses long before Rosa Parks’ act of defiance, often choosing to walk or bike instead. She boycotted segregated movie theaters and public buildings in silent protest.
Her philosophy was simple yet radical: “Resist the rules that make you invisible.”
Denied admission to Harvard Law School because of her race and sex, Murray instead attended Howard University, where she graduated at the top of her class in 1944, the only woman in her cohort.
Her senior paper argued that segregation was unconstitutional, a theory so prescient that it later became part of the legal reasoning behind Brown v. Board of Education (1954). This landmark Supreme Court case struck down school segregation.
Her groundbreaking text, States’ Laws on Race and Color, became what Thurgood Marshall famously called “the Bible of civil rights lawyers.” It was this text that civil rights attorneys leaned on as they built the case for racial equality under the law.
Murray’s legal influence extended well beyond race. In 1971, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited Murray as a co-author of the brief in Reed v. Reed, the first U.S. Supreme Court case to rule that sex-based discrimination violated the Constitution.
“We were not inventing something new,” Ginsburg would later say. “We were saying the same things that Pauli had said years earlier, at a time when society was not prepared to listen.”
Her life’s arc also bent toward faith. In 1977, Murray became the first Black woman ordained as an Episcopal priest, symbolizing a reconciliation between her fierce intellect, spiritual conviction, and lifelong advocacy for inclusion.
Despite her monumental contributions, Murray’s name rarely appeared in textbooks or legal histories until the release of the 2021 documentary My Name is Pauli Murray, which helped restore her to the public consciousness. Her writings, such as Proud Shoes and Song in a Weary Throat, remain powerful testaments to the endurance of the human spirit in the face of systemic exclusion.
Pauli Murray died on July 1, 1985, at the age of 74, but her legacy continues to ripple through America’s legal and social fabric. Every time the courts debate equal protection, every time activists speak of inclusion that is not performative but purposeful, they are echoing the intellectual blueprint Murray laid down decades ago.
Murray’s story reminds us that true progress is not just about who gets remembered, but who gets erased.
