ABOUT PAULI MURRAY
Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, Esq. was a poet, lawyer, activist, and priest whose visionary work laid the foundation for modern American democracy. Their brilliance, resilience, and unwavering pursuit of justice continue to inspire new generations of leaders today.
Biography: Early Life & Roots
Birth & Family
Pauli Murray was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 20, 1910, the child of William H. Murray (a teacher) and Agnes Fitzgerald Murray (a nurse). After Agnes’s death in 1914 and William’s later illness and death, Murray was raised by maternal aunts and grandparents in the extended Fitzgerald family. This Southern upbringing, combined with the family’s history of enslavement and resistance, deeply influenced Murray’s lifelong commitment to justice.
Throughout their youth, Murray moved between Baltimore, Durham, and later New York City — experiences that gave them a sharp awareness of race, gender, and class inequality, and fueled their resolve to challenge oppressive systems at every turn.
Durham, North Carolina
Pauli spent their childhood in Durham, NC, in a household led by their aunt Pauline Fitzgerald Dame and grandparents. The family home and neighborhood shaped Pauli’s moral imagination and commitment to education, dignity, and racial justice.
Early Education
Educated in Durham’s public schools, Pauli excelled academically and in writing. Experiences with segregated schools—and seeing the daily costs of Jim Crow—seeded the constitutional arguments Pauli would later advance.
Move to New York City
As a teenager, Pauli moved to New York City to continue their education and work during the Great Depression, ultimately graduating from Hunter College (B.A., 1933). New York became a second home base for Pauli’s political writing and labor activism.
Key Places They Lived & Studied
- Durham, NC – childhood and adolescence with the Fitzgerald family.
- New York, NY – Hunter College; later writing and organizing.
- Washington, DC – Howard University School of Law (LL.B., 1944; first in class).
- New Haven, CT – Yale Law School (J.S.D., 1965), the first African American to earn that doctorate.
- Various – teaching, legal research, government service, and later theological study leading to ordination in the Episcopal Church (1977).
Why This Matters
Mobility between the Jim Crow South and urban North gave Pauli a unique vantage point on how race, gender, and class intertwine across regions. Those lived realities anchored Pauli’s pioneering legal theories and pastoral vision in the decades that followed.
A SCHOLAR &
LEGAL PIONEER
LEGAL PIONEER
Denied admission to the University of North Carolina due to their race, Murray wrote a scathing letter that gained national attention — foreshadowing a lifetime of strategic legal advocacy. They graduated from Hunter College (1933) and later became the only woman in their Howard University School of Law class (1944), finishing first.
Harvard Law denied them admission because of gender, crystallizing their understanding of “Jane Crow” — the dual oppressions of racism and sexism. Murray’s senior thesis at Howard argued that “separate but equal” should be overturned, directly influencing the strategy behind Brown v. Board of Education. Later, they became the first African American to earn a JSD from Yale Law School (1965).
ARCHITECT OF
JUSTICE
JUSTICE
Pauli Murray’s 1950 volume States’ Laws on Race and Color mapped segregation statutes with such precision that Thurgood Marshall called it the “bible” of the civil rights movement. It armed litigators with hard facts, strategic leverage, and a national vista of Jim Crow’s reach—turning scattered struggles into a coordinated legal offensive.
Even earlier, while at Howard University School of Law, Murray’s senior thesis argued that segregation violated the 14th Amendment. That audacious position did more than challenge doctrine; it gave language and logic to a generation of lawyers who would dismantle “separate but equal” in Brown v. Board of Education.
Murray’s analysis insisted that freedom movements are braided—race, gender, class, and power cannot be separated without losing truth. That conviction animated Murray’s co-founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 and informed the legal frameworks Ruth Bader Ginsburg later advanced on gender equality.
The result is a legal legacy that is both cerebral and fiercely practical: scholarship that became strategy, and strategy that became social change. Murray didn’t just interpret the Constitution—they helped the nation imagine a more honest application of it.
WRITER
AND POET
AND POET
Murray wrote because the archive had gaps big enough to swallow whole lives. In Proud Shoes, a family history becomes a mirror for the nation—revealing how love, violence, survival, and contradiction live side by side in American memory. The book refuses simplification; it invites readers to sit with complexity until clarity emerges.
The poetry of Dark Testament moves in another register—lyrical, spiritual, insurgent. Through verse, Murray articulates grief without surrender and hope without naïveté. The poems braid theology and politics, private longing and public witness, crafting a language capacious enough for both pain and transformation.
Together, the memoir and poems do more than supplement the legal record; they expand our sense of what counts as evidence. Feeling, memory, and story become forms of knowledge—indispensable to any honest account of how change happens and what it costs.
Murray’s literature gives us interiority alongside impact, ensuring their legacy isn’t confined to case law but lives also in the imagination—where new futures are rehearsed before they’re enacted.
BOOKS BY PAULI MURRAY
Click on each title to view the cover image or visit Goodreads.com to learn more and purchase the book.
These five volumes represent only a small portion of Pauli Murray’s remarkable body of work. Across memoir, legal scholarship, poetry, sermons, and historical analysis, Murray’s writing spans genres and disciplines, offering a profound record of both personal truth and collective struggle. To explore the full breadth of their publications and additional titles, please visit here.
SPIRITUAL
TRAILBLAZER
TRAILBLAZER
In 1977, Murray became the first Black woman—and the first known LGBTQ+ person—ordained in the Episcopal Church. The moment was not mere ceremony; it was a public argument about who belongs at the altar and who is authorized to declare good news. Murray’s answer was simple and seismic: everyone.
Murray’s preaching flowed from the same well as their legal work: a conviction that dignity is not negotiable. The pulpit became another forum for liberation, where scripture was read with the eyes of the oppressed and tradition was measured against the command to love neighbor without exception.
The ministry did not retreat from struggle; it leaned toward the world’s wounds. Murray modeled a spirituality that could tell the truth about harm and still insist on wholeness. It was rigor without cruelty, compassion without compromise—a theology that welcomed doubt as a doorway to deeper faith.
In this way, Murray braided lawyer, prophet, and pastor into one vocation. The church was not a refuge from activism but its continuation—another place to practice the courage to include.
GENDER, QUEERNESS
AND LEGACY
AND LEGACY
In private writings, Murray described feeling male-identified and pursued medical pathways largely inaccessible in their era. Without today’s vocabulary—nonbinary, transmasculine, gender-expansive—Murray nonetheless lived at the edges of language, insisting on a self that did not fit the given boxes.
That insistence was not only personal; it was philosophical. Murray’s life asked the country to expand its imagination about gender just as their legal work demanded an expanded imagination of equality. The same throughline runs across it all: a refusal to mistake custom for truth or hierarchy for order.
Murray died in 1985, but the resonance of their witness has only deepened. In 2012, the Episcopal Church canonized Murray a saint, honoring a life that fused intellect, art, and faith into a singular calling. Today, Murray’s story animates classrooms, movements, and communities that look to their vision for courage and clarity.
The documentary My Name Is Pauli Murray has carried this legacy to new audiences, but the truest memorial is the work still unfolding in Murray’s wake—legal arguments sharpened, poems remembered, pulpits widened, and identities honored. The future Murray imagined keeps arriving, because people keep building it.
YOU ARE A
CHILD OF DESTINY
CHILD OF DESTINY
In this powerful reflection, Pauli Murray recalls a deathbed blessing from Bishop Henry B. Delany: “You are a child of destiny.” That charge echoed throughout Murray’s life—through doubt, faith, and ultimately ordination—shaping their sense of being guided by a force greater than themselves.
LISTEN ON SOUNDCLOUD“You are a child of destiny.” Interview – Dr. Cynthia Neverdon-Morton for Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, December 10, 1982. (music added for dramatic effect)
BOOKS ABOUT PAULI MURRAY
Beyond their own published works, Pauli Murray has inspired a rich body of scholarship, biography, and cultural study. These books explore Murray’s life, thought, and impact from multiple perspectives—situating their legacy within movements for civil rights, gender equality, theology, and the law. Taken together, they affirm that Murray’s story is not simply history to be remembered, but a living inheritance shaping how we imagine justice and community today.
Click on each title to view the cover image or visit Goodreads.com to learn more and purchase the book.
Additional titles about Pauli Murray can be found here.