Gay History Month: Pauli Murray
Pauli Murray was an American lawyer, civil rights activist and ordained priest who fought for race and gender equality.
She was born in Baltimore in 1910.
After graduating from New York’s Hunter College, Murray was denied admission into the University of North Carolina and Harvard University’s law schools because of her race and gender, respectively.
She received her degree in law from the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to teach American Studies at Brandeis University in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Murray co-founded the Women’s Rights Law Reporter, one of the first publications in the legal field to focus on women’s rights.
She was also involved with the NAACP, contributing legal assistance in Brown v. Board of Education in 1961. During this time, Murray studied at Yale Law School and became the first African American to earn a doctoral degree in law (J.S.D.).
Murray was also an accomplished poet and writer. She authored the acclaimed book, Proud Shoes, which was a personal history of her family spanning from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
In 1977, she became the first African American female Episcopalian priest. She served in the church until her retirement in 1984.
She died of cancer in 1985. She was 74.
