Brief Bio
Pauli Murray was born on November 20, 1910 in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of Agnes and William Murray. Her father, a Howard University graduate, taught in the Baltimore public schools. Both of Murray's parents died when she was a child. Her mother suffered from a brain hemorrhage and died in 1914. Her father was the victim of typhoid fever and died in 1923.
Despite such heartbreaking tragedy, Murray pursued her life goals. In 1933 she graduated from Hunter College in New York City, New York. Despite a stellar academic record, Murray in 1938 was denied admission into the University of North Carolina Law School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She later enrolled in the Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C. and graduated in 1944.
Not long afterwards, Murray sought admission to Harvard University Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts for an advanced law degree but was denied admission because of her gender. She enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley where she received a master of law degree in 1945. Twenty years later, in 1965, she became the first African American awarded a J.S.D. (a law doctorate) from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Her degree was based on her dissertation, "Roots of the Racial Crisis: Prologue to Policy."
Murray argued that her experiences encountering and overcoming racial and gender discrimination gave her special insight into the nature of racial and sexual hierarchies in the U.S. and wrote about its various manifestations in America's legal history. Murray coined the term "Jane Crow and Jim Crow" to describe the impact of dual discrimination. She also joined both the civil rights movement and the feminist movement. In 1966 Murray was one of the founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW) with feminist icon Betty Friedan.
Late 1960s Murray worked closely with Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King but was critical of the way that men dominated the leadership of these civil rights organizations. She often wrote to Randolph and pointed out that she had: "been increasingly perturbed over the blatant disparity between the major role which Negro women have played and are playing in the crucial grass-roots levels of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions.
At the age of 62, Murray resigned from her academic position and enrolled in a General Theological Seminary. Five years later, she became the first African-American woman priest to be ordained by the Episcopal church. For the next seven years until her death in 1985, she ministered to the sick at a parish in Washington, DC.
Poems - 20 in all
Sherley Anne Williams
Hate
Ruth
Words
For Pan
Tongues
Conquest
Prophecy
Nazarene
A Presence
Youth to Age
Without Name
Love in Wartime
Woman and Man
Dinner for Three
Harlem Riot, 1943
To the Oppressors
For Mack C. Parker
The Song of the Highway
To Poets Who Have Rebelled
Mr. Roosevelt Regrets (DETROIT RIOT, 1943)
|
