Pauli Murray was turned away from the University of North Carolina in 1938 because they were Black. Six years later, they were turned away from Harvard because they were not a man. Murray graduated first in their class from Howard Law School anyway, coined the term "Jane Crow," wrote the legal blueprint that fed Brown v. Board of Education, mentored a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg, co-founded the National Organization for Women, and became the first Black woman ordained as an Episcopal priest. Almost nobody learned their name in school. Here is why that needs to change.
Who Was Pauli Murray?
Anna Pauline Murray was born in Baltimore, Maryland on November 20, 1910. Their mother died of a brain hemorrhage when Pauli was three. Their father, a public school teacher who had been beaten by a hospital orderly, was institutionalized and later killed inside that same institution. Pauli was sent south to Durham, North Carolina, to be raised by Aunt Pauline and Aunt Sallie, two unmarried Black women who taught school and ran a tight, loving household on the corner of Carroll and Edward streets.
Murray grew up reading everything in the house, including the law books their grandfather had collected. They were small, sharp, and stubborn. They cut their hair short, wore pants when girls were expected to wear skirts, and signed letters "Pauli" instead of Pauline. In private journals later in life, Murray wrote about a gender that did not match the body they were given. They asked doctors for hormone treatment in the 1940s. They were refused and told the feelings were a mental illness. The language to name what Murray was did not exist yet. They built a life around the gap.
Rejected From UNC, Then From Harvard
In 1938 Murray applied to the University of North Carolina for graduate study in sociology. They had graduated from Hunter College in New York with strong grades. UNC rejected them. The letter said the university did not admit Black students.
Murray wrote letters everywhere. They wrote to UNC's president. They wrote to the NAACP. They wrote to the White House. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote back. The First Lady and the 27-year-old applicant began a correspondence that lasted until Eleanor died in 1962. The Roosevelt papers at Hyde Park contain hundreds of letters between them. Eleanor pushed back on Pauli sometimes. Pauli pushed back on Eleanor too. The friendship was real.
Six years later Murray graduated from Howard Law School at the top of their class. The top graduate at Howard traditionally went to Harvard on a Rosenwald Fellowship. Murray won the fellowship. Harvard rejected the application. The school did not admit women. Murray wrote a letter pointing out that the founder of the fellowship had endowed it for the top Howard student, regardless of sex. Harvard did not budge. Murray went to the University of California Berkeley for a master's instead and used the rejection to start naming the second wall they had run into.
The Bus Arrest Before Rosa Parks
On March 23, 1940, fifteen years before Rosa Parks refused to move on a Montgomery bus, Pauli Murray and their friend Adelene McBean were arrested in Petersburg, Virginia. They had moved to broken seats in the front of a Greyhound bus rather than sit in the back row where the white driver ordered them to go. Murray was 29 years old. They were charged with creating a disturbance and violating Virginia's bus segregation law.
Murray wrote a careful, polite letter to the bus driver from jail explaining why they had refused. They sent copies of the letter to the NAACP and the Workers Defense League. They also wrote a long legal memo arguing that bus segregation violated the Interstate Commerce Act. The NAACP did not take the case to the Supreme Court. Murray spent three days in jail and paid a fine. But the legal arguments they wrote at 29 became the same arguments used 6 years later in Morgan v. Virginia, the 1946 case that struck down interstate bus segregation. Thurgood Marshall argued Morgan. He cited Murray's research.
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15 Years Pauli Murray was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a Virginia bus in 1940, fifteen years before Rosa Parks did the same thing in Montgomery in 1955. |
"Jane Crow" and How They Named It
While Murray was at Howard Law in the early 1940s, the men in their class made jokes about women in the law. One professor told Murray on the first day that the only reason he could think of for women to be in law school was to give the men something to look at. Murray was the only woman in the class. They began writing about a discrimination that did not have a name yet. It was not Jim Crow. It was not the gender discrimination white women faced. It was the specific overlap, the way Black women got hit by both at once, with neither civil rights law nor women's rights law fully covering them.
Murray called it Jane Crow. They used the term in a 1947 essay and again in a 1965 law review article co-authored with Mary Eastwood titled "Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII." Today scholars use the word intersectionality, a term Kimberlé Crenshaw coined in 1989. Crenshaw has cited Murray as a foundational figure. Jane Crow was the first widely-used American framework for the idea that race and sex discrimination compound when they hit the same person.
The Civil Rights Roadmap Hidden in a Law School Paper
In their senior year at Howard, Murray wrote a paper arguing that Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling that legalized "separate but equal," should be overturned. The other students in the class laughed. Their professor, Spottswood Robinson, told Murray the argument was unwinnable. Robinson bet Murray ten dollars it would never happen.
Six years later, in 1950, Murray published a book called "States' Laws on Race and Color." It catalogued every segregation statute in every U.S. state, with arguments for striking each one down. Thurgood Marshall called the book "the bible of the civil rights movement" and ordered copies for every NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney working on school desegregation. When the NAACP argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court in 1953 and 1954, Murray's legal framework was sitting in the briefcases.
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In May 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown that "separate but equal" had no place in public education. Spottswood Robinson, by then a civil rights attorney himself, paid Murray the ten dollars.
Mentoring a Future Supreme Court Justice
In 1965 Murray and Mary Eastwood published "Jane Crow and the Law" in the George Washington Law Review. The article laid out a strategy nobody had tried in court yet. It argued that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which the Supreme Court had used to strike down race discrimination, could be used the same way against sex discrimination.
A young attorney named Ruth Bader Ginsburg read it. She was working on a case called Reed v. Reed, in which an Idaho law preferred male executors over female executors of estates. Ginsburg used Murray's framework in her brief. In 1971 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously for Sally Reed. It was the first time the Court ever struck down a state law for sex discrimination. Ginsburg listed Pauli Murray as a co-author on the brief. She did not have to. She did it because the argument was Murray's.
Ginsburg cited Murray in court filings and speeches for the next half-century. When Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993, she gave a speech naming Pauli Murray as the person whose work had made her own Supreme Court litigation possible. Murray was eight years dead by then.
Co-Founding NOW
In June 1966 Murray sat in a hotel room at the Washington Hilton with Betty Friedan, Aileen Hernandez, and a handful of other women who had spent the day at the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had refused to enforce the sex discrimination provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The women had tried to pass a resolution demanding enforcement. Conference organizers had blocked it. So they decided to start their own organization that night.
Murray was one of 28 founding members of the National Organization for Women. They wrote much of NOW's founding statement of purpose, which made the organization the first major American feminist group to explicitly include Black women's concerns in its agenda. Murray pulled away from NOW within a few years, frustrated that the organization treated race as a side issue rather than a core feminist concern. The framework they had insisted on, that you cannot fight for women's rights while ignoring race, still defines every working coalition in American feminism.
The Priest Who Buried Their Aunt
In 1973 Renee Barlow died. She had been Murray's partner of nearly 17 years, the office manager at a Wall Street law firm where they had met in 1956. Murray was 62 and grieving. They left academic life and enrolled at General Theological Seminary in New York. The Episcopal Church had not yet ordained any woman as a priest in its 200-year history.
The church changed the rule in 1976. In January 1977 Murray was ordained at the Washington National Cathedral. They were the first Black woman ever ordained in the Episcopal Church. A month later they returned to Durham, North Carolina, and celebrated their first Eucharist at the Chapel of the Cross. The same chapel where their grandmother Cornelia, who was the enslaved daughter of a Cherokee mother and a white planter, had once been baptized in the slave gallery. Murray performed communion at the altar where their grandmother had stood as property.
Love, Gender, and a Lifetime In Between
Murray's adult relationships were almost all with women. The longest was with Renee Barlow. Before Renee there was Peggie Holmes in the 1930s, and Adelene McBean (the same friend arrested on the Virginia bus), and Mary Norris in the early 1950s. None of these relationships could be called by name in public. Murray called Renee a "close friend" in official biographies. When Renee died, Murray buried her wearing a black armband and crashed at friends' apartments because they could not bear to return to the home they had shared.
Murray's relationship to gender was harder. They wrote in journals about being a "he/she personality" and a "boy-girl." They wore pants and short hair their whole life. They asked at least two doctors for testosterone in the 1940s. The doctors said no. One ordered an exploratory abdominal surgery to look for hidden testes, convinced Murray must be intersex. The surgery found nothing. Murray called themselves a "girl who should have been a boy" in private writing and used she/her in public. Scholars and the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice today often use they/them in recognition of how Murray described their internal experience, while acknowledging Murray lived in a time and language that gave them no other options.
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Pauli Murray's Legacy Today
Pauli Murray died of pancreatic cancer on July 1, 1985, in Pittsburgh. They were 74. The obituary in the New York Times ran 12 paragraphs and did not mention Renee or any romantic relationship. It would take another generation for biographers to put that part of the story back where it belonged.
| 1 | 2012: Sainthood. The Episcopal Church added Pauli Murray to its calendar of Holy Women, Holy Men. Murray became one of the few American saints recognized by a major Christian denomination. |
| 2 | 2016: National Historic Landmark. The childhood home in Durham was designated a National Historic Landmark, the highest federal recognition. It is now the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice. |
| 3 | 2017: Yale residential college. Yale University renamed Calhoun College to Pauli Murray College, swapping out a white supremacist senator and putting a Black queer civil rights pioneer in their place. The school had originally argued Calhoun's name should stay. Student protests changed that. |
| 4 | 2021: Documentary. "My Name Is Pauli Murray," directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West (the team behind RBG), released on Amazon Prime. It introduced Murray to millions of viewers and won critical acclaim. |
| 5 | 2024: American Women Quarter. Pauli Murray was selected as one of five women honored on a U.S. quarter through the American Women Quarters Program. The coin entered circulation in 2024, making Murray the first openly queer civil rights figure on American currency. |
Common Misconceptions About Pauli Murray
MISTAKE 01
Pauli Murray was a footnote in the civil rights movement.
They were not. Murray's 1950 book on segregation statutes shaped Brown v. Board. Their 1965 article on sex discrimination shaped Reed v. Reed and every later Equal Protection sex case Ginsburg argued. The framework was theirs. The credit went to other people because Murray was a Black queer woman writing in a country that did not want to give Black queer women credit.
MISTAKE 02
Pauli Murray identified as a lesbian.
Murray's relationships were with women, but Murray did not consistently describe themselves with the language of lesbian identity. Their journals show a long struggle with what they called "the inner conflict," a sense that they should have been born male. Most contemporary scholars describe Murray as gender-nonconforming or transmasculine, not as a lesbian. The Pauli Murray Center uses they/them pronouns and refers to Murray as a queer figure rather than a lesbian one.
MISTAKE 03
"Jane Crow" was a synonym for sexism.
Murray's coinage meant something more specific. Jane Crow named the way racism and sexism stacked on top of each other for Black women. It was not generic sexism. It was the experience of being shut out of civil rights spaces because you were a woman, and shut out of women's rights spaces because you were Black. The term is the direct ancestor of intersectionality.
MISTAKE 04
Pauli Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt were just penpals.
The friendship was deep and complicated. Eleanor sent Pauli care packages of clothing and money during graduate school. Pauli stayed at Val-Kill, Eleanor's home in Hyde Park, multiple times. They argued in letters about civil rights tactics, especially Eleanor's reluctance to push FDR harder. When Eleanor died in 1962, Pauli was at the funeral. The correspondence spans 1938 to 1962, and the unpublished letters at FDR Library include some of the most candid writing either woman ever did.
If you want more on the figures who shaped this same era of activism, our profile of Audre Lorde traces another Black queer intellectual whose work named what white feminism missed. Our piece on Bayard Rustin covers the gay civil rights organizer whose career ran parallel to Murray's, and our story on James Baldwin picks up the same intersection from a writer's point of view. The Edie Windsor profile shows where Murray's legal framework eventually carried the marriage equality fight.
FAQ: Pauli Murray
What pronouns did Pauli Murray use?
Murray used she/her in public during their lifetime because the language for nonbinary or transgender identity did not exist in widespread use. In private journals, Murray described feeling male and asked doctors for hormone treatment in the 1940s. The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice today uses they/them pronouns out of respect for how Murray described their internal experience, and many contemporary scholars do the same.
What is "Jane Crow"?
Jane Crow is a term Pauli Murray coined in the 1940s to describe the specific discrimination Black women face when racism and sexism overlap. Murray published the most influential version of the concept in a 1965 George Washington Law Review article. Kimberlé Crenshaw's later term "intersectionality," coined in 1989, builds directly on Murray's framework.
How did Pauli Murray influence Brown v. Board of Education?
Murray's 1950 book "States' Laws on Race and Color" catalogued every segregation statute in every U.S. state and laid out legal arguments for striking each one down. Thurgood Marshall called the book "the bible of the civil rights movement" and provided it to every NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney working on school desegregation. The NAACP team that argued Brown in 1954 used Murray's framework as a foundational reference.
Did Ruth Bader Ginsburg credit Pauli Murray?
Yes. Ginsburg used Murray's Jane Crow framework in her brief for Reed v. Reed (1971), the first Supreme Court case to strike down a state law for sex discrimination. Ginsburg listed Murray as a co-author on that brief out of respect for whose argument it was. She continued to credit Murray throughout her career, including at her Supreme Court nomination in 1993.
When did Pauli Murray become a priest?
Murray was ordained on January 8, 1977, at the Washington National Cathedral. They were the first Black woman ordained as a priest in the 200-year history of the Episcopal Church. Murray had entered seminary in 1973, the year their longtime partner Renee Barlow died.
What was Pauli Murray's relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt?
Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt corresponded from 1938 until Eleanor's death in 1962. The friendship began when Murray wrote to the White House about being rejected from the University of North Carolina because of their race. The two became close personal friends, with Murray visiting Val-Kill multiple times. Hundreds of letters between them survive in the FDR Presidential Library.
Where can I visit something connected to Pauli Murray?
The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice operates Murray's childhood home at 906 Carroll Street in Durham, North Carolina. The home is a National Historic Landmark and offers tours, exhibits, and educational programs. Yale University also named a residential college after Murray in 2017.
Related: Murray's legal blueprint helped Billie Jean King force the US Open to pay women equally in 1973, the same week the Equal Rights Amendment was making its final state-by-state push.
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Fly the flag for the names history left out. Pauli Murray spent a lifetime arguing that race, gender, and sexuality cannot be separated. Their work is the reason we have the legal protections we do. |
