What The Hell America!

A few years ago, I went searching for Pauli Murray.

By that point, the poet, civil rights activist and pioneering legal scholar had been dead for 35 years. But in researching her life for the book I was working on, I’d learned about the profound impact that her work had had on the very fabric of America and particularly on the country’s legal system. I was convinced that because of everything Murray had done—the extent to which she had shaped movements and laws and lives—she would have to be remembered prominently and publicly. It was probably just my own fault, I reasoned, that I hadn’t previously heard of her.

I walked through New York City. I went to the street where I’d learned she’d lived. Then I went up to International House, a residence for scholars from around the world tucked behind Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus, where she’d also stayed for a time. No plaques, no statues. Finally, when I’d almost given up, I found myself at the Yale Club of New York City where I’d been invited to meet a colleague for lunch. There in the lobby, overlooking the steady stream of well-educated, well-heeled patrons that passed in and out of the large doors all day, was Pauli Murray.

I stood for several minutes looking at the portrait. It was big and beautiful. She’s depicted sitting at a desk in a violet jacket. Late in her life, Murray became the first African-American woman ever ordained as an Episcopal priest, and in 1979 she received an honorary degree from the Yale Divinity School. In the portrait she’s wearing a clerical collar. Sunlight’s streaming in through the colorful stained glass windows behind her. She’s smiling.

After that day at the Yale Club, I learned of other tributes to Murray across the country. There’s a Pauli Murray College at Yale University (in 1965, Murray also became the first African-American to receive a JSD degree from Yale Law School) and there’s a series of breathtaking murals of her in Durham, N.C., where she spent much of her youth. A 2021 movie masterfully documents her life.

But I wanted more. Especially as I deepened my research and learned more about all that she had done for women’s rights and racial justice, I wanted her to be present. I wanted people to stumble upon a statue of her in Manhattan’s Central Park or perhaps in the middle of Times Square. I wanted people to ask themselves who is this person? And then I wanted them to go on their own journey to learn about her life and legacy. Because Murray is just so important to our understanding of who we are today; of where we’ve come from, and where we stand—of the ferocious battles that others fought so that we can live as we do.

Work that defined an era

Anna Pauline Murray was born on Nov. 20, 1910, in Baltimore. From a young age she adopted the more gender neutral Pauli and she wrestled with her gender identity throughout her life. 

For years, Murray requested testosterone injections and hormone therapy, as well as exploratory surgery to investigate her reproductive organs. She was denied all of that. In journals, essays, letters and autobiographical works from the latter part of her life she used “she/her/hers” pronouns and she self-described as a woman. So that is what I’m choosing to do here, that is what I did in my book, and it is also how her niece—who I have spoken to about Murray’s life, struggle and legacy—refers to her.

After growing up in Durham, Murray was determined to live in New York City and, as a teenager in the 1920s and 1930s, attended Hunter College. She was an intellectually brilliant student—a precocious astute academic—but was denied the opportunity to study at the all-white University of North Carolina. In protest, she wrote letters, including to President Roosevelt, which would later lead to a long and deep friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1940, Murray was arrested for sitting at the front of a bus and violating segregation laws 15 years before Rosa Parks so famously was.

In 1965, when Murray became the first African-American to receive a JSD degree from Yale, her mastery of the law began to capture the attention of major civil right leaders. She wrote Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII—coining a term and acknowledging the brutality of intersectional discrimination—and Roots of the Racial Crisis: Prologue to Policy, both of which would shape some of the country’s most important legal frameworks that challenged racial discrimination.

Pauli was also a co-founder of the National Organization for Women—though she never achieved anywhere close to the level of popular recognition and fame that her co-founder Betty Friedan enjoyed. She became the first person to teach African-American Studies and Women’s Studies at Brandeis University, and she had an immense impact on countless legal scholars, activists and even justices. 

Her 1950 book—a 746-page tome entitled States’ Laws on Race and Color,—was adopted by the ACLU as a sort of bible. And indeed, that’s exactly what the late justice Thurgood Marshall dubbed it. It is credited with leading to Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark decision that determined segregation in public education to be unconstitutional.

In 1971, the Reed v. Reed Supreme Court case, which the late justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued, marked the first time the Equal Protection Clause was applied to sex discrimination. It was a pivotal moment for gender equality in America and later served as precedent for many arguments in cases that cemented civil rights. Ginsburg credited Murray’s work as the inspiration for the brief that she wrote for that case, even citing Murray as honorary co-author.

So yes, for any number of reasons Murray, who died in 1985 at the age of 74, should be a household name. She should appear in every history book and every school syllabus. One should not have to look hard to find a tribute to her, to see her face and to learn about her copious and powerful body of work—work that defined an era.

Censuring history

So it was with utter disgust that I learned last week that Pauli Murray’s biography had been deleted from the federal government’s website. Rosita Stevens-Holsey, one of Murray’s nieces, emailed me to let me know.

She pointed me to a statement published by The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice in Durham, N.C. “Members of the LGBTQIA+ community have always been a part of the rich fabric of our society,” the statement reads. “Reverend Dr. Murray exists in a lineage of LGBTQIA+ Southerners who have advanced social justice work on a national scale, and whose contributions have gone on to shape history,” it adds. And then: “Erasing this truth at the federal level censures American history, and compromises the work of transgender and queer activists who stand in Murray’s wake today.”

Like millions of others around the world, I have spent the last few weeks oscillating between fear, anger and sadness as I’ve watched the new U.S. administration neglect the core values of democracy and wreak havoc with the systems that have propped up this country for centuries.

So very much of what we’ve seen so far has been hard to process, but the decisions I’ve found myself having the most visceral reactions to, are those that seem to serve no other purpose than to assert authority and to belittle those who don’t think like, don’t live like and don’t look like the president. These are decisions that are petty—their only point might be to bolster one man’s fragile ego or to reinforce the hierarchy of power in an already achingly unequal nation.

These moments of hysterical desperation and aggression are so far removed from anything that could possibly be construed as civil service; so far removed from anything that could possibly be interpreted as responsible leadership. And I’d count the decision to try and erase Pauli Murray’s legacy among them.

With no way of changing the mind of a morally bankrupt megalomaniac, I’m concentrating on what I can do. Since I’ve learned of her remarkable life, I’ve loved telling people about Murray; about the unlikely against-all-odds battles she faced head-on—public wars she waged while simultaneously grappling with her own often-debilitating private troubles.

As we continue to witness the tragic reversal of so much progress, I will be doing much more of this. I will be recommending books by Murray: Song in a Weary Throat and Proud Shoes: An African American Family, which taught me so much about the complex racial and social dynamics that shaped the country I’ve chosen to call home. I’ll be recommending books about Murray, like The Firebrand and the First Lady which chronicles Murray’s extraordinary friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt.

If the federal government chooses to ignore those upon whose shoulders we all stand, those of us who recognize the indignity of this will simply have to make up for it by telling their stories loudly, telling their stories often and then repeating them over and over and over again. It is, after all, what Pauli Murray would do.

Read more: