Pauli Murray

Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray was a civil rights activist, legal scholar, advocate, and, later in life, an Episcopal priest.

Born on November 20, 1910, in Baltimore, Maryland, Murray was orphaned young and raised by her aunt. At just 16, she left home for New York City to attend Hunter College, where she later earned a Bachelor of Arts in English.

In 1940, fifteen years before Rosa Parks, Murray and her friend Adelene McBean were arrested in Virginia for refusing to move to the back of a segregated Greyhound bus. This experience sparked her lifelong commitment to fighting racial injustice. The case, first backed by the NAACP and later taken up by the Workers’ Defense League, helped set her on the path toward law and activism.

Murray graduated first in her class at Howard University School of Law but was denied admission to Harvard because she was a woman. She coined the term “Jane Crow” to describe the dual discrimination faced by Black women and became a powerful voice against both racism and sexism. Her 1950 book States’ Laws on Race and Color was hailed by Thurgood Marshall as the “bible” of the civil rights movement.

She went on to co-found the National Organization for Women in 1966 and helped shape key legal arguments in landmark cases like Brown v. Board of Education and Reed v. Reed. In 1977, she became the first Black woman ordained as an Episcopal priest.

Pauli Murray died on July 1, 1985, of pancreatic cancer at her home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Sources:

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Pauli Murray. Retrieved October 29, 2025, from https://nmaahc.si.edu/pauli-murray

By Carolina Digital Library and Archives - Carolina Digital Library and Archives. "Murray, Pauli, 1910-1985." 5 July 2007. Online image. UNC University Library. Accessed 8 April 2011. http://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/vir_museum&CISOPTR=431., CC BY-SA 3.0, Link