Pauli murray autobiography meaning

One of the places we are working to protect is the Pauli Murray House, and I love how the film ends with the young woman, standing on the lawn of the Center reciting Murray’s words. Why was it important to include that in the film?

West: To hear high school student Keleona Jiminez read an excerpt from Pauli Murray’s poem "Dark Testament," “Give me a song of hope, and a world where I can sing it,” felt like the right way to honor the legacy Murray left for future generations.

After a lifetime that involved struggle, misunderstanding and some important victories, Murray was never accorded sufficient recognition at the time. The fact that young people are now visiting the house where Murray was nurtured by a loving family, attending schools that bear Murray’s name, and grappling with ideas that Murray was often the first to espouse, seemed a fitting end to our story of a deeply optimistic person who once wrote, “I have lived to see my lost causes found.”

What were some of the challenges working on this film?

Cohen: The biggest challenge of this project was telling the story of a complex, multifaceted person who had made an almost unfathomable number of contributions to society and had died 35 years ago. Fortunately for us, Murray had the prescience to understand that future generations may want to know more and so had left behind an extraordinary archive of papers, journals, photos, audiotapes, and even some video which provided the foundation we used to piece together essential components of this monumental life

The wager was ten dollars. It was 1944, and the law students of Howard University were discussing how best to bring an end to Jim Crow. In the half century since Plessy v. Ferguson, lawyers had been chipping away at segregation by questioning the “equal” part of the “separate but equal” doctrine—arguing that, say, a specific black school was not truly equivalent to its white counterpart. Fed up with the limited and incremental results, one student in the class proposed a radical alternative: why not challenge the “separate” part instead?

That student’s name was Pauli Murray. Her law-school peers were accustomed to being startled by her—she was the only woman among them and first in the class—but that day they laughed out loud. Her idea was both impractical and reckless, they told her; any challenge to Plessy would result in the Supreme Court affirming it instead. Undeterred, Murray told them they were wrong. Then, with the whole class as her witness, she made a bet with her professor, a man named Spottswood Robinson: ten bucks said Plessy would be overturned within twenty-five years.

Murray was right. Plessy was overturned in a decade—and, when it was, Robinson owed her a lot more than ten dollars. In her final law-school paper, Murray had formalized the idea she’d hatched in class that day, arguing that segregation violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. Some years later, when Robinson joined with Thurgood Marshall and others to try to end Jim Crow, he remembered Murray’s paper, fished it out of his files, and presented it to his colleagues—the team that, in 1954, successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education.

By the time Murray learned of her contribution, she was nearing fifty, two-thirds of the way through a life as remarkable for its range as for

American writer and activist (1910–1985)

Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray (November 20, 1910 – July 1, 1985) was an American civil rightsactivist, advocate, legal scholar and theorist, author and – later in life – an Episcopal priest. Murray's work influenced the civil rights movement and expanded legal protection for gender equality.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Murray was essentially orphaned and then raised mostly by her maternal aunt in Durham, North Carolina. At age 16, she moved to New York City to attend Hunter College, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1933. In 1940, Murray sat in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus with a friend, and they were arrested for violating state segregation laws. This incident, and her subsequent involvement with the socialistWorkers' Defense League, led her to pursue her career goal of working as a civil rights lawyer. She enrolled in the law school at Howard University, where she was the only woman in her class. Murray graduated first in the class of 1944, but she was denied the chance to do post-graduate work at Harvard University because of her gender. She called such prejudice against women "Jane Crow", alluding to the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. She earned a master's degree in law at University of California, Berkeley, and in 1965 she became the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School.

As a lawyer, Murray argued for civil rights and women's rights. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall called Murray's 1950 book States' Laws on Race and Color, the "bible" of the civil rights movement. Murray was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to serve on the 1961–1963 Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. In 1966, she was a co-founder of the Natio

Today we welcome a guest post from Troy R. Saxby, author of Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life, out now from UNC Press.

The Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray (1910–1985) was a trailblazing social activist, writer, lawyer, civil rights organizer, and campaigner for gender rights. In the 1930s and 1940s, she was active in radical left-wing political groups and helped innovate nonviolent protest strategies against segregation that would become iconic in later decades, and in the 1960s, she cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW). In addition, Murray became the first African American to receive a Yale law doctorate and the first black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. Yet, behind her great public successes, Murray battled many personal demons, including bouts of poor physical and mental health, conflicts over her gender and sexual identities, family traumas, and financial difficulties. In this intimate biography, Troy Saxby provides the most comprehensive account of Murray’s inner life to date, revealing her struggles in poignant detail and deepening our understanding and admiration of her numerous achievements in the face of pronounced racism, homophobia, transphobia, and political persecution.

In this post, Saxby examines some of Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray’s many identities as well as the challenges that arise when labeling Murray’s selfhood in the present.

Pauli Murray is now available in hardcover and ebook editions.

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Michel Foucault famously declared, “Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.” Foucault was alluding to the inevitability that our identities are changeable, contextual, and subjective, and yet discourses of power seek to make them appear fixed, immutable, and objective. Our identities are rigorously