'Let the Record Show' Tells a Story of the Queer Black Attorney Who Laid the Foundation for Racial and Gender Rights

Reverend Dr. Pauli Murray lived an expansive life: as a civil rights activist, legal theorist, author, poet, and Episcopal priest. In a world that rarely made room for people who looked, thought, and experienced life like Murray, each title represented a barrier that they had to break. As a result, Murray became a first in nearly every space they entered, and their work laid the foundation for an intersectional approach to advocacy and served as a framework for activists in tackling major threats to racial justice, gender justice, and the right to protest. As a member of the ACLU’s Board and an advisor, Murray’s leadership was critical in shaping legal strategies and guiding the organization’s women’s right work. Their invaluable contributions to the legal field still inform our work today.

But who was the person behind the legal accomplishments?

In our latest episode of “Let the Record Show,” ACLU’s newest history podcast, hosts, Matt Beat and Shereen Marisol Meraji break down White v. Crook, a case about who gets to sit on a jury. Murray, a visionary lawyer on the case, built out an argument that said the Constitution protects against both race and sex discrimination, including in jury selection. The case showed how these forms of discrimination work together to protect the same power structure. The ACLU has long celebrated Murray’s accomplishments in fighting for civil liberties and have written expansively about their life; here, we’ve taken a moment to honor the person behind the complex caseload.

Born Anna Pauline Murray in Baltimore in 1910, Murray is the grandchild and great-grandchild of enslaved people. Murray’s mother died when Murray was 3 years old. Their father was killed less than a decade later. By 12, Murray went to live with an aunt in North Carolina.

Murray’s aunt noticed early on that they rejected many traditional ideas about femininity and calls them “a little boy-girl.” Murray embraced this sense of gender expansiveness into adulthood — and sometimes used the name, Oliver.

In North Carolina, Murray refused to get on segregated streetcars, opting instead to walk or ride their bike. They didn’t go to the movies because of the separate entrance and instead read a lot.

Murray went on to go to Hunter College in 1929 and became one of four Black students in a class of 247. While at Hunter, Murray wore pants instead of skirts and cut their hair short.

Murray’s intersectional identity made them uniquely qualified to explore the legal frameworks of racial and gender discrimination. Murray went on to attend law school at Howard, where they stood out in a class where all the other students were men. Murray also graduated first in their class. There, they developed a concept, which they called “Jane Crow,” referring to the unique discrimination based on both gender and race.

“In my preoccupation with the brutalities of racism,” Murray wrote. “I had failed until now to recognize the subtler, more ambiguous expressions of sexism.”

At Howard, they also wrote a powerful thesis about how to overturn of Plessy v. Ferguson, which allowed “separate but equal” racial segregation. The other students reportedly hooted at their argument which focused on how the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause could be used to dismantle the separate but equal doctrine. Murray even bet a skeptical professor $10 that Plessy would be overturned within 25 years. They were right. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, while still a litigator, went on to use Murray’s innovative legal theory in Brown v. Board of Education, where separate but equal was finally overturned.

In our latest episode of “Let the Record Show,” Chase Strangio, co-director of the LGBTQ and HIV project at the ACLU, said so much of his life and work depends on that of Murray’s. He noted that beyond having an incredible legal mind, Murray was also an artist, a creator, a reverend.

“As a lawyer, one of the things I’m endlessly frustrated by every day is how constrained law is and how unimaginative, therefore, many legal thinkers are,” Strangio said. “Pauli had no patience for that. And that allowed Pauli to sort of imagine demanding so much more than what other people were demanding in their minds within the law.”

It made their work and legacy so much richer, Strangio added. “It also, of course, meant that they were imagining a type of freedom and embodiment that did not comport with the constraints of their time,” he said. As a result, the world painfully cast Murray as “insane” because of how expansive their ideas of justice and embodiment are. And yet, those ideals are at the center of the ACLU’s intersectional approach to much of our work today.

Beyond writing legal arguments, Murray also wrote about the same ideas of racial and gender justice in a book of poetry, “Dark Testament,” written between 1933 and 1941.

Hope is a crushed stalk

Between clenched fingers.

Hope is a bird’s wing

Broken by stone.

Hope is a word in a tuneless ditty

A word whispered with the wind,

A dream of forty acres and a mule,

A cabin of one’s own and a moment to rest,

A name and a place for one’s children

And children’s children at last.

Hope is a song in a weary throat.

Give me a song of hope

And a world where I can sing it.

Give me a song of faith

And a people to believe in it.

Give me a song of kindliness

And a country where I can live it.

Give me a song of hope and love

And a brown girl’s heart to hear it.

Murray’s legacy lives on, especially in our work at the ACLU. ACLU’s Pauli Murray Fellowship was founded in 2022 in honor of Murray. The fellowship invests in and cultivates leadership pathways for individuals who have overcome systemic barriers to achievement to support development of future leaders.

For our former fellow, Areej Qadeer, Murray’s insistence on understanding justice through identity and intersectionality has profoundly shaped her own work as an organizer and advocate.

“I deeply resonate with Pauli Murray’s conviction that identity cannot be reduced to the parts of ourselves most palatable to society,” Qadeer said. “Like Murray, I embody intersecting marginalized identities: I am Muslim, a woman who wears hijab, the daughter of immigrants, and a first-generation American. Murray’s example has given me the courage to stand confidently in my difference and recognize the very aspects of my identity that have exposed me to discrimination as beacons of strength.”

To learn more about a case Murray helped built, listen to our latest episode of “Let the Record Show.” You can also learn more about Murray’s life and legal accomplishments here.