Pauli Murray, Civil Rights and Feminist Activist, is Born
Pauli Murray,an African-American lawyer, feminist, civil libertarian, poet, and eventually an Episcopal Priest, was born on this day.
Particularly important, as a student at Howard University in the mid-1940s, she helped to organize and participated in a sit-in to desegregate a local Washington, DC, restaurant on April 17, 1943. It was the first civil rights sit-in in American history, and inspired later sit-ins that became a major part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Perhaps her most notable accomplishment was to write a paper commissioned by President John F. Kennedy’s President’s Commission on the Status of Women, arguing that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal protection for women. The Commission embraced the argument and even suggested that people bring court cases to test the proposition. Eight years later, the Supreme Court accepted the argument (see below). Go to October 11, 1963, for the release of the Commission’s report.
When Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, wrote her brief in the landmark case of Reed v. Reed, decided on November 22, 1971, she added the names of Pauli Murray and Dorothy Kenyon in recognition of their pioneering work for women’s rights.
Read the definitive new biography: Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow The Life of Pauli Murray (2017)
Read her autobiography: Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes (1999)
Learn more: Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Racial Justice (2016)
Watch of documentary on Pauli Murray: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBROdwo_le4
Read: Sarah Arazansky, The Dream is Freedom: Pauli Murray and the American Democratic Faith (2011)
Learn more at the Pauli Murray Project at Duke University: http://paulimurrayproject.org/.