Pauli Murray: civil rights lawyer

Trailblazing attorney Pauli Murray devoted her legal career to tackling racial and gender discrimination in the US. But what drove the civil rights icon and LGBTQ+ pioneer to take up the fight in the first place?

- JONNY WILKES

Murray spent the final years of her life serving as an Episcopalian priest in Washington DC, having been ordained in January 1977 at the age of 66

When Pauli Murray attempted to enrol at the University of North Carolina in 1938, she was refused due to her race. She went on to study civil rights law at the historically black Howard University in Washington DC, committed to ending Jim Crow, the system of racial segregation in the US. Graduating top of her class, Murray then tried to enrol at Harvard and was again refused, this time due to her gender. Highlighting the plight of black women, she wrote: "What I'm experiencing is Jane Crow."

A crowd gathers to mark 25 years since the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v Board of Education, which had declared segregation in US public schools to be unconstitutional

In the legal career that followed, Murray made enormous strides in the fight against racial and gender discrimination. In the early 1940s, she bet her Howard professor $10 that Jim Crow would be overturned in 25 years; the process began in a little over a decade, thanks in no small part to her arguments of the unconstitutionality of 'separate but equal' being utilised in the Supreme Court case Brown v Board of Education in 1954. Her book States' Laws on Race and Color (1950) was described as "the bible for civil rights lawyers".

Murray's interpretation of the 14th Amendment - not to "deny to any person... the equal protection of the laws" - then inspired another landmark Supreme Court case, in 1971, for women's rights. She fought publicly for equality, while fighting privately for her own identity in the face of what one biographer called a sense of "inbetweenness".