Fortunately for Murray, she had, by then, a strong, if complicated, sense of family elsewhere. Robert, by contrast, was raised in Pennsylvania, attended anti-slavery meetings with Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and fought for the Union in the Civil War. Together, they formed part of a large and close-knit family whose members ranged from Episcopalians to Quakers, impoverished to wealthy, fair-skinned and blue-eyed to dark-skinned and curly-haired.
By the time she graduated, at fifteen, she was the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, the president of the literary society, class secretary, a member of the debate club, the top student, and a forward on the basketball team. Around the time of her birth, North Carolina had begun rolling back the gains of Reconstruction and using Jim Crow laws to viciously restrict the lives of African-Americans.
From the moment Murray understood the system, she actively resisted it. Even as a child, she walked everywhere rather than ride in segregated streetcars, and boycotted movie theatres rather than sit in the balconies reserved for African-Americans. Since the age of ten, she had been looking north. When the time came to pick a college, she set her sights on Columbia, and insisted that Pauline take her up to visit.
It was in New York that Murray realized her life was constrained by more factors than race. Dismayed but determined, Murray petitioned her family to let her live with a cousin in Queens, then enrolled in Richmond Hill High School, the only African-American among four thousand students. Then came October 29, Murray, who was supporting herself by waitressing, lost, in quick succession, most of her customers, most of her tips, and her job.
She looked for work, but everyone was looking for work. She took time off from school, took odd jobs, took shared rooms in tenement buildings. She graduated in —possibly the worst year in U. Nationwide, the unemployment rate was twenty-five per cent. In Harlem, it was greater than fifty. For the next five years, Murray drifted in and out of jobs—among them, a stint at the W. She learned about the labor movement, stood in her first picket line, joined a faction of the Communist Party U. In , worried about their health and lacking any job prospects, she decided to apply to the graduate program in sociology at the University of North Carolina—which, like the rest of the university, did not accept African-Americans.
Murray knew that, but she also knew her own history. Two of her slave-owning relatives had attended the school, another had served on its board of trustees, and yet another had created a permanent scholarship for its students.
Surely, Murray reasoned, she had a right to be among them. On December 8, , she mailed off her application. Six days later, she got a reply. Thanks to an accident of timing, that letter made Murray briefly famous. Two days earlier, in the first serious blow to segregation, the Supreme Court had ruled that graduate programs at public universities had to admit qualified African-Americans if the state had no equivalent black institution. Murray hoped to sue, and asked the N. Nor was she ever admitted to U.
Soon enough, though, she did get into two other notable American institutions: jail and law school. In March of , Murray boarded a southbound bus in New York, reluctantly. She had brought along a good friend and was looking forward to spending Easter with her family in Durham, but, of all the segregated institutions in the South, she hated the bus the most. Murray and her friend changed buses in Richmond, Virginia. Since the available seats in the back were broken, they sat down closer toward the front.
Some time earlier, they had discussed Gandhi and nonviolent resistance, and so, without premeditation, when the bus driver asked them to move they politely refused. The driver called the cops, a confrontation ensued, and they were thrown in jail. This time, the N. But the state of Virginia, steering clear of that powder keg, charged Murray and her friend only with disorderly conduct. That vow did not last six months. Waller had been sentenced to death for shooting the white man whose land he farmed: in self-defense, he claimed; in cold blood, according to the all-white jury that convicted him.
As Bell-Scott documents, that friendship had begun two years earlier, after Murray wrote an angry letter to F. Eleanor responded, unperturbed, and later invited her to tea—the first of countless such visits, and the beginning of a productively contentious, mutually joyful decades-long relationship.
While there, she gave a speech that reduced the audience to tears—an audience that, by chance, included Thurgood Marshall and the Howard law professor Leon Ransom. Later that day, Murray ran into the two men in town; Ransom, who had admired her speech, suggested that she apply to Howard.
Murray died of pancreatic cancer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on July 1, Researchers have discovered that Murray struggled with her sexuality and gender identity during her lifetime. Rosalind Rosenberg, author of Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray , asserts that Murray may have identified as a transgendered man but did not have the information or acceptance available during her lifetime to describe it. Privacy Terms of Use. Skip to main content. Photograph of Reverend Dr.
Pauli Murray in her study in Arlington, VA. Photograph of Rev. Pauli Murray being ordained at the National Cathedral. Pauli Murray. Privacy Terms of Use. Skip to main content. Pauli Murray — Pauli Murray — was a writer, lawyer, minister, and activist.
Pauli Murray being ordained at the National Cathedral, January 8, Photograph by Milton Williams.
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