The trailblazing attorney 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 explores the remarkable life of Pauli Murray <\/p>
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<\/a>, 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: \u201cWhat I\u2019m experiencing is Jane Crow.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u2018separate but equal\u2019 being utilised in the Supreme Court case Brown v Board of Education in 1954. Her book States\u2019 Laws on Race and Color<\/em> (1950) was described as \u201cthe bible for civil rights lawyers\u201d.<\/p>\n Murray\u2019s interpretation of the 14th Amendment \u2013 not to \u201cdeny to any person<\/em>\u2026 the equal protection of the laws\u201d \u2013 then inspired another landmark Supreme Court case, in 1971, for women\u2019s rights. She fought publicly for equality, while fighting privately for her own identity in the face of what one biographer called a sense of \u201cinbetweenness\u201d.<\/p>\n Murray\u2019s strong-willed character had been evident from an early age. Although born with African-American, white and Native American heritage on 20 November 1910, Anna Pauline Murray grew up as \u2018coloured\u2019 in the South. An orphan by the time she was 12, she was raised by relatives in North Carolina, and \u2013 with the support of her aunt, Pauline \u2013 she enjoyed a freedom of expression not commonly afforded one of her race and gender.<\/p>\n The extremely self-motivated Murray then moved to New York at 16 to get a better education, graduating in English in 1933 from the all-women\u2019s Hunter College. In the North she hoped to be free of Jim Crow\u2019s grip too, but in 1940 she was arrested for not moving to the back of a bus, much like Rosa Parks<\/a> 15 years later. The incident lit a fire in her to take up civil rights law in the first place.<\/p>\n By then Murray faced, as well as discrimination, a deeply personal form of inbetweenness that caused much confusion and distress, and yet instilled in her a need to push against societal boundaries: she was gender nonconforming. While always referring to herself as \u2018she\/her\u2019, Murray went by the gender-neutral name Pauli, dressed in men\u2019s clothing, and was attracted, in her own words, to \u201cextremely feminine and heterosexual women\u201d. Despite a brief marriage to a man in 1930, she became convinced she was \u201ca girl who should have been a boy\u201d.<\/p>\n On the podcast | Matt Cook, Channing Joseph, Jen Manion and Angela Steidele tackle some of the biggest themes in LGBTQ history<\/strong><\/p>\nPauli Murray as a LGBTQ+ icon<\/h2>\n