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WOW2: November 2023 Women Trailblazers and Activists – 11-17 thru 11-23 [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-11-18

November 20, 1910 – Pauli Murray born, American civil and women’s rights activist, lawyer, and author. She was the first African American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest, and among the first women to be ordained by that church. Orphaned very young in Baltimore, Maryland, she was raised by her maternal grandparents in Durham, North Carolina. After being denied entry to Columbia University because it was then a males-only school, at 16, she went to Hunter College in New York, graduating with a BA in English in 1933. During the Depression, she worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps at an all-woman camp founded at the urging of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, whom she met when she visited the camp, but Murray later clashed with the camp’s director after he found a Marxist book among her belongings, and he disapproved of her relationship with Peg Holmes, a white counselor. They both left the camp in 1935, and traveled the country on foot, hitching rides and hopping freight trains, before finding employment, Murray with the YWCA. In 1940, Murray was arrested for sitting in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus, a violation of Virginia’s segregation laws. After this incident, and her involvement with the socialist Workers’ Defense League, Murray enrolled in the law school at Howard University after being denied entry to the University of North Carolina because of her race. At Howard, her awareness of sexism increased, which she called “Jane Crow” (alluding to the Jim Crow laws which enforced racial segregation in the Southern U.S.). She graduated first in her class, but was denied entry to Harvard for post-graduate work because of her gender. In 1964, she delivered her speech “Jim Crow and Jane Crow” in Washington DC. She earned a master’s degree in law at University of California, Berkeley, and in 1965 she became the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School. As a lawyer, Murray took on civil and women’s rights cases. Thurgood Marshall, then chief counsel for the NAACP, called her 1950 book, States’ Laws on Race and Color, the “bible” of the civil rights movement. Murray was appointed by President Kennedy to serve on the 1961-1963 Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt until her death in 1962, then run by Esther Peterson, noted activist for labor, women’s rights, and the consumer movement. Murray was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women in 1966. In recognition of Murray’s seminal work on gender discrimination, Ruth Bader Ginsburg named her as co-author of a brief in the 1971 case, Reed v. Reed, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that administrators of estates cannot be named in a way which discriminates between sexes. The case involved the parents of a young man who had died, where their petitions to the Idaho Probate Court were decided in favor of the father only because the Idaho code specified that “males must be preferred to females” in appointing estate administrators. It was a landmark case because it was the first time that the Supreme Court ruled that the 14 th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause prohibited differential treatment based on sex. Murray taught law at Brandeis University from 1968 until 1973, when she became involved with Episcopal Church programs, and in 1977, at the age of 67, she was ordained as a priest, and became the first woman to celebrate the Eucharist at an Episcopal Church in North Carolina, then worked until 1984 in a parish in Washington DC. Murray died in 1985 of pancreatic cancer.

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