Dr. Anna Pauline Murray, or Pauli, was a civil rights organizer, feminist, poet and priest. She did so much it was hard to decide what to include here.

Born in 1910 Murray was raised by relatives in Durham after her mother died when she was just 3.  Murray credited her family with giving her social justice values and an appreciation of education, however at 15 she turned down a scholarship to study at Wilberforce University in Ohio because she was opposed to segregated education. Moving to New York, Murray supported herself to attend the non-segregated Hunter College instead, completing a degree in English in 1933. She stayed on in NY for several years during the Depression; teaching and publishing her first book Angel of the Dessert.

After returning to Carolina in the late 30’s, three events shaped Murrays’ future politics.

First, in 1938 she was refused entry to the University of North Carolina law school due to her race, then refused again on appeal. In 1940, she was then arrested for breach of segregation statutes and public disturbance while traveling by Greyhound bus with a cousin, and met with lawyers from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NACCP] who suggested that she keep pursing law, after seeing her competence organizing her own case.  Finally she was an organizer for the Workers Defense League in the case of an African American sharecropper, Ordell Waller, who was sentenced to death for the murder of a white farmer. When he lost, Murray committed to become a  civil rights lawyer.

After finishing a law degree at Howard University first in her year, Murray was awarded a fellowship at Harvard. Harvard refused her admission though on grounds of gender. She graduated with a Masters in Law from the University of California Berkeley instead, writing her thesis on The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment.

In 1942, she co-founded the Congress For Racial Equality [CORE]. CORE was a pacifist group influenced by  Ghandian non-violence, the close connections between it’s members including Murray and Bayrnard Rustion and Dr. Martin Luther King influenced the use of civil disobedience in the movement.

Murray returned to NY to work with the NAACP publishing the “bible for civil rights lawyers” States Laws on Race and Colour in 1951, and contributing to the famous 1954  Brown vs the Board of Education case which ended racial segregation in schools.

She also wrote a successful biography Proud Shoes:the Story of an American Family about her Southern Family in 1956, was appointed to President Kennedy’s Commitee on the Status of Women in 1961 and became the first African American to be awarded a law doctorate from Yale in 1965.

She also campaigned to have sex discrimination in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. When it was passed, she wrote a famous legal article Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII making links between sex discrimination and Jim Crow laws. Then in 1966, she co-founded NOW, the National Organization of Women after convincing Betty Friedan that the US needed a “NAACP for women”

Eventually in 1977, having turned away from the “militancy” of political organizing, she was ordained a Protestant Episcopal Priest.  She was able to celebrate her first service at the church in North Carolina where her grandmother had been baptised, as a slave, in 1864.