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Euro-African-American activist Pauli Murray was a feminist lawyer, who played pivotal roles in both the modern civil rights and women's movements. Born in 1910 and identified as female, she believed from childhood she was male. Before there was a social movement to support transgender identity, she devised attacks on all arbitrary distinctions, greatly expanding the idea of equality in the process.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- A Note on Pronouns and Other Word Choices
- Introduction
- Part I: Coming of Age, 1910-1937
- Chapter 1 - A Southern Childhood
- Chapter 2 - Escape to New York
- Part II: Confronting Jim Crow, 1938-1941
- Chapter 3 - "Members of Your Race Are Not Admitted"
- Chapter 4 - Bus Trouble
- Chapter 5 - A Death Sentence Leads to Law School
- Part III: Naming Jane Crow, 1941-1946
- Chapter 6 - "I Would Gladly Change My Sex"
- Chapter 7 - California Promise, 1944-1946
- Part IV: Surviving the Cold War, 1946-1961
- Chapter 8 - "Apostles of Fear"
- Chapter 9 - A Person In Between
- Chapter 10 - "What Is Africa to Me?"
- Part V: A Chance to Lead, 1961-1967
- Chapter 11 - Making Sex Suspect
- Chapter 12 - Invisible Woman
- Chapter 13 - Toward an NAACP for Women
- Part VI: To Teach, To Preach, 1967-1977
- Chapter 14 - Professor Murray
- Chapter 15 - Triumph and Loss
- Chapter 16 - The Reverend Dr. Murray
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Rosalind Rosenberg is Professor of History Emerita at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century, Changing the Subject: How the Women of Columbia Shaped the Way We Think About Sex and Politics, and Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism.
Summary
Throughout her prodigious life, activist and lawyer Pauli Murray systematically fought against all arbitrary distinctions in society, channeling her outrage at the discrimination she faced to make America a more democratic country. In this definitive biography, Rosalind Rosenberg offers a poignant portrait of a figure who played pivotal roles in both the modern civil rights and women's movements.
A mixed-race orphan, Murray grew up in segregated North Carolina before escaping to New York, where she attended Hunter College and became a labor activist in the 1930s. When she applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where her white great-great-grandfather had been a trustee, she was rejected because of her race. She went on to graduate first in her class at Howard Law School, only to be rejected for graduate study again at Harvard University this time on account of her sex. Undaunted, Murray forged a singular career in the law. In the 1950s, her legal scholarship helped Thurgood Marshall challenge segregation head-on in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.
When appointed by Eleanor Roosevelt to the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1962, she advanced the idea of Jane Crow, arguing that the same reasons used to condemn race discrimination could be used to battle gender discrimination. In 1965, she became the first African American to earn a JSD from Yale Law School and the following year persuaded Betty Friedan to found an NAACP for women, which became NOW. In the early 1970s, Murray provided Ruth Bader Ginsburg with the argument Ginsburg used to persuade the Supreme Court that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protects not only blacks but also women - and potentially other minority groups - from discrimination. By that time, Murray was a tenured history professor at Brandeis, a position she left to become the first black woman ordained a priest by the Episcopal Church in 1976.
Murray accomplished all this while struggling with issues of identity. She believed from childhood she was male and tried unsuccessfully to persuade doctors to give her testosterone. While she would today be identified as transgender, during her lifetime no social movement existed to support this identity. She ultimately used her private feelings of being "in-between" to publicly contend that identities are not fixed, an idea that has powered campaigns for equal rights in the United States for the past half-century.
Additional text
Jane Crow does justice to the powerful mind and personal pain of Pauli Murray and to the momentous events she had a hand in bringing to pass. This is a book that asks us to meet it with an energy and compassion that does honor to its subject and will change the way we understand our world.
