After serving as chairman of the Sumter County Republican Party, Murray was elected in the 1890s as a United States congressman from South Carolina.

Murray was born into slavery on a cotton plantation near Rembert, Sumter County, South Carolina, in the Piedmont region.

That year the legislature also passed a law restricting admission to whites and designating Claflin College for higher education for black students, in order to qualify for funding under the Morrill Land-Grant Act.

Education was an urgent need and a high calling among the freedmen, and Murray taught school for fifteen years in Sumter County.

Murray gradually became active in local organizing and politics, playing an important role in the Republican Party in South Carolina in the late 19th century.

In 1876, white Democrats regained control of the state legislature following violence and election fraud, and they passed laws to impose racial segregation and make voter registration and voting for blacks more difficult.

Murray and other black leaders struggled to resist these electoral changes, but in 1882 the legislature passed a requirement for an "eight-box ballot", which made voting even more confusing.

[3] Under the national Republican administration, Murray was appointed in 1890 as a federal inspector of customs at the port of Charleston, South Carolina, serving to 1892.

He became known as the "Republican Black Eagle" for his speech against a proposed law in 1893 to remove federal inspectors from polling places, in which he recounted his own problems with harassment and discrimination in voting.

Although he lost the popular vote to William Elliott, a white Democrat, he successfully contested the election, due to numerous cases of voter fraud in several precincts that discriminated against African American citizens.

The case took nearly until the end of the first Congressional session to be decided in his favor, but Murray was seated and served in the Fifty-fourth Congress from June 4, 1896 to March 3, 1897.

To prevent another Republican-Populist alliance that threatened their control, in 1895-1896, Democratic legislators in South Carolina forced through a new state constitution that effectively disenfranchised African-American citizens, by making changes to residency requirements, requiring literacy tests, poll taxes and a $300 property requirement that Murray and other black South Carolina politicians protested and brought to national attention by publishing the address "To the People of the United States," in July 1896 in the New York World, asking for national support for federal intervention in the South Carolina elections.

He had a petition signed by hundreds of South Carolina Republicans, and asserted that more than 100,000 eligible black voters had been disenfranchised from the 1896 election; therefore, the state should not have retained nine electoral votes.

[2] At the time, such constitutional changes had survived challenges to the US Supreme Court, which ruled narrowly that, since they applied to all citizens, they were not discriminatory.

[5] The powerful southern Democratic bloc defeated any efforts to change electoral apportionment based on citizens who were able to vote, rather than total populations.

The historian John F. Marszalek agrees with Murray's assessment, describing the trial as "legal whitecapping, a way to rid the community of a troublesome black.