Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray (November 20, 1910 – July 1, 1985) was an American civil rights activist, advocate, legal scholar and theorist, author and – later in life – an Episcopal priest.

[3] This incident, and her subsequent involvement with the socialist Workers' Defense League, led her to pursue her career goal of working as a civil rights lawyer.

[20] The historian Rosalind Rosenberg wrote: Their honeymoon weekend, spent in a "cheap West Side Hotel", was a disaster, an experience that she later attributed to their youth and poverty.

Murray took a job selling subscriptions to Opportunity, an academic journal of the National Urban League, a civil rights organization based in New York City.

[29] Murray and Holmes left the camp in February 1935, and began traveling the country by walking, hitchhiking, and hopping freight trains.

[39] Murray and McBean initially were defended by the NAACP, but when the pair were convicted only of disorderly conduct rather than violating segregation laws, the organization ceased to represent them.

[41] With the WDL, Murray became active in the case of Odell Waller, a black Virginia sharecropper sentenced to death for killing his white landlord, Oscar Davis, during an argument.

[47] Murray's trial on charges stemming from the bus incident and her experience with the Waller case inspired a career in civil rights law.

[53] After passing the California Bar Examination in 1945, Murray was hired as the state's first black deputy attorney general in January of the following year.

[55] Murray was the first Black woman hired as an associate attorney at the Paul, Weiss law firm in New York City, working there from 1956 to 1960.

[56] Murray was an outspoken activist at the forefront of the civil rights movement, alongside such leaders as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.

The black women decided to "...continue ... [standing] ..." for their freedom and liberty even when "...their men ..." began to experience exhaustion from a long struggle for civil rights.

[31] Thurgood Marshall, then NAACP chief counsel and a future supreme court justice, called Murray's book the "bible" of the civil rights movement.

[6] Her approach was influential to the NAACP arguments in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), by which they drew from psychological studies assessing the effects of segregation on students in school.

[60]In 1964, Murray wrote an influential legal memorandum in support of the National Women's Party's successful effort (led by Alice Paul) to add "sex" as a protected category in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

[31] In March of that year, Murray wrote to Commissioner Richard Alton Graham that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was not fulfilling its duty in upholding the gendered portion of its mission, leaving only half the black population protected.

[6] She taught at Brandeis from 1968 to 1973, receiving tenure in 1971 as a full professor in American studies and appointed as Louis Stulberg Chair in Law and Politics.

[31] On July 1, 1985, Pauli Murray died of pancreatic cancer in the house she owned with lifelong friend Maida Springer Kemp in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

[75] Bishop Michael Curry of the Diocese of North Carolina said this recognition honors "people whose lives have exemplified what it means to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and make a difference in the world.

[9] Murray wore her hair short and preferred pants to skirts; due to her slight build, there was a time in her life when she was often able to pass as a teenage boy.

[88] Murray pursued hormone treatments in the 1940s to correct what she saw as a personal imbalance[37] and even requested abdominal surgery to determine if she had "submerged" male sex organs.

When asked about her understanding of Murray's gender in a 2017 interview with the African American Intellectual History Society, Rosenberg states: "[During Pauli's life,] the term transgender did not exist and there was no social movement to support or help make sense of the trans experience.

Murray's papers helped me to understand how her struggle with gender identity shaped her life as a civil rights pioneer, legal scholar, and feminist.

"[90] In an interview with HuffPost Queer Voices, Brittney Cooper agreed on the matter: "Murray preferred androgynous dress, had a short hairstyle and may have identified as a transgender male today, but she lacked the language to do so at the time.

Historian Simon D. Elin Fisher has also challenged the historical and textual practices of assigning Murray female pronouns through his pronominal use of "s/he" in some of his writings.

She conceives of the practice as one of many "de-essentialist" trans historiographical methods capable of "interrupt[ing] the logic of biological determinism" and "the constraints of cissexism operating historically.

"[93] Her view is a radical departure from biographers and scholars like Rosenberg, and conventional practices more broadly, which generally refer to Murray through the use of "she-her-hers" pronouns.

Her first autobiographical book, Proud Shoes (1956), traces her family's complicated racial origins, particularly focusing on her maternal grandparents, Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald.

The New York Herald Tribune stated that Proud Shoes is "a personal memoir, it is history, it is biography, and it is also a story that, at its best, is dramatic enough to satisfy the demands of fiction.

The title poem, "Dark Testament", originally appeared in the winter 1944–45 issue of Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling's South Today.