The 20th Century and Pauli Murray

Or what is gender anyways?

On a sweltering morning in Durham, North Carolina, I was hanging out in a lush little pocket of a park with some co-workers, cutting colorful bits of plastic to weave into a chain link fence around a basketball court. Nearby, some of my colleagues taped off shapes onto concrete sidewalks and started spray painting in bright colors, while others collected fallen branches and other detritus.

Across the street, a modest blue house sits on a little hill, surrounded by trees and lined up with other homes. My agency, McKinney was conducting a day of service for the Pauli Murray Center for Social Justice, a center based in Murray’s childhood home on this residential street in Durham. Our brilliant executive director of equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging Chandra Guinn, had identified the perfect way for our team to commit to doing good the week before Juneteenth, and during Pride.

There are so many activist icons from the 20th century that shape our world today, like Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis, Betty Friedan, RBG, Eleanor Roosevelt. Count Pauli Murray among those names. Pauli’s work as a lawyer and activist shaped the thinking of these feminist and civil rights icons, the policy around gender and race, and the institutions that continue to fight for civil rights and women’s rights today.

Pauli was a queer, feminist, Black activist whose friendships with Eleanor Roosevelt, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Betty Friedan, and many more luminaries planted seeds for the 21st century. A lawyer and poet, Murray played pioneering roles in the ACLU and the National Organization of Women, before becoming an Episcopalian priest late in life.

The 2021 documentary My Name Is Pauli reintroduces Pauli to a public attuned to revisiting the past with a new lens. Filmmakers Betsy West and Julie Cohen learned about Murray while producing their Emmy-winning docu about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In an interview for the film, RGB credited Murray with the core argument that helped her win the case determining sex-based classification as unconstitutional. This was a revelation for filmmakers, who decided to dedicate their next film to Murray. A recent article about the documentary in Time Magazine says:

Working well before the coining of the term intersectionality—the idea that overlapping factors such as race, sex, gender, class and immigration status must be viewed collectively to fully understand a person’s identity—Murray had outlined the parallels between sex discrimination and race discrimination, setting the stage for the former to be recognized as just as unconstitutional as the latter. 

In a 1956 autobiography Proud Shoes, Murray wrote, “Great art is not a matter of presenting one side or another, but presenting a picture so full of the contradictions, tragedies, [and] insights of the period that the impact is at once disturbing and satisfying.”

Murray’s own impact continues today. Before we began listing pronouns alongside our names, before Stonewall, perhaps even before Marlene Dietrich was arrested for wearing pants,  Murray was grappling with what it meant to feel more masculine than feminine, and writing doctors to explore hormone treatment and sex reassignment. 

Murray’s longest romantic relationship, with Irene Barlowe, was also the most spiritual, and the two visited the Episcopalian church during lunch breaks from their mutual place of employment, where Murray was the only Black and female-presenting lawyer and Barlowe was the office manager. This source of faith led Murray to Episcopalian priesthood, yet another surprising space of intersecting identities of religion, gender, and sexuality.

Murray was born Anna Paulina Murray, and later chose to go by gender-neutral “Pauli.” As you may have noticed, I’ve avoided pronouns throughout this article.  Many writings about Murray caveat the hell out of pronoun usage, and rely on the pronouns Pauli used in life: the default she/her/hers. However, newer scholarship retroactively introduces they/theirs, and one scholar uses he/his, identifying Murray as a trans man. This move that opens up for redefinition much of Murray’s legacy -- for example, as the first Black female Episcopalian priest. Some stories feel too complex for their time; Pauli Murray’s story is one that continues to unfold.

Watch the documentary here, and learn more about or donate to the Pauli Murray Center for Social Justice.

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You’ve just read Framing, a regular newsletter about what’s good culture, marketing, and business by Anita Schillhorn van Veen. I’m Director of Strategy at McKinney, on the lead team of Ladies Who Strategize, and a writer over at my other favorite Substack Why Is This Interesting.

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