Honoring The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray: Feast Day

The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray (1910 – 1985)

The Anti-Racism and Reconciliation Commission of the Episcopal Diocese of Florida shares the following in celebration of Pauli Murray Feast Day, which the Episcopal Church commemorates on July 1.

The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray was an American civil rights activist, lawyer, and gender equality advocate. Born in 1910, her work influenced groundbreaking legal battles. An early champion of intersectionality, her legacy is celebrated in the civil rights, women’s, and LGBTQIA+ movements and communities of faith.

Especially earlier in life, she often dressed in traditionally masculine clothing and faced societal pressure regarding her identity. While she did not, during her lifetime, publicly proclaim as transgender, scholars today recognize her as an important gender-fluid twentieth-century figure in LGBTQIA+ history.

Murray was a trailblazer in both racial and gender equality.

She was denied admission to Harvard Law School due to her gender, which she famously called “Jane Crow,” drawing parallels to “Jim Crow” racial segregation laws. She went on to earn a master’s degree in law from the University of California, Berkeley, and became the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School in 1965.

Her legal scholarship was instrumental in shaping civil rights litigation. Thurgood Marshall, who went on to become a Supreme Court Justice, referred to her book “States’ Laws on Race and Color” as the “bible” of the civil rights movement. The NAACP incorporated her legal theories to overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine during the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case.

She was appointed to President John F. Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women and was one of the original founders of the National Organization for Women in 1966. In a brief filed in 1971 in the Supreme Court case Reed v. Reed, Ruth Bader Ginsburg recognized Murray’s legal influence. Ginsburg went on to win that case, which was the first gender equality high court victory based on the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment equal protection clause.

Later in life, Murray became the first Black woman ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1977. In a letter sent to friends shortly following ordination, Murray proclaimed, “We bring our total selves to God, our sexuality, our joyousness, our foolishness. . . I’m out to make Christianity a joyful thing.”

The Lessons Appointed for Use on the Feast of Pauli Murray offers the following Collect:

Liberating God, we thank you for the steadfast courage of your servant Pauli Murray, who fought long and well: Unshackle us from the chains of prejudice and fear, that we may show forth the reconciling love and true freedom which you revealed in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.