The Reverend Dr. Pauli Murray: legal strategist whose thinking influenced Thurgood Marshall’s arguments in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case; whose work Ruth Bader Ginsberg relied upon when arguing a Supreme Court Case against gender discrimination in 1971; and whose advocacy for the inclusion of the word “sex” in the 1964 Civil Rights bill would define its interpretation as protecting women’s rights in its time, and securing LGBTQ rights in our time. The first African American to receive a J.S.D. degree from Yale Law School, Murray has been called a “one-woman civil rights movement” by the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Made a saint by the Episcopal church in 2018, and the namesake of Pauli Murray College at Yale in 2017, Murray's vision for a better society lives on in an extraordinary legacy for generations to come.
FILM
Overlooked by history, Pauli Murray was a legal trailblazer whose ideas influenced RBG’s fight for gender equality and Thurgood Marshall’s civil rights arguments. This is a portrait of their impact as a non-binary Black luminary: lawyer, activist, poet, and priest who transformed our world.
BOOK
In a voice that is energetic, wry, and direct, Murray tells of a childhood dramatically altered by the sudden loss of her spirited, hard-working parents. Orphaned at age four, she was sent from Baltimore to segregated Durham, North Carolina, to live with her unflappable Aunt Pauline...
MUSEUM EXHIBIT
The Smithsonian multi-media exhibit, Pauli Murray’s Proud Shoes: A Classic in African American Genealogy, based on Murray’s memoir, Proud Shoes, explores Murray's family history. “If Grandfather had not volunteered for the Union in 1863 and come south three years later as a missionary among the Negro freedmen, our family might not have walked in such proud shoes and felt so assured of its place in history.”
Exhibit at Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture
Watch the film "My Name is Pauli Murray" on Amazon Prime (link above). Then watch Yale Alumni Academy's webinar (press play below) about the film featuring a conversation with Professor Tina Lu, Inaugural Head of Pauli Murray College at Yale, and Jongnic Bontemps '96, composer of the film's original music score.
TRAVEL PROGRAM
October 23 - 30, 2022
WEBINAR
Noel Lenski
March 8, 2022
4 p.m. ET
VIRTUAL TOURS
