Her analytical mind, her familiarity with legal strategies, and her tireless efforts on behalf of the oppressed made her invaluable to the feminist movement. She helped found the National Organization of Women. Murray was appointed to Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women. Her paper at Howard proposed the seminal idea that led to school desegregation in 1954. She had written “States’ Laws on Race and Color, the “bible’ for civil rights lawyers. to the Harvard Board.īy the 1960s, Murray was a seasoned mover and shaker. Harvard did not accept her, because she was a woman. restaurants.įirst in her graduating class, Murray got the Rosenwald Scholarship that most recipients had used at Harvard Law School. Yet while dealing with her personal battles for respect and equality, Murray led successful sit-ins for integration in Washington, D.C. The only woman in her class, Murray was subjected to discrimination at the all-black, all-male law school.
Pauli lost her case but after watching her NAACP attorneys, Murray applied to Howard Law School. The sheriff fulfilled their requests and the male prisoners changed their behavior. one to the sheriff and one to the prisoners. Unsatisfied with the jail conditions and their treatment by the black male prisoners, Murray wrote two letters. In 1941, Pauli Murray and a companion were arrested for causing a disturbance on a Jim Crow bus in Virginia. Thus began her lifetime friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. She sent a copy to the First Lady, lest the President overlook her letter. Her rejection letter came only days after President Roosevelt spoke at Chapel Hill, praising the university as a liberal institution.
A correspondence of arguments and counter-arguments began that made headlines. The university rejected her because she was a Negro. She applied to University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill to earn a graduate degree in sociology. The WPA instilled Murray with a desire for change.
Thus began her life-long mentorship with Stephen Vincent Benet. She wrote a letter asking him to look at her writing. Murray was living in New York, working for the WPA(Work Projects Administration), and working on her writing when she heard that her literary hero lived in New York. Convinced that writing could bring long-awaited change, she lived out her motto: “One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement.” But the revolution began long before for Pauli Murray. The 1960s in America was a decade of revolution.
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