Pauli Murray

Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray was an American civil rights activist who became a lawyer, a women's rights activist, Episcopal priest, and author. Among many other things, Murray became involved in attempts to end segregation on public transport, which resulted in her arrest and imprisonment in March 1940 for refusing to sit at the back of a bus in Virginia. In 1942, while still in law school, Murray joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and later that year published an article, "Negro Youth's Dilemma", that challenged segregation in the US military, which continued during the Second World War.

She participated in sit-ins which preceded the more widespread sit-ins during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Murray was elected chief justice of the Howard Court of Peers, the highest student position at Howard, and in 1944 she graduated first in her class. After passing the California bar exam, Murray was hired as the state's first black deputy attorney general and also published the book, “States' Laws on Race and Color”, a book which Thurgood Marshall, the then NAACP chief counsel and a future supreme court justice, praised as being the "bible" of the civil rights movement.

In 1961, John F. Kennedy appointed Murray to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, and was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women. Murray was also the first African American to receive a J.S.D from Yale.

• In 2012 the General Convention of the Episcopal Church voted to honor Murray as one of its Holy Women, Holy Men.
• In 2015 the National Trust for Historic Preservation designated the childhood home of Murray as a National Treasure.
• In April 2016, Yale University announced that it had selected Murray as the namesake of one of two new residential colleges (Pauli Murray College)
• In December 2016 the Pauli Murray Family Home was also designated as a National Historic Landmark by the US Department of Interior.
• In 2018 Murray was chosen by the National Women's History Project as one of its honorees for Women's History Month in the United States.
• Also in 2018, Murray was made a permanent part of the Episcopal Church's calendar of saints.

When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind…