In a new documentary, Pauli Murray says that communication is at the center of everything she does. This thrilled me because I have for years been thinking about communication. Communication is fundamentally about the meeting of two persons, two subjectivities, and the bridging of differences. Differences are set up and perpetuated by social categories, most often binaries, and individuals are sort of tied in a web of these categories. Pauli Murray was a brilliant and perceptive human whose self was suspended in the threads between firm categories. I’m thinking of the categories of subject and object, not-white and white, female and male, heterosexual and homosexual. Binaries are distortions. She was capable of perceiving her situation, and effecting action upon it, long before we had (as a culture in U.S.) the language to talk about these things. She was like a grammarian to a language that had yet to exist. She had the astounding imagination to be able to sketch the landscape that Martin Luther King, Jr. could only partly see from his mountaintop. This is because he did not have people who were not heterosexual, or who were assigned female, standing there with him. Murray liked to say that she lived to see all her lost causes found. Many of them were. Many will be.
Ruth (a poem by Pauli Murray)
Brown girl chanting Te Deum on Sunday
Rust-colored peasant with strength of granite,
Bronze girl welding ship hulls on Monday,
Let nothing smirch you, let no one crush you.
Queen of ghetto, sturdy hill-climber,
Walk with the lilt of ballet dancer,
Walk like a strong down-East wind blowing,
Walk with the majesty of the First Woman.
Gallant challenger, millioned-hope bearer,
The stars are your beacons, earth your inheritance,
Meet blaze and cannon with your own heart’s passion,
Surrender to none the fire of your soul.
Pauli Murray (November 20, 1910–July 1, 1985) was a poet, a writer of letters to powerful people, a lawyer, civil rights activist, women’s rights activist, organizer, professor, Episcopal priest, and a non-binary person. She was a Black person who had many white ancestors, and at least one indigenous ancestor. She was assigned female at birth but always felt that she was really a man, that there was some mistake in her body. She lived most of her life as a lesbian woman, after a short time presenting as a boy when riding the rails during the Great Depression. She never spoke publicly about her sexuality or sexual identity, but her voluminous archive does include many documents expressing them. She knew that she would be an object of study in the future—her archive includes photos and film from the 1930s!— and she did not hide her complex identity from us, here in the future, although she did destroy her letters with her greatest love. I am so grateful to whoever did not destroy this record of her non-binary self. I think we are ready to think about her as she really was in a way that was not possible while she lived. Maybe that’s why most people are only now discovering her.
Pauli Murray is not able to tell us explicitly which pronouns are hers. This choice was not available to her the way it is available to people now. I am using the third person pronouns she did use for herself. It is not wrong to use “they/them”. It is not wrong to use “he/him”. These are categories we can question FOR her. Another category we have now that I don’t think she had then is “non-binary.” This may have been the best home for her, but we just don’t know. That is why her power for us is to QUESTION CATEGORIES. As a lawyer, Murray questioned racial and gender categories and worked to show that laws discriminating against people based on these categories are arbitrary and unconstitutional. These laws are wrong at their core, not just in their implementation.
In the same way it is not wrong to include her—someone who knew themselves to be a man—in a project about female power. If you have read this long, I am now going to tell you a secret (it was never a secret). Female Power is not just for females. My project is to expand the definition of power to include the power of females. We know that binaries are inadequate. Let’s imagine what replaces them.
I urge everyone to see the recent documentary called “My Name Is Pauli Murray” available at the link below. In it we hear Chase Strangio, an ACLU attorney, say, “We can’t comprehend legal movements for justice without understanding Pauli’s role in them.”
There is too much to include in this small space, so I will make a condensed list of Murray’s ground breaking human rights work. In the last decade of her life she worked in ministry as an Episcopal priest, the first ordained African American woman in that church. She felt she wanted to work directly in communion with individual people.
• In 1940, Murray sits in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus with a friend, and they are arrested for violating state segregation laws. They had been reading about Gandhian non-violent resistance. The NAACP drops her case when the charges are changed to disorderly conduct. This event fires her interest in Civil Rights law.
• In 1941 she enters Howard University Law School and stays at the top of her class. She writes a paper on a strategy to counter segregation and her reasoning is later used by Thurgood Marshall to argue Brown v. Board of Education. While at Howard she participates in sit-ins challenging discrimination at restaurants in D.C.
• Long before Kimberlé Crenshaw develops the idea of intersectionality, Murray uses the term “Jane Crow” to describe the special status of Black women as the targets of discrimination. She later criticizes the sexism of the civil rights movement, “It is indefensible to call a national march on Washington and send out a call which contains the name of not a single woman leader.”
• In 1950, Murray publishes a book surveying state racial segregation laws across the country. She continues her argument that lawyers should fight such laws as directly unconstitutional, instead of trying to make the separate accommodations more equal. Thurgood Marshall calls Murray’s book the “bible” of the civil rights movement. The text functions as a catalogue of laws for dismantling, similar to the Solicitor General’s list that RBG used.
• 1961–1964 Murray writes influential works on extending the developing civil rights law protections for Black people to women as well. Ruth Bader Ginsburg adds Murray as coauthor on her brief in her first case for the ACLU, Reed v. Reed (1971).
• In 1966, she originates the idea for, and then co-founds, the National Organization for Women (NOW), which she hoped could act as a NAACP for women’s rights.
DESIGN NOTE
You might have noticed that the large titling typeface I used in this design is a “unicase font” (called Quinoa) in which upper case and lower case forms are combined into one case. In other words, this type is non-binary.
This print was published in October 2021.
SOURCES
Documentary: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B09DMPMWCP/
Artwork based on this Photo: Pauli Murray of New York, winner of Mademoiselle Merit Award for signal achievement in law, 1946. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
Wikipedia
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/the-many-lives-of-pauli-murray
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