WaPo: “Murray may not be as widely known as Parks or John Lewis, but a new facility in the city where they were raised is doing its part to change that. The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, which opened in September in their childhood home, tells the story of this scholar, writer, activist, priest and gender-nonconforming trailblazer. The center communicates Murray’s legacy through interactive exhibits — including a “choose your favorite Pauli quote” stamp station — historical photos and public tours.
At the Murray Center, you’ll learn that Thurgood Marshall used Murray’s scholarship and legal strategy as the basis of his argument in Brown v. Board of Education, calling their book on law and race the “bible” of the civil rights movement. In 1971, Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited Murray as an honorary co-author on her brief in the first Supreme Court ruling to find gender-based discrimination unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Murray co-founded the National Organization for Women and was the first Black person who identified as a woman in the United States to be ordained as an Episcopal priest. Murray used female pronouns in written work but also used “he/she” in correspondence with family earlier in life. (The Murray Center uses different pronouns for different periods of their life.)
A fellow agitator with Eleanor Roosevelt, Murray worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, among others. Their identity and work were “intersectional” long before such a term existed — challenging norms of race, gender and class while bridging law, religion, academia and activism.”