Pauli Murray Wrote the Legal Blueprint for Your Rights. Why Don't We Know Her Name?
TL;DR: Pauli Murray was a Black queer legal scholar who invented the constitutional argument that your boss can't fire you for being a woman—and who helped crack open the case that ended school segregation. Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited her work in her first landmark Supreme Court brief. History textbooks still don't know her name. We're fixing that today.
Okay, let's unpack this: You have probably read Ruth Bader Ginsburg quotes on mugs. You've worn the "Notorious RBG" t-shirt, or at least seen it at Urban Outfitters. You know RBG helped remake gender equality law from the inside out.
What you probably don't know is that the constitutional theory RBG used—the argument that the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause applies to sex discrimination just as much as race discrimination—wasn't Ruth's idea. She borrowed it (with full credit) from a Black queer legal scholar named Pauli Murray, who had been making that argument since 1965.
Murray died in 1985. History has mostly left her there.
We aren't doing that today.
Who Was Pauli Murray? (The Version They Left Out of Your Textbooks)
Pauli Murray was born in Baltimore in 1910, raised in Durham, North Carolina, after being orphaned young. She was brilliant, restless, and refused to accept the cage that America kept trying to lock around her.
In 1938, Murray applied to the University of North Carolina's graduate school. She was rejected—because she was Black. This was before Brown v. Board, before the Civil Rights Act, back when "separate but equal" was still the law of the land and UNC was proudly "whites only."
She wrote about the rejection in a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt. She was 27 years old. (The audacity, the receipts, the whole thing. I love her.)
In 1944, Murray graduated at the top of her Howard University Law class—class valedictorian. She applied to Harvard Law School to pursue her doctoral degree. She was rejected—because she was a woman. Harvard didn't admit women. She had just led her entire class at one of the country's most respected HBCU law schools, and Harvard still said no. She responded by calling it "Grandmother's Law"—the same exclusion by a different name. (She eventually got her LLM from UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall in 1945 and her doctorate from Yale Law in 1965—because if one door won't open, you kick in three others.)
She coined a term for what she was living: "Jane Crow." The double bind of racism and sexism working together to keep Black women at the bottom of every ladder. This wasn't an abstract concept. She was describing her own life.
The Legal Genius Nobody Tells You About
Here's where it gets good—and infuriating, because this is where history does the disappearing act.
In 1951, Murray published a 746-page document called States' Laws on Race and Color, a meticulous survey of racial discrimination law across every state in the country. NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall called it "the bible" of the civil rights legal movement. Marshall and his team used Murray's research framework as they built the case that became Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
So: The landmark ruling that ended school segregation? Murray's fingerprints are all over it.
Then, in 1965, Murray co-authored a law review article—"Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII"—arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause applied to sex discrimination. Not just race. Sex.
This was a radical argument at the time. The conventional legal wisdom was that the Fourteenth Amendment was only about race. Murray said: look at the text. Look at the logic. The math isn't mathing if you say "equal protection" only applies to some people.
A young attorney named Ruth Bader Ginsburg read that work. And when she argued Reed v. Reed before the Supreme Court in 1971—the first case in which the Court ruled that sex discrimination violated the Constitution—she listed Pauli Murray as co-author on her ACLU brief, in tribute to the foundational legal framework Murray had built.
Read that again: RBG gave Murray co-author credit. Because that's how foundational Murray's work was. You don't get to write the legal blueprint and not get your name on it. At least, that's how it should work.
Murray didn't live to see the full fruit of that work. She died in 1985, a few years before RBG joined the Supreme Court. She spent her final years fighting a different kind of battle—she became the first Black woman ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1977, at age 67—which, if we're being honest, is also peak "I will break every door you try to shut in my face."
Why Doesn't Anyone Know This?
Because the history of who gets credit in America is a history of who gets to be seen.
Murray was Black in a legal world that centered whiteness. She was a woman in a profession that still barely tolerated women. She privately identified in ways that didn't fit the binary expectations of her era—her journals, later examined by scholars, describe a gender identity that contemporary readers would recognize as trans or nonbinary. She was erased on multiple fronts, because America erases anyone it can't easily categorize.
And here's the corporate "girlboss"-era version of erasure that really gets me: When the women's movement of the 1970s started lifting up female legal pioneers, it often lifted up the white ones. Murray co-founded the National Organization for Women in 1966. She was in the room. And yet the iconography of feminist legal history tends to look like RBG and Sandra Day O'Connor, not Pauli Murray.
The lens matters here. When we don't insist that our feminism includes Black women—especially Black queer women—we literally lose the names of the people who built the architecture of our rights.
Why This Matters Right Now
We are not in a moment of "celebrating progress." We are in a moment where the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause is being relitigated. Where reproductive autonomy is being dismantled case by case. Where the federal government is rolling back civil rights enforcement. Where "diversity" has become a dirty word in corporate America and, increasingly, in federal policy.
The legal tools we have to fight back—the arguments that sex discrimination is unconstitutional, that the government cannot treat women as second-class citizens—those are tools that Pauli Murray built. We should know whose hands made them.
This isn't just historical trivia. It's a power map. When you know who actually built the framework, you know the framework is possible. That it was done by someone working against enormous odds. That it can be done again.
What We Do Next
Here's your Tuesday action plan, no pink merch required:
1. Read her memoir. Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet (1987). It's out of print but findable at your library—and if your library doesn't have it, request it. That's how you get your library to stock more marginalized voices.
2. Check what your kids are learning. Does your local school curriculum include Pauli Murray? Go to one school board meeting this semester and ask. That's it. Just ask. (I have a template for how to phrase the question—DM me.)
3. Support the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice. It's in Durham, North Carolina—her hometown—and it's doing the work of keeping her legacy alive and accessible.
4. Say her name. The next time someone brings up RBG—at dinner, on social, in your office—add the sentence: "And did you know the legal theory behind RBG's biggest wins came from Pauli Murray?" That's it. That's the whole action. Let the name spread.
5. Share this post. Forward it to your group chat, your local feminist organizing listserv, your book club. The most powerful thing we can do for someone who was erased is to make her impossible to ignore.
We are in Women's History Month, which means we're getting a lot of "celebrating women!" content that's going to trend on LinkedIn and then disappear on April 1st. I don't do that. If we are going to use this month, we are going to use this month—to correct the record, to restore the names, to hand people the map so they can understand whose work they're standing on.
Pauli Murray built part of the floor you're standing on. She built it while being Black, while being a woman, while being rejected by every institution she approached. She built it anyway.
Now, what are we doing about it?
In solidarity and with a lot of coffee, Maya.