shopper approved
    2906.19
    1.10
    32.12
    0.15
    1000.79
    5.68
    1011.68
    7.78

    The Pauli Murray Quarter

    Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray (1910 – 1985) had an extremely varied life. In fact, she earned five advanced degrees over the course of her lifetime, and her life had several distinct but distinguished chapters.

    As it happens, Murray may have been before her time. Her actions in support of gender equality, gender identity, and sexuality likely laid much of the groundwork for the current movements in our culture to recognize the different varieties of people.

    So, Dr. Murray deserves recognition as an honoree of the American Women Quarters Program. Let’s go through the different pages of her life and discover one of the more fascinating people in recent memory.

    Biography

    Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray was born in Baltimore, Maryland on November 20, 1910. She was the fourth of six children born to William and Agnes Murray. Though her parents’ heritage was something of a pastiche, both of them identified themselves as Black.

    Though her family began as a happy unit, things fell apart when young Pauli was only three years old. Her mother passed away suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage. Her father, an accomplished man and educator, could not process his grief and carry on as the sole parent of six children.

    So, he sent them to live with different relatives. He sent Pauli to live with her mother’s sister, Pauline, and her mother’s parents in Durham, North Carolina.

    Unfortunately, William’s fortunes never improved. He was committed to the Crownsville State Hospital for the Negro Insane in 1916 due to his depression and other mental issues.

    He died seven years later in a violent and traumatic fashion at the hands of a baseball bat-wielding guard at the facility. This event, and Pauli’s subsequent viewing of her father’s body at his funeral, deeply affected Pauli and steeled her resolve to fight for equal rights and treatment of African-Americans in the US.

    However, amid all of this volatility and instability, Pauli proved herself to be a highly-gifted student and intellectual. She graduated from high school at the tender age of 15, but resisted applying to the North Carolina College for Negroes due to her disagreement with segregation and the decidedly unequal treatment under the law.

    So, she resolved to attend Columbia in New York City, and moved to the Big Apple to pursue that goal. Columbia didn’t accept female students at that time, but its sister college, Barnard, did.

    However, Pauli had two problems with her plan. First, she didn’t have the tuition money to attend Barnard. Second, North Carolina’s educational system for blacks lagged behind the standard in New York significantly, and her high school diploma was not considered complete by those in higher education.

    So, she returned to high school in NYC, attending Richmond Hill High School until her graduation in 1927. She then chose to attend Hunter College, rather than Barnard.

    Her time at Hunter was both fruitful and difficult. On the one hand, she blossomed in her studies of English literature. She also met several extremely prominent Harlem Renaissance figures like Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois, and attended concerts of musicians like Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington.

    However, her timing to attend college, supplement her income by waitressing, and find work after college could not have been worse. The dawn of the Great Depression in October 1929 caused her customers, tips, and job to dry up in rapid succession.

    Ultimately, Murray had to take two years off her studies to build up her cash reserves and, frankly, survived. She finally graduated from Hunter in 1933 with a BA in English literature.

    Unfortunately, the Great Depression did not conclude to celebrate her graduation. Murray spent most of the 1930s in and out of poverty and did not spend any major periods of time employed. She even attempted to pursue a graduate degree at the University of North Carolina, but UNC did not accept Black entrants at that time – even though she could point to some of her relatives who were graduates of the school.

    Murray, under pressure from her North Carolina-based relatives, finally decided to move back to the Tar Heel State in 1940. However, she and a friend would experience a seminal event on the bus ride south from New York City.

    Like Rosa Parks later would, Murray and her friend refused to sit in the back of the bus in the Black section. Murray was arrested for the Jim Crow violation, but was later charged only with disorderly conduct.

    Then, she became aware of the plight of Odell Waller, a black sharecropper sentenced to death for the murder of his white landlord. She spoke publicly and passionately in defense of Waller, whose trial and conviction both had numerous elements of concern. Unfortunately, her efforts were for naught, and Waller went to Virginia’s electric chair in 1942.

    Nevertheless, the situations ignited Murray’s drive for civil rights and social issues. Furthermore, she was invited to attend Howard University’s law school after one of its law professors heard her speak.

    So, she began her studies there in 1941. She was the only woman in the entire law school and faced quite a bit of gender discrimination – at first. However, she let the barbs motivate her to become the top of the class. She did so, and graduated first in the class in 1944 with a bachelor of laws degree.

    She then continued her legal studies at the University of California at Berkeley. After her graduation with her LLM, she took and passed the California Bar Exam in 1945.

    However, finding work as a black female attorney during the 1940s was quite the challenge. She ended up moving back to New York and, in essence, bumming around for the next three years.

    Then, the course of her career and life changed dramatically for the better in 1948. The Methodist Church approached her to write a report on the status of racial discrimination. The Church, which opposed Jim Crow laws and other discriminatory policies, sought to understand their legal requirements to uphold these laws in the states where they had churches.

    Murray spent the next two years creating this report. It became a 746-page book entitled States’ Laws on Race and Color, and thrust Murray into the national spotlight.

    The American Civil Liberties Union began distributing the book en masse. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall owned several copies that he kept in plain view.

    Later, the findings in the book became the backbone for the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which largely rendered the system of racial discrimination espoused in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) – separate but equal and the like – unconstitutional. Marshall referred to Murray’s book as the “Bible” of the decision.

    Ironically, her stellar efforts ultimately rendered the book obsolete. Though Murray rejoiced at its success, it left her short on working opportunities. Though she was hired by a prestigious NYC law firm in 1956, she chafed in the role as she was one of only three women attorneys and the only black attorney in the firm.

    She resigned in 1960, and briefly sought solace as an administrator and professor at the newly created Ghana School of Law. However, the rumbles of the growing civil rights movement in the US soon lured her back.

    Murray attempted to assist the country’s civil rights leaders as soon as she returned. However, she soon grew irritated at the movement’s inability to listen to women in the movement and began to strike out on her own. She sought to add women to the list of groups in need of recognition and played a major role in the inclusion of sex as a protected class in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

    She also met with feminist icon Betty Friedan at this time. In 1966, she and Friedan became two co-founders of the National Organization for Women.

    However, she also spent her time during the 60s and early-70s in academia. She earned her Doctorate of Juridical Science from Yale in 1965 as the first black person to receive this degree from Yale. Dr. Murray served in the administrations and on the faculties of several universities as a law and African American Studies professor until 1973.

    Despite her tenured status – she received tenure at Brandeis University in 1971 – Dr. Murray had one more career and life transformation in mind. She wanted to become a member of the Episcopalian clergy. She entered seminary and received her masters in divinity in 1976.

    She was ordained into the Episcopalian diaconate the following year as the first black woman to do so. She continued to set many firsts as she conducted the activities and responsibilities of her faith.

    However, Dr. Murray was already 67 years old when she was ordained. So, she had only a limited amount of time to serve in what would become her final role.

    As it turned out, she developed pancreatic cancer in the mid-1980s. Pauli Murray died on July 1, 1985, from the disease – she was 74.

    Gender identity

    One underreported aspect of Dr. Pauli Murray’s life was her struggles with her gender identity. Beginning in 1930, she began to question her status as a female and began to present this status in a variety of ways.

    Murray often dressed in pants, shorts, or other clothing atypical of female fashions of the time. She sought hormone treatments and surgical interventions as a means of calming her distress, but was unsuccessful, as such treatments were unavailable at that time.

    Had Murray been born a century later, she likely would have found kinship within the transgender community. However, though she was troubled about the topic at times, she apparently resolved to keep things private about it.

    Neither her autobiography nor any of her works mentioned her dysphoria, and she clearly did not seek any sort of recognition for it. Aside from her clothing, the only other extant sign of her internal makeup was her sexual preference – she engaged in long-term relationships with both men and women and gravitated towards women as she aged.

    Legacy

    Dr. Pauli Murray’s contributions to the cause of both racial and gender discrimination remain incredibly important to this day. Her foundational role for both Brown v. Board of Education and the addition of sex as a protected class cannot be ignored.

    Despite these contributions, she has largely escaped commemoration by national organizations. She has never received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Kennedy Center honors, or induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. The only recognition of this type came in 2018, when the National Women’s History Project honored her during Women’s History Month.

    Her main sources of recognition are the Episcopal Church and academia. In 2012, the Church decided to honor her on the anniversary of her passing, July 1, on its calendar of saints. She became a permanent honoree on the calendar in 2018.

    Then, in 2016, Yale University designated her as the namesake of one of its new residential colleges. Pauli Murray College became a fixture of the campus in 2017.

    Finally, in January 2021, Pauli Murray became the subject of a biographical documentary. My Name Is Pauli Murray debuted at the Sundance Film Festival.

    Thus, the 2024 quarter was the next item in the series of recognitions Dr. Murray has received in recent years.

    The 2024 Quarter

    The Pauli Murray quarter debuted as the first quarter released in the 2024 series of the US Mint’s American Women Quarters Program. It is the eleventh coin in the series overall.

    As is the case with all quarters since 1932, President George Washington adorns the obverse of the coin itself. The quarter’s face also features the 2024 mintmark.

    The reverse of the coin is the tribute to Dr. Murray. Her face is not featured in its entirety. Instead, she is inscribed onto large script lettering of the word “HOPE,” which Murray often cited as the underpinning of her struggle for equality.

    In addition to her visage, the large letters also feature an inscription reading “A Song in a Weary Throat,” a phrase from her poem Dark Testament. Like the notion of hope, this phrase signified the long struggles that Dr. Murray encountered and largely overcame during her lifetime.

    Her name on the coin is fashioned with her titles – The Reverend Dr. Pauli Murray. Oddly enough, this name, as grand as it is, may undersell the tremendous effect that Murray had on the world.

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