Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray — not unlike Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other Civil Rights activists — had a dream for the future of the world. They wanted society to become more accepting of everyone — regardless of race, socioeconomic status, gender identity, sexual orientation or religion.
Now in Murray’s hometown of Durham, North Carolina, there is a team of individuals working to immortalize the legacy of Murray and their vision by creating a space to provide resources to a new generation of activists, as well as educate the public about Murray’s work.
The Pauli Murray Center was established on June 18, 2012, with the mission of “connecting history to contemporary human rights issues” and “activate visitors of all ages to stand up for peace, equity and justice.”
Executive Director Angela Mason has been involved with the Pauli Murray Center for a few years, but it wasn’t until just last year she stepped into the leadership role of director.
“Our mission is to uplift the life and legacy of Reverend Dr. Murray,” Mason told Qnotes in a phone interview. “My vision is that when people connect to the center … they feel moved to transform their communities through doing something, committing to an everyday action rooted in social justice and equity, because that is really the spirit of Pauli’s legacy.”
Who is Pauli Murray?
Murray was born as Anna Pauline Murray in Baltimore on November 20, 1910, to parents Agnes Fitzgerald and William Murray. They were the fourth child out of a total of six siblings, but life changed for Murray when their mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1914. Shortly after that, Murray’s father began to experience exacerbated symptoms of depression from long-term effects of typhoid fever, which resulted in his confinement to Crownsville State Hospital.
After the death of Fitzgerald, Murray moved south to Durham, where they lived with their aunt, Pauline Fitzgerald Dame, and their grandparents, Robert George and Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald.
“Pauli Murray was, and still is, an absolute force as a person,” Mason offered. “The space where Pauli was raised in Durham, the West End, really shaped their earliest concepts around democracy, justice, equity, and even gender identity and ultimately was foundational to the work that they would go on to do as an attorney and a legal scholar.”
After graduating from high school in 1926, Murray moved to New York City and attended Hunter College where they studied English Literature. It was during this time Murray changed their name to “Pauli,” and they began to question their gender identity and their sex assigned at birth. Murray would repeatedly ask doctors for hormone therapy and exploratory surgery to look into their reproductive organs as Murray believed they may have been intersex. However, doctors continually denied their request for gender-affirming care.
While Murray was grappling with coming to terms with their gender identity, they were writing essays and poems for various publications across New York City, including Common Sense and The Crisis, a publication belonging to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
“As a poet and an author Pauli’s work explored the Black American experience and brought awareness to what that entailed,” Mason explained.
Murray was also very involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the time, ranging from starting a letter-writing campaign to enter graduate school at the all-white UNC-Chapel Hill to establishing a relationship with then-First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. They then graduated from Howard University’s law school in the top of their class and would go on to lay the groundwork for civil rights legal cases of the 1950s and 1960s, according to Mason.
“Pauli’s personal activism and professional work in the 1930s and 1940s built the foundation for civil rights law in the ‘50s and the ‘60s, including the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” she explained. “As a feminist, they helped to found the National Organization for Women, they advocated for the rights of black working class women … and they were the first perceived as a woman African American to be ordained an Episcopal priest.”
Murray died of cancer in Pittsburgh on July 1, 1985, but according to Mason, their legacy lives on in the work being done at the Pauli Murray Center.
“They [Murray] were so fundamental to our landscape in terms of shaping American democracy but also in terms of shaping equitable spaces and equitable community for marginalized people,” she said.
Envisioning a future for all
The Murray Center stands on the same plot of land of Murray’s Durham home, which is located in the historically Black neighborhood of West End. Mason said it only seems fitting the location of Murray’s formative years would be the place to house a permanent fixture of their legacy.
According to the Pauli Murray Center website:
“Inspiring activism will lead the way to Pauli Murray’s dream for a just world. It is our hope that the Center will launch the next generation of Pauli Murray firebrand leaders – smart, motivated and determined activists who will demand a world that enables all ideas, amplifies many voices and honors everyone’s contributions.”
Mason said the center is meant to serve not only as a time capsule of Murray’s life, but it also meant to inspire a new generation of leaders and activists. This is being done through programming, which ranges from the Pauli Murray Center Book Club to a Pauli Murray Pilgrimage to learn more about the trailblazer’s life. The center also does a lot of community outreach, from speaking engagements to sponsoring or participating in local events. But one of the main areas of focus for the center is around education and ensuring people are being given an accurate account of history.
“For us, it’s really important that students and teachers, especially those from marginalized communities, have Reverend Dr. Murray as a touchstone,” Mason explained. “The current political climate (in North Carolina) has empowered us to do more and to think creatively about how to support people who are on the frontlines, whether that is educators or whether that is activist.”
One way the center is helping teachers is through a six month fellowship where teachers from Wake, Orange and Durham counties can learn how to apply social justice and equity centered teaching pedagogies in their classrooms. This is a relatively new initiative from the center, and it would also allow teachers to directly connect with activists and organizations to build direct relationships between the education system and those on the frontlines.
Mason said by forming these relationships between educators and organizers, Murray’s vision of equity can trickle down into the next generation of leaders and members of society.
“We’re building what I would describe as symbiotic relationships in these communities so that educators can support organizers and organizers can support educators and their work, but also offer additional perspectives around how they can strategically connect students’ educational practices rooted in justice and equity,” Mason said. “We work deeply with them and others in our community to think about how folks can still do the truth telling work, in spite of these policies.
“That is the power of our work at the center, and I’m really, really excited that moving forward, we will get to do even more of that work.”