Jane Crow

The Life of Pauli Murray

Sensitive exploration of a black person identified at birth as female who said she was male, before the term transgender existed.

Pauli Murray (1910-1985) played pivotal roles in both the modern civil rights and women's movements. In the 1950s, her legal scholarship helped Thurgood Marshall to shift his course and attack segregation frontally in Brown v. Board of Education. In the 1960s, Murray persuaded Betty Friedan to help her found an NAACP for women, which Friedan named NOW. In the early 1970s, Murray provided Ruth Bader Ginsburg with the argument Ginsburg used to persuade the Supreme Court that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protects not only blacks but also women — and potentially other minority groups — from discrimination.