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This chapter examines Murray's coming of age politically in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. By examining her poetry, short stories, and political essays, it traces Murray's emerging concerns around race, gender, and sexuality and the historic disfranchisement of black Americans. It shows how the themes of identity, history, and democratic eschatology emerge in her early writing.

This chapter describes landmark legal arguments Murray made about equal protection in the 1960s. Using the category of “Jane Crow,” she demanded that the law be responsive to the synthetic nature of identity. In so doing, Murray placed African American women's experiences at the center of democratic consideration. Despite her attempts to build coalitions, she found herself increasingly at odds with leaders of the feminist and Black Freedom movements.

This chapter discusses Murray's transition in the 1970s and 1980s from a career focused on the law to one devoted primarily to what she called “moral and spiritual problems.” It offers a systematic reading of the themes of salvation, suffering, and the coming kingdom that animated Murray's sermons and places her theological program in conversation with contemporary womanist and black feminist scholars.

This chapter describes Pauli Murray’s childhood. At age three Murray moved from Baltimore to Durham, North Carolina, to live with her maternal relations following her mother’s sudden death. Murray endured another childhood trauma when a white attendant brutally murdered her father while he was confined to Crownsville Asylum for the Negro Insane. Jim Crow segregation created many more hardships and complications for Murray and her maternal family. Murray’s grandmother was descended from slaves and slave owners. Her grandfather fought for the Union in the Civil War. Both grandparents and many of their descendants could pass as white, but still embraced a black racial identity. The family subscribed to black uplift ideology: they prized education and adhered to middle-class values but also demonstrated ‘colorism.’

This chapter examines Pauli Murray’s early adult years. Murray relocated to New York City to complete high school and undergraduate study at Hunter College. The Great Depression severely disrupted her education, but also facilitated her tramping across the country, often passing as a teenage boy. Gender identity concerns and the social stigma around homosexuality led Murray to seek gender reassignment and contributed to mental health problems, which were also exacerbated by a fear of hereditary insanity. Work on New Deal projects led to immersion in the labor movement and an interest in communism. These influences, and Gandhian civil disobedience, inspired Murray’s groundbreaking contributions to nonviolent direct-action civil rights protests, which included challenging segregated education by applying to the University of North Carolina and being arrested for violating segregated bus seating.

This chapter explores Pauli Murray’s continuing civil rights activism, emerging feminism, and legal training during World War II. Murray joined the Workers Defense League and campaigned to save sharecropper Odell Waller from execution. The experience partially inspired Murray to become a lawyer. While studying at Howard University, Murray became conscious of sexism, which she labelled “Jane Crow.” Murray’s mental health, sexual identity, and gender identity all continued to trouble her. She initiated restaurant sit-ins to protest segregation in Washington and reported on the 1943 Harlem race riots for a socialist newspaper. Murray also completed a master’s degree at Berkeley before becoming the first African American Deputy Attorney General of California.

This chapter covers Murray's career and writings as a young lawyer in the late 1940s through the 1950s. It explores her development of a new kind of American history and an account of black American identity as integral to her democratic thought. In response to McCarthyist insinuations that she is disloyal, she published a family memoir that portrayed her multiracial family and the history of violence against which it was formed. In the late 1950s, Murray left the United States for Ghana in search for a sense of home, but ultimately concluded that her racial identity and history made her irrevocably American.

This chapter examines Pauli Murray’s life during the Cold War era. Preferential treatment for returned servicemen and McCarthyism further disadvantaged Murray’s employment opportunities in the post-World War II period. Most notably, Cornell University denied her employment because of her “past associations.” Murray responded by writing Proud Shoes, a history of her maternal grandparents. Physical and mental health concerns continued to plague Murray, and as one of only a few independent black women lawyers in New York City, Murray struggled to make a living. In the late 1950s she became a corporate lawyer, wrote poetry, and then went to Ghana to teach law and explore her own racial identity.

This chapter concludes that Pauli Murray's critical attentions to identity, history, and her articulation of a democratic eschatology provide readers with resources for contemporary discussions of Christianity and American democracy. It considers Murray's project in conversation with the work of Jean Bethke Elshtain and Cornel West, two contemporary theorists who aim to inform democratic theory with Christian theological imagination and commitments.

King’s radicalism was hard to see or remember after he was assassinated and a campaign for a King Holiday transpired. It became hard to remember that he was the most hated person in America during his lifetime. The black social gospel became more institutional and conventionally political after the King era; liberation theology grew out of the Black Power movement; and womanist theology grew out of black theology.

This chapter focuses on Pauli Murray’s contributions to Second Wave Feminism. Murray served on the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, campaigned to retain the sex amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and cofounded the National Organization for Women. She also became the first African American to complete a law doctorate at Yale. Murray gained employment at Benedict College in South Carolina before moving to Brandeis University where she clashed with Black Power student activists over the establishment of Black Studies programs. Murray also won a teaching award and innovated Women’s Studies courses.

This chapter explores the final years of Pauli Murray’s life. Following her partner’s death, Murray resigned from Brandeis to pursue ordination into the Episcopal priesthood. Murray obtained a master’s in theology from General Theological Seminary while campaigning for women’s ordination. Under pressure from Murray and others, in 1976 the Episcopal Church overturned its prohibition on women priests. The following year Murray became the first black woman Episcopal priest. Murray continued to keep her sexual orientation private, but publicly advocated for minority rights, including gay rights, under the aegis of universal human rights. Murray worked as a supply priest in various locations before retiring to Pittsburgh where she died.

This introductory chapter sets out the main purposes of the book. It traces the development of Pauli Murray's democratic and theological criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s. Ranging from Murray's theologically rich democratic criticism of the 1930s to her democratically inflected sermons of the 1980s, this study proclaims Murray to be a significant 20th-century African American intellectual who grounded her calls for democratic transformation in Christian concepts of reconciliation and of the coming kingdom. While investigating her remarkable career and contributions to major political, social, and theological debates of her time, this book demonstrates how Murray articulated a theologically grounded democratic criticism that employs theological norms to interrogate democratic practices and democratic norms to interrogate religious practices. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Pauli Murray was one of the young activists that Mary Church Terrell mentored. In the 1940s, Murray enrolled at Howard University Law School and went on to graduate as the only woman and top student in her class. In the 1930s, the convergence of several important Black male intellectuals at Howard University, including Abram Harris, E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, had cemented a new formal model of the academically trained Black male public intellectual. When Murray enrolled in the 1940s, she experienced great sexism from these Black male intellectuals. She termed their treatment of her, “Jane Crow.” While she went on to have a storied career as a legal expert, Episcopal priest, poet, and writer, all of which place her firmly in the tradition of the race woman, her identity as both a woman and queer person in the 1940s and 1950s collided with the Howard model of public intellectual work. This chapter brings together Murray’s time and training at Howard, her archives, and an examination of her two autobiographies to suggest that her concept of Jane Crow grew out of the collision of race-based sexual politics and limited ideas among Black men about who could provide intellectual leadership for Black people. Moreover, Jane Crow exposed the heterosexist proclivities of Black public leadership traditions, and offers a framework for thinking about how Black women negotiated gender and sexual politics even as they devoted their lives to theorizing new strategies for racial uplift.

This chapter discusses the lives of two remarkable women who shared a good many characteristics in spite of their great difference in early experience and in style. It explains that Lina Ware came from a family of New England Unitarians with a long tradition of social concern as well as attachment to Harvard University. On the other hand, Pauli Murray's heritage was a mix of black and white; she was a child of a nurse and a public school teacher, and was adopted by the schoolteacher aunt for whom she was named. Caroline Farrar Ware, white, born in 1899, raised in Massachusetts, and Pauli Murray, black, born in 1910, raised in segregated North Carolina, developed a most unusual friendship and threw light on some of the major issues of the middle decades of the twentieth century, particularly those touching on questions of racial discrimination and civil rights.

Azaransky analyzes the political activism of lawyer, author, and advocate for civil rights and women’s rights Pauli Murray. Azaransky mines her sermons, journals, lectures, published writings, and ecclesial leadership as sources of, and indeed model examples of, deep, disciplined, engaged reflection on God and God’s relation to the world. Azaransky demonstrates how lived theology’s singular commitments prompt a series of pressing theological, historiographical, and methodological questions. These include, what counts as theological reflection? Can activism and organizing for social justice be appropriated as theological material? And what kind of a hermeneutic do we need to accurately read practices as theological texts?

This chapter describes Pauli Murray's teaching job in the newly independent nation of Ghana at the new University of Ghana Law School, and tells of Murray's traumatic experiences in Ghana, where she almost felt homesick: the tropics were bad for her collection of health problems, and she suffered from culture shock. It notes that after the initial adjustment, Murray worked hard at teaching and at learning about Ghana, but was always at the edge of depression.