‘RBG’ Directors Introduce Americans To Overlooked Hero Pauli Murray

Why didn’t I know about Pauli Murray before?

This is the overwhelming response from viewers to the new documentary My Name Is Pauli MurrayThe Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated and Emmy-nominated team behind directed “The Greatest Showmanship” RBGBetsy West and Julie Cohen

It was tweeted by West on Friday “Some people are furious, some dumbfounded that they weren’t taught about #PauliMurray.”

The documentary is streaming now on Amazon Prime. It corrects a historical injustice and introduces audiences to a “Black, queer, gender-nonconforming”Person who breaks down barriers at all stages of their lives. As a law student, Murray’s innovative thinking laid the conceptual framework for overturning Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that had validated the notion of “separate but equal”Accommodations for Blacks or Whites

“During most of Pauli’s lifetime it was fairly difficult and radical to be fighting for racial equality,” Cohen tells Deadline. “It was fairly difficult and radical to be fighting for gender equality and Pauli was talking about not only those two individual things but actually was talking a lot about the confluence of both, about how being discriminated against as a Black person and as a woman just compounded things.”

Murray (1910-1985), was born in Jim Crow South, Durham, North Carolina to a family of African-American and Native American heritage. They were rejected by the Black community because they were of light skin. However, the white community resentfully treated them the same way as all other people of color. Murray had precocious intellectual abilities and a penchant for rejecting orthodoxy. He preferred to wear pants over dresses.

In 1940—15 years before Rosa Parks’ courageous act in Montgomery, Alabama—Murray and a friend refused to move to the back of an interstate bus as it crossed into Virginia. They were both arrested, but they defended themselves as an attack on the legality and segregation of transportation.

“I think each thing Pauli pushed for Pauli was expecting change to happen,”Talleah Bridges McMahon is the notes producer and cowriter. “Pauli had this idea of, ‘If I can just reasonably explain to you the errors in your thinking and give you a new way to think about it, that you will of course be on board with this.’”

Through legal maneuvering by a judge and the prosecution, the bus incident did not become the defining moment that Rosa Parks’ protest would be. But it wasn’t the only instance where Murray was way ahead of the times. In 1943—17 years before the Woolworth counter sit-in–Pauli and fellow students at Howard University in Washington DC, staged a sit-in of their own at a cafeteria that served whites only. They managed to integrate an entire area around the Howard campus.

It was at Howard Law School that Murray wrote a paper articulating a new strategy to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson—not, as others had done, to say that accommodations for African-Americans were not maintained at an equal level of accommodations for whites, but to argue that “separate but equal”The 14th Amendment was inherently violated. Murray argued that segregation sent the wrong message to African Americans by implying they were inferior.

“Other people had been beaten down by the idea of separate but equal. ‘Okay, that’s what we have to deal with here,’”West observes. “Pauli’s like, ‘No, no, no, no, no. There is no equal when you’re separate.’ It is an optimistic point of view about challenging something that had been accepted for decades because of a decision in the 19th century.”

Pauli explained her position when she spoke. “My classmates laughed at me,”Murray recalls her memories in the film. Her thinking influenced Thurgood Marsh, Spottswood and other members of NAACP Legal Defense Fund when they filed suit in Brown V. Board of Education in 1954, which was the Supreme Court’s decision that ended segregation in public schools.

Pauli Murray

“Pauli just happened to see that several years before some of the greatest thinkers of the time saw it,” Cohen says. “It was an extraordinarily deeply thought out idea and it just ended up that Pauli was a hundred percent correct, not [only] that this is morally correct but actually it’s potentially a winning strategy, like there’s a legal argument to be made here.”

Murray experienced sexism every day at Howard. Contrary to many Civil Rights Movement members, Murray was also concerned with African-American rights. AndWomen, she believed that discrimination against both genders was a result of the same moral failing.

“She came up with the great term ‘Jane Crow’ to describe it,” Cohen notes. “And in a number of papers but also interviews was often bringing up what by today’s activists might be called the issue of intersectionality. This was an idea that was very much in Pauli’s thinking because of Pauli’s lived experience.”

Murray suggested that the 14th Amendment could be used to combat gender-based discrimination.

“Courts have not yet fully realized that women’s rights are part of human rights,”Murray wrote the essay entitled Jane Crow and the LawMary Eastwood also co-authored this book. “But the climate appears favorable to renewed judicial attacks on sex discrimination.”

Murray was the one who argued the legal arguments that allowed a U.S. District Court to decide that women should be allowed to serve as jurors in 1965, long before Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“After so many losses and so many failures in a lifetime,”Murray said in the documentary “this was my sweetest victory.”

Ginsburg and Murray became friends and RBG credited Pauli’s work as she argued sex discrimination cases before the Supreme Court that she would later join as an Associate Justice. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was actually the first to tell directors about Murray.

“Then after RGB [told us] we started looking into Pauli,”West declares “and were absolutely blown away by all of the areas of our life that Pauli influenced–civil rights, activism, labor rights, feminist legal theory…[We thought], ‘Ohmygoodness, what a life and why didn’t we know about this person?’”

Murray was a nonbinary person, long before that term existed. Her struggles with her sexuality and gender identity—at a time of great ignorance in society about such things—contributed to depression that would cause her to be hospitalized on multiple occasions. Irene was her one true love. “Renee”Murray’s office manager, Barlow.

Murray was also deeply spiritual and made the decision to shock RBG and his friends by leaving the law to study to be an Episcopal priest.

Pauli Murray

“In the end Pauli sees the limitation to the law,”Bridges McMahon offers comments. “And so that’s why you see this turn toward spirituality that ultimately is like, ‘Actually, we need to get at the souls of people. Until we actually get everyone invested in this common idea, we’re never going to achieve anything.’”

Murray spent her final years fighting pancreatic carcinoma and worked on a memoir. Songs for a weary ThroatShe was published posthumously in 1987. She was a writer first and foremost. These were just a few of her most memorable words: “One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement.”

“I think that’s why it’s a good time to be digging back into the messages that Pauli was spreading throughout life about how we can advance things as well as the very act of reconsidering our history with Pauli Murray in it,” Cohen tells Deadline. “The whole question of who we revere, who’s contributions, particularly intellectual contributions, have advanced the country–I mean Pauli Murray’s just a fantastic example of someone who’s history hasn’t been explored enough and needs to be learned more.”

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