Movie Review: My Name is Pauli Murray

 

My Name is Pauli Murray
2021
Dir., Betsy West & Julie Cohen 

"Many of the ideas that you take for granted were radical when I first proposed them," wrote Pauli Murray. So why isn't she taught in the nation's history curricula? 

This question defines how you connect to this documentary. If you know her influence on social justice in the 20th century, you'll understand that the question is rhetorical. It likely evokes anger. If, like me, you're new to her story, you might take the question as an invitation to learn more.

Trailblazer isn't adequate to describe the breadth and depth of Pauli Murray's impact. Fifteen years before Rosa Parks, she was arrested for refusing to sit in the assigned section on a bus. In 1943, 17 years before the first lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, Pauli integrated U Street business in DC. She got involved with the labor movement during the 1937 auto workers strike.

Rejected from Harvard by dint of race and gender, she was the only woman in her law school class at Howard. She coined the term "Jane Crow" in describing her experience. During her time at Howard, she wrote a paper on overturning Plessy v. Ferguson in which she predicted the ruling would be overturned within 25 years. Ten years later, Thurgood Marshall used Pauli's work to do just that.

She was a founding member of NOW. "Nobody was a feminist then except Pauli Murray." Six years before RBG's first gender equality case before the Supreme Court, Pauli lobbied to put her on the board of the ACLU. 

Pauli was queer and gender non-conforming. During the Depression, she rode the rails in boy drag. She lobbied doctors for HRT in response to her own depression. "Her sense of in-betweenness made her increasingly critical of boundaries." Her grief at the death of her partner in 1985 motivated her to become an Episcopal minister.

So why isn't this poet-priest-lawyer's life taught in schools? I live an hour from Yale University, which named a residential college for her (1st person of color; 1st LGBTQ+ person). Why didn't I know her story? Was it because she was Black? Because she was a woman? Because she was queer?

Now that I know her story, I too consider that question rhetorical. And it makes me angry.