Nonetheless, she embraced those oppressed identities and, until her death at age 74 in 1985, committed herself to liberation in terms never neatly aligned with what she privately considered her own identity, terms far beyond the personal. She saw them as reductive falsifications of who she knew herself to be. Murray chafed against the identities she was born into (woman, Black). (Making Murray the great-great-granddaughter of James Strudwick Smith, a congressman and one of antebellum North Carolina’s foremost white citizens.) This family history both haunted and empowered Murray, as did a secret that would have been taboo, even dangerous, in the South of that era: she privately considered herself to be a man. Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald, Murray’s maternal grandmother, had been born into slavery, the result of her own enslaved mother being raped by a white man named Sidney Smith. Murray-nicknamed “Lenie”-was raised by her maternal grandparents and her aunt in Durham, North Carolina.

He was beaten to death by a guard in 1923. Her mother, a nurse, died when Murray was three, and her father, a teacher, was committed to an asylum for “the Negro insane” because of long-term typhoid fever.

She was born Ann Pauline Murray in Baltimore in 1910. They also inspired poetry of vast ambition. As Rosalind Rosenberg suggests in Jane Crow (2017), a biography of Murray, these setbacks threatened Murray’s livelihood, but they also laid the groundwork for a long career of activism during which Murray sought a constitutional basis for legal challenges against racial and gender discrimination. This came more than two decades after the University of North Carolina Graduate School denied her admission in 1938 because she was Black, followed by another denial in 1944 from Harvard Law School because she was a woman. In June of 1965, Murray became the first Black person to earn a JSD (doctorate in the Science of Law) from Yale Law School. The achievement was another first in what had been a trailblazing life marked by both triumph and strife. The newspaper was running a story about the then-67-year-old Murray becoming the first African-American woman ordained an Episcopal priest. “Please don’t refer to me as ‘Mother Murray,’” Pauli Murray chided a reporter from the New Haven Register in 1977.

Hope is a song in a weary throat