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Who is Pauli Murray? The pioneering African American legal scholar and organizer for racial and gender equality was celebrated this week at the annual Sundance Film Festival with the premier of the new documentary, “My Name is Pauli Murray.” The film was directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West, the duo responsible for the 2018 Oscar-nominated documentary “RBG,” about late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was deeply influenced by Murray.
“My name is Pauli Murray, and my field of concentration has been human rights,” Murray, who died in 1985, says in the archival film clip that gave the documentary its name. “My whole personal history has been a struggle to meet standards of excellence in a society which has been dominated by the ideas that Blacks were inherently inferior to whites and women were inherently inferior to men.”
Pauli Murray, born Anna Pauline Murray in 1910, orphaned in 1923, and raised by relatives, adopted the gender-neutral name “Pauli” in adulthood. Murray’s diaries and letters, housed at Harvard University...Read More→
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