Women's History Month: Documentary, other media shed light on Pauli Murray's importance in fight for gender equality
NEW YORK -- It's almost the end of Women's History Month and Thursday is International Transgender Day of Visibility. For these communities and beyond there is a late civil rights pioneer who is relied on for inspiration and who is getting increased recognition.
CBS2's Dave Carlin has more on Pauli Murray, whose incredible life is the focus of recently released documentary, along with new books and upcoming honors.
Murray was a trailblazer whose ideas greatly influenced Ruth Bader Ginsburg's fight for gender equality and the civil rights arguments of Thurgood Marshall.
The activist, lawyer, poet, and priest's life, from 1910 until 1985, has had a lasting impact.
"Pauli was a person who was ahead of the times and who is extremely relevant to many of the issues that were dealing with today," said Betsy West, a documentary filmmaker who co-directed "My Name is Pauli Murray."
"What brought you to Pauli Murray?" Carlin asked.
"My directing partner, Julie Cohen, and I and were I making a film about Ruth Bader Ginsberg, 'RBG,' and it was RBG who first credited Pauli Murray with coming up with the strategy for winning equal rights for women," West said. "Pauli had a very strong feeling, although born a woman assigned female at birth, that Pauli was really a man."
The film delves into a difficult childhood spent mostly in Durham, North Carolina. Murray was orphaned young and was kept separate from white students.
"After high school, I did not want to attend any more segregated schools," Murray says in the documentary.
At the age of 16, Murray moved to New York City to attend Hunter College. The year was 1926.
"I was astounded by almost everything I saw -- the skyscrapers, Coney Island, the Statue of Liberty, the Broadway Theater District," Murray said. "Most of all, I was impressed because one could sit anywhere one wanted in the subway trains, buses, and streetcars."
Murray was jailed for refusing to move to the back of a bus in the Jim Crow South. This was 1940 and 15 years before Rosa Parks.
Having found success as a labor organizer, lawyer, and author, Murray helped launch the National Organization for Women, or NOW, in 1966.
"Pauli was connected to many of the most famous people in the 20 century -- Thurgood Marshall, Eleanor Roosevelt, RBG, James Baldwin," West said.
"We should all know about Pauli Murray," added Barbara Lau, executive director of the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice. "Recent Supreme Court cases based on Pauli Murray's legal strategies from the 1960s, they're being used to protect LGBTQ people now."
"Pauli did have a sense that gender boundaries, racial boundaries were pretty arbitrary. Pauli was an in-between person and I think that's what helped Pauli come up with these innovative ideas that informed both civil rights and women's rights activism," West added.
The Rev. Dr. Murray was ordained in 1977.
"The first female African-American episcopal priest," West said.
In every role, Murray had much to say and contribute. And now, more and more people listen and learn, thanks to a film and additional media that has put this brilliant luminary in the spotlight.
