Mixed Race Studies

Pauli Murray applied to be a Supreme Court justice in 1971. 50 years later, a Black woman could make history.

The Washington Post
2022-01-27

Anne Branigin

The trailblazing lawyer wrote President Nixon to do something “unprecedented”

When Pauli Murray wrote to President Richard Nixon in September 1971, the trailblazing lawyer, activist, writer and scholar held no illusions about how the letter would be received.

The 60-year-old constitutional lawyer was writing to Nixon to “do something which may be unprecedented in the history of the USA”: to directly apply, as a self-identified “Negro woman,” for a seat on the Supreme Court.

“By the time this letter reaches the White House, I suspect you will have announced your choice to fill the vacancy left by Mr. Justice Hugo L. Black’s resignation,” Murray wrote. “Since I do not expect you to see this letter, it does no harm to amuse your administrative and secretarial staff as it passes up and down the line on its way to the waste basket.”

But while Murray may have taken a tongue-in-cheek tone, the ultimate aim of the letter was a serious one…

Read the entire article here.

‘The Firebrand and the First Lady,’ by Patricia Bell-Scott

Sunday Book Review
The New York Times
2016-02-19

Irin Carmon

Pauli Murray, in 1946, and Eleanor Roosevelt, circa 1943. Credit Left, Bettmann/Corbis; right, Stock Montage/Getty Images

Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016)

The February 1953 issue of Ebony included an article entitled “Some of My Best Friends Are Negroes.” The byline was Eleanor Roosevelt’s, though the headline, apparently, was not. “One of my finest young friends is a charming woman lawyer — Pauli Murray, who has been quite a firebrand at times but of whom I am very fond,” Roosevelt wrote. “She is a lovely person who has struggled and come through very well.” Indeed, nothing was ever easy for Murray, a black woman born in 1910, a woman attracted to women and also a poet, memoirist, lawyer, activist and Episcopal priest. But her tender friendship with Roosevelt, sustained over nearly a quarter-century and more than 300 cards and letters, helped. It is the rich earth Patricia Bell-Scott tills for “The Firebrand and the First Lady,” a tremendous book that has been 20 years in the making.

You could say Pauli Murray was born too soon, and saying so captures the essential injustice of her life, but it would also rob her of credit for making her own time the best she could. “I’m really a submerged writer,” Murray once told her friends, “but the exigencies of the period have driven me into social action.” The granddaughter of a woman born into slavery and a mixed-race Union soldier, Murray was arrested for refusing to sit in the colored section of a bus 15 years before the Montgomery bus boycott and for participating in restaurant sit-ins in the early 1940s, long before the 1960 sit-ins at Woolworth’s lunch counter. She led a national campaign on behalf of a black sharecropper on death row…

Read the entire review here.