{"id":53410,"date":"2017-04-11T19:27:35","date_gmt":"2017-04-11T19:27:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=53410"},"modified":"2017-04-11T19:27:35","modified_gmt":"2017-04-11T19:27:35","slug":"the-many-lives-of-pauli-murray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=53410","title":{"rendered":"The Many Lives Of Pauli Murray"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Many Lives Of Pauli Murray<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/a>
\n2017-04-17<\/p>\n

Kathryn Schulz<\/strong><\/a>, Staff Writer<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nIt was Pauli Murray\u2019s<\/a> fate to be both ahead of her time and behind the scenes.<\/em>
\nCREDIT COURTESY SCHLESINGER LIBRARY \/ RADCLIFFE INSTITUTE \/ HARVARD UNIVERSITY<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

She was an architect of the civil-rights struggle\u2014and the women\u2019s movement. Why haven\u2019t you heard of her?<\/em><\/p>\n

The wager was ten dollars. It was 1944, and the law students of Howard University were discussing how best to bring an end to Jim Crow<\/a>. In the half century since Plessy v. Ferguson<\/em><\/a>, lawyers had been chipping away at segregation by questioning the \u201cequal\u201d part of the \u201cseparate but equal\u201d doctrine\u2014arguing that, say, a specific black school was not truly equivalent to its white counterpart. Fed up with the limited and incremental results, one student in the class proposed a radical alternative: why not challenge the \u201cseparate\u201d part instead?<\/p>\n

That student\u2019s name was Pauli Murray<\/a>. Her law-school peers were accustomed to being startled by her\u2014she was the only woman among them and first in the class\u2014but that day they laughed out loud. Her idea was both impractical and reckless, they told her; any challenge to Plessy<\/em> would result in the Supreme Court affirming it instead. Undeterred, Murray told them they were wrong. Then, with the whole class as her witness, she made a bet with her professor, a man named Spottswood Robinson<\/a>: ten bucks said Plessy<\/em> would be overturned within twenty-five years.<\/p>\n

Murray was right. Plessy<\/em> was overturned in a decade\u2014and, when it was, Robinson owed her a lot more than ten dollars. In her final law-school paper, Murray had formalized the idea she\u2019d hatched in class that day, arguing that segregation violated the Thirteenth<\/a> and Fourteenth Amendments<\/a> of the United States Constitution<\/a>. Some years later, when Robinson joined with Thurgood Marshall<\/a> and others to try to end Jim Crow, he remembered Murray\u2019s paper, fished it out of his files, and presented it to his colleagues\u2014the team that, in 1954, successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education<\/em><\/a>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

She was an architect of the civil-rights struggle\u2014and the women\u2019s movement. Why haven\u2019t you heard of her?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,459,8,23674,20,25],"tags":[26822,16819,4178,3886],"class_list":["post-53410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-history","category-media-archive","category-social-justice","category-usa","category-women","tag-kathryn-schulz","tag-new-yorker","tag-pauli-murray","tag-the-new-yorker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53410"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53411,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53410\/revisions\/53411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}