{"id":61542,"date":"2021-09-20T16:49:40","date_gmt":"2021-09-20T16:49:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=61542"},"modified":"2021-09-30T03:39:39","modified_gmt":"2021-09-30T03:39:39","slug":"pauli-murray-should-be-a-household-name-a-new-film-shows-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=61542","title":{"rendered":"Pauli Murray Should Be a Household Name. A New Film Shows Why."},"content":{"rendered":"

Pauli Murray Should Be a Household Name. A New Film Shows Why.<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2021-09-15<\/p>\n

Melena Ryzik<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nA scene from \u201cMy Name Is Pauli Murray<\/a>.\u201d The documentarian Betsy West<\/a>, who made the film with Julie Cohen<\/a>, said, \u201cWe just thought, why didn\u2019t anybody teach us about this person?\u201d Amazon Studios<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The lawyer, activist and minister made prescient arguments on gender, race and equality that influenced Thurgood Marshall<\/a> and Ruth Bader Ginsburg<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

When the lawyer, activist, author and educator Pauli Murray<\/a> died in 1985 at the age of 75, no obituary or commemoration could contain all of her pathbreaking accomplishments. A radical and brilliant legal strategist, Murray was named a deputy attorney general in California<\/a> \u2014 the first Black person in that office \u2014 in 1946, just a year after passing the bar there. Murray was an organizer of sit-ins and participated in bus protests as far back as the 1940s, and co-founded the National Organization for Women<\/a>. Murray was also the first Black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. In 2012, she was sainted.<\/p>\n

Murray has been saluted in legal, academic and gender-studies circles, and in the L.G.B.T.Q. community<\/a>. But her overarching impact on American life in the 20th and now 21st centuries has not been broadly acknowledged: the thinking and writing that paved the way for Brown v. Board of Education<\/em><\/a>; the consideration of intersectionality (she helped popularize the term \u201cJane Crow<\/a>\u201d); the enviable social circle, as she was a buddy of Langston Hughes<\/a> and a pen pal of Eleanor Roosevelt<\/a>, and worked on her first memoir alongside James Baldwin<\/a> at the MacDowell Colony<\/a> in the first year it allowed Black artists.<\/p>\n

Murray was devoted to feminism and the rights of women even as, it turned out, she privately battled lifelong gender identity issues. She should be a household name on par with Gloria Steinem<\/a> or Ruth Bader Ginsburg<\/a>, both of whom cited her work often. Instead Murray is an insider\u2019s civil rights icon.<\/p>\n

Now a documentary, \u201cMy Name Is Pauli Murray<\/a>,\u201d aims to introduce Murray to the masses. Made by the same Academy Award<\/a>-nominated filmmakers behind the surprise hit \u201cRBG<\/a>,\u201d it uses Murray\u2019s own voice and words as narration, drawn from interviews, oral histories and the prolific writing \u2014 books, poems and a collection of argumentative, impassioned and romantic letters \u2014 that Murray meticulously filed away with an eye toward her legacy. And the film arrives at a moment when the tenacious activism of people of color, especially women, is being re-contextualized and newly acknowledged, at the same time that many of the battles they fought are still raging…<\/p>\n