Pauli Murray: Lawyer, Poet, Priest, Trailblazer

Summary

Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | "Pauli Murray: Lawyer, Poet, Priest, Trailblazer" (August 28, 2021)

Host: Dahlia Lithwick
Guests: Betsy West & Julie Cohen (directors, "My Name is Pauli Murray")
Guest: Professor Patricia Bell-Scott (consulting producer, author, and professor emerita)

---

Episode Overview

This episode centers on the extraordinary life and legacy of Pauli Murray—an overlooked but profoundly influential figure in 20th-century American legal, civil rights, and gender equality movements. In conversation with the directors of the documentary My Name is Pauli Murray and Professor Patricia Bell-Scott, the group explores Murray’s multidimensional identity as a lawyer, poet, priest, and activist, examining Murray's enduring impact on constitutional law, social justice, and movements for racial and gender equality.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Recognizing Pauli Murray’s Pioneering Legacy

• Murray's Underappreciated Role:
  Pauli Murray was a critical legal thinker whose work shaped the underpinnings of landmark civil rights and gender equality cases—including arguments that later surfaced in Brown v. Board of Education and Reed v. Reed (the latter credited publicly by Ruth Bader Ginsburg) ([02:00], [15:58], [17:40]).
• Ahead of Her Time:
  Murray was involved in civil disobedience (sit-ins, refusal to move to the back of the bus) years before these acts became known symbols of the civil rights movement ([01:54], [32:13]).

2. Pauli Murray’s Complex Identity

• Race, Gender, and Non-Binary Identity:
  Murray, of mixed-race ancestry and presenting publicly as female, privately expressed a gender identity more akin to what we would consider genderqueer or non-binary today, struggling with the lack of contemporary vocabulary and acceptance ([04:48], [05:09], [10:53]).
  • Quote: “Publicly…referred to herself as she. And it was only in Polly's diaries and letters that we learned about the struggle…” —Betsy West [10:53]
  • Documentary filmmakers and biographers debate which pronouns are most accurate, ultimately choosing to let speakers use what feels authentic, sometimes simply using “Pauli” ([12:31]).
• Intersectionality Embodied:
  Murray’s lived experience illustrated the overlapping oppressions of race, gender, class, and sexuality ([20:07]).

3. The "Why Was She Forgotten?" Discussion

• Barriers to Recognition:
  Multiple systemic and personal factors led to Murray’s erasure from mainstream history:
  • Societal dismissiveness of Black, female, and gender-nonconforming legal professionals
  • Murray’s own impatience with institutional inertia and tendency to move on before receiving credit
  • Her discomfort with institutional hierarchies and a preference for innovation over conformity ([20:07], [23:02]).
  • Quote: “There's a pattern of…male colleagues, lawyers, who would take her ideas and not bother to give her credit.” —Patricia Bell-Scott [20:07]

4. Pauli Murray as a Poet and Creative Force

• Creative Works as Core Identity:
  Despite her legal renown, Murray considered herself fundamentally a poet and writer. Her poetry deeply reflects her experience and identity, providing another window into her struggle and resilience ([27:06]).
  • The documentary ended up centering more poetry than planned, recognizing how it elevated the story ([28:29]).
  • Quote: “Given the choice of all of Pauli's many identities, writer was actually the most important.” —Julie Cohen [29:48]

5. Dissonance with Institutions

• Contrast with RBG and Institutionalism:
  Unlike Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who "lashed herself to institutions," Murray repeatedly found institutions too limiting, moving on in frustration when change was too slow. This tendency limited her mainstream success but preserved her independence ([14:26], [45:04]).
  • Quote: “I think the easy road was really not of much interest to Pauli Murray.” —Julie Cohen [45:04]
• Structural Barriers:
  Many opportunities open to later trailblazers (like Ginsburg) were foreclosed to Murray due to racism, sexism, and homophobia ([48:12]).
  • Quote: “The opportunities RBG had were not available to Paulie... She very much wanted to become a law professor. She did not have that opportunity.” —Patricia Bell-Scott [48:12]

6. Personal Pain, Restlessness, and Turn to Faith

• Intellectual and Emotional Struggle:
  Murray faced persistent inner turmoil—struggles with gender identity, being unheard by doctors and colleagues, and exclusion from ‘her own movements.’ Yet she remained unbreakable in the face of adversity ([50:00], [52:25]).
  • Quote: “I'm not sure I'm going along with brokenness, though, because Paulie was pretty unbreakable.” —Julie Cohen [53:18]
• Finding Healing in the Church:
  Murray’s late-life turn to the ministry (becoming one of the first Black female Episcopal priests) brought palpable peace and fulfillment previously elusive in law and activism ([46:43], [56:56]).
  • Quote: “...the missing element is theological.” —Patricia Bell-Scott [53:18]
  • Memorable Visual: The rediscovered interview footage of Murray in her priest’s collar, “...Polly's smile. It was just a beautiful…welcoming, fantastic smile.” —Betsy West [56:56]

7. Defining Lasting Contributions

• Doctrine of Dignity and Equality:
  Murray’s constitutional vision—anchored in the 13th and 14th Amendments—centered “dignity” long before it became mainstream in Supreme Court reasoning ([00:03], [39:45]).
  • Quote: “Many of the signature rulings…go all the way back to Pauli's notion of human dignity and human equality and authentic selfhood.” —Patricia Bell-Scott [00:03, 39:45]
• Foundational Work for Gender Equality:
  Murray’s strategic legal contributions were instrumental in adding “sex” to Title VII, shaping anti-discrimination law ([39:45]).

---

Selected Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Selfhood and Intersectionality
  "She is someone who really takes a very expansive view of the human experience. So that she sees herself as both male and female. Beyond those boundaries…" —Patricia Bell-Scott [05:09]

• On Not Getting Credit "There's a pattern of particularly male colleagues, lawyers, who would take her ideas and not bother to give her credit...Who writes the minutes really shapes the perception of what actually happened." —Patricia Bell-Scott [20:07]

• On Law Versus Truth "Lawyers are focused primarily on the facts. And writers or poets…were focused on the truth." —Patricia Bell-Scott [35:34]

• On Being Ahead of the Curve "Pauli liked being way ahead of the curve and was willing to do that, maybe at the expense of becoming a central figure in a movement that Pauli stuck with..." —Julie Cohen [45:04]

• On Resilience "I'm not sure I'm going along with brokenness, though, because Paulie was pretty unbreakable.” —Julie Cohen [53:18]

• On Healing through Faith "The decision to move into the ministry was evidence of her healing and her desire to be...a listener in support of the healing of others..." —Patricia Bell-Scott [56:56]

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Pauli as Legal Architect; Forgotten Foundational Work: [01:38]–[02:22], [15:58]–[17:40]
• Murray’s Non-Binary Identity & Pronouns: [04:48]–[14:20]
• Why Pauli Was Forgotten/Erased: [19:25]–[27:06]
• Role & Richness of Murray’s Poetry: [27:06]–[31:30]
• Civil Disobedience and Being Erased: [31:30]–[35:34]
• Doctrine of Dignity / Influence on Modern Law: [39:45]
• Trouble with Institutions vs. RBG’s Path: [45:04]–[50:00]
• Turn to Faith and Priesthood: [46:43], [53:18]–[58:18]
• Culminating Reflections and Legacy: [58:18]–[59:32]

---

Summary Table of Core Themes

| Theme | Example/Quote | Timestamp | |-----------------------|------------------------------------------------------------|-------------| | Legal trailblazing | “A law school paper that Murray wrote on Plessy vs Ferguson…became part of…Brown v. Board…” | [02:00] | | Non-binary identity | “We learned about the struggle that Polly had to get doctors to recognize Polly's feeling…” | [10:53] | | Erasure from history | “There’s a pattern…of male colleagues…would take her ideas and not bother to give her credit.” | [20:07] | | Poetry & art central | “Writer was actually the most important [identity].” | [29:48] | | Institutional limits | “The easy road was really not of much interest to Pauli Murray.” | [45:04] | | Doctrine of dignity | “Many of the signature rulings...go all the way back to Pauli's notion of human dignity...” | [39:45] | | Healing in faith | “…the missing element is theological.” | [53:18] |

---

Conclusion

The episode presents a rich exploration of Pauli Murray’s unparalleled yet under-recognized contributions to American law, civil rights, literature, and spirituality. Through discussion with documentary filmmakers and scholars, it becomes clear that Murray’s legacy is not only foundational but also increasingly relevant. Murray’s struggle to be visible, recognized, and whole—across overlapping margins of identity and justice—resonates urgently today. The episode closes with gratitude for the belated but vital recovery of Murray’s story and a sense that Murray's time in the public consciousness is only just beginning.

---

Recommended viewing/readings from the episode:

• Documentary: My Name is Pauli Murray
• Book: The Firebrand and the First by Patricia Bell-Scott

Transcript

[A]

Many of the signature rulings that we have seen, to me, go all the way back to Pauli's notion of human dignity and human equality and authentic selfhood.

[B]

Hi and welcome to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court and the rule of law. And I'm Dahlia Lithwick and I cover the things for Slate. Today's show is part of our summer series where we take a step back from the news cycle to talk a little bit about books you haven't read.

[C]

Yet, films you haven't seen yet. And this week we wanted to talk.

[B]

About one of the most seminal figures in the last century's civil rights battles for both racial and gender equality, Pauli Murray. Later on in the show, Slate's own Mark Joseph Stern will be joining us with the triumphant return of our Slate plus segment. With very much to plow through as the court hands down shadow docket decision after shadow docket decision, particularly this week with two rather horrifying ones. If you are not a Slate plus member, you can access this and all the other fantastic Slate plus content. Never hit a [e-mail] by signing [e-mail] Amicus plus and it's only $1 for your first month. But now to the main show. If Ruth Bader Ginsburg was known as the Thurgood Marshall of the gender equality.

[C]

Movement, I don't even know what to.

[B]

Call Pauli Murray, who, believe it or not, I never even learned about in law school. Murray was both the Ginsburg and the Marshall of the race and gender equality movements doing sit ins before there were sit ins, refusing to move to the.

[C]

Back of the bus.

[B]

A decade before Rosa Parks, a law school paper that Murray wrote on Plessy.

[C]

Vs Ferguson actually became part of the.

[B]

Briefing in Brown v. Board of Education. It's just that nobody told or credited Pauli Murray. Okay, so now Murray is the subject of a new documentary. It's called My Name is Pauli Murray. It premiered at Sundance and will be released by Amazon this fall.

[D]

My name is Pauli Murray, and my field of concentration has been human rights. 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.

[B]

Murray was far too complicated for any 20th century rubric to contain black, non binary, queer, feminist and civil rights pioneer. Murray was a poet, a teacher, a legal activist, a white shoe lawyer, ultimately an Episcopal priest. Murray hung out with Langston Hughes James Baldwin had a 23 year friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt and helped Betty Friedan found the National Organization for Women. My Name is Pauli Murray was made by directors Betsy west and Julie Cohen. They made the documentary RBG that helped Kim catapult Justice Ginsburg into the super celebrity stratosphere. Betsy and Julie are joined with me today by Professor Patricia Bell Scott, a consulting producer of My Name is Pauli Murray and Professor Emerita of Women's Studies and Human Development and Family Science at the University of Georgia. Her biography the Firebrand and the First Portrait of a Friendship, Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Struggle for Social justice won the Lillian Smith Book Award. Julie, Betsy, Professor Bell Scott, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

[E]

Thank you.

[A]

Thank you so much.

[C]

I don't even think my introduction that I just gave, which had so many exclamation marks, begins to do Pauli Murray justice. I feel as though watching the film and doing some reading, Pauli Moriti is like a Where's Waldo of the big major labor, racial, gender movements in this last century. Except Pauli Murray did it a decade before anyone else thought of it. And not just in terms of activism, but actually constructing legal architecture. And I think if you add in Pauli Murray's lifelong insistence that she was a man living in a woman's body, pleading with doctors to hear her and help her, it's clear to me that Pauli Murray was not in any category that the 20th century was can contain. So Patricia, can you help just set the table for listeners who've not heard yet of Pauli Murray, what the early life was, the education and all the ways in which these kind of weird constructed boundaries kept throwing up walls.

[A]

Yes, I think when we try to decipher what resulted in this incredible person to whom we are all so we are all so indebted. We have to start with her childhood. Pauli Murray was a person who had tremendous sensitivity to injustice when she was a child. And I'm right now using the pronoun she because she presented as a female largely as a result of the pressures of social forces and political, political issues in her life. However, she presented it as a female publicly, however, privately and through all of her life. She would be someone we would describe now as someone who was genderqueer or we might say that she was gender non binary. And there is a phrase that some people use that I truly think is appropriate when we think about her in that she is someone who really takes a very expansive view of the human experience. So that she sees herself as both male and female. Beyond those boundaries. She was of mixed race ancestry, so she saw herself as beyond just male and female. So when I say she, I don't necessarily mean she in the conventional sense, but I'm using that because that is how she wrote about herself. That is how she presented herself publicly and to people. We have to start with this childhood of someone who, at age 6, lodged her first protest against inequality over the dinner table. When Aunt Pauline, who became Murray's adoptive mother, was distributing the pancakes and Paulie was given one pancake and Grandfather Robert was given three, and she looked at his plate and looked at her plate and decided that it was. This was not fair. And so she turned to Aunt Pauline and said, aunt Pauline, why do you give Grandfather Robert three pancakes and me only one? Well, the adults at the table really had no answer that they were willing to share with this young woman. And even though it perhaps might have been a question that they had expected her to let lie, she didn't. So that later, when she was at dinner at. They were dinner guests at the home of a prestigious family in the community, a black middle class family, and they were being served a meal. And Paulie, who was tiny but always ravenous, said, I'd like to have another helping of meat. Aunt Pauline said, no. And then Paulie said, well, I still feel like I should have another helping of meat. And she insisted. And finally Aunt Pauline said, please excuse us to the host, took Pauline in another room, gave Paulie a spanking, and then when they returned to the dinner table, you would not be surprised to know that this child turned to her Aunt Pauline and the guest and said, I want another helping of meat. So what we saw was this. What you see in this comes from Murray's account of childhood in her memoir, Some in a Weary Throat, is an insistence to not be silent in the face of injustice and a persistence and a determination to question power and authority, whether that authority be in the personhood of her older relatives who raised her, or in the presence of the White House, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, to whom she wrote hot letters protesting Jim Crow in the South. So early on, we see in Pauli Murray someone at a very young age, highly sensitive to injustice and very much determined to question it and to persist and accept the consequences, even if the consequences, in one case as a child was a spanking.

[C]

And Betsy and Julie, I feel like I want to ask you that initial framing question that Patricia just brought up, which is the pronouns, because it's clear that throughout the film different speakers are identifying Pauli Murray as they. As she kind of trying to honor exactly this theme that Patricia just laid out, that she referred to herself as her. How did you all choose to think about this question of pronouns and how it so precedes. It's so out of time. I'm just wondering how you worked that out for yourselves. Maybe. Betsy, you want to go first?

[E]

Sure. This was the subject of many, many discussions as we were putting the film together because Patricia said publicly Polly was presenting as a woman, referred to herself as she. And it was only in Polly's diaries and letters that we learned about the struggle that Polly had to get doctors to recognize Polly's feeling that Polly was a man. And this was going on in the 30s and 40s when there was no language to describe what Polly was experiencing. So in the film, we felt that the people who knew Pauli, Polly's great grand niece, for example, and others friends, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, knew Polly as a woman, and they refer to Pauli as she. Polly has in recent years, as the story of Pauli's non binary identity has come out, has become a beacon, I think, for the trans world. And there are certainly people who refer to Pauli as they. So we made an effort to let people speak about poly in the way that they chose, but to be sensitive about using the pronoun she her too aggressively, let's put it that way.

[C]

Julie, do you have something to add?

[F]

Yeah, I mean, as Betsy says, it's something that we discussed in detail as we were making the film and that kind of shifted over time. You know, there's no Pauli, while absolutely seeking out hormone treatment in life, didn't address the pronoun question. Like the pronoun question was not a question when Pauli was alive. So we're kind of left a little bit to want to create a situation where we're not being hurtful to today's trans community, who, many of whom identify with Pauli in such a way that the pronoun they or even he seems preferable. One thing that we actually were guided on by Chase Strangio, the ACLU trans rights lawyer, who himself is a trans man, said, you know, some people just use their name as their pronoun. That's what he did to talk about Pauli. So that's. We've tried to find to kind of follow that lead. Honestly, it's surprising how difficult it is to use not to slip into a female pronoun for someone who you've perceived as a woman, because of the way that Pauli, you know, self presented all throughout life. The fact that it's so hard, I think is sort of fascinating in and of itself. So, you know, I think we are fairly accepting of all kinds of different people's choices on this question. Obviously, there's no way to know what Pauli would have chosen if Pauli had had the good fortune to be alive in a time when acceptance of a trans or non binary identity was even a possibility.

[B]

Now let's get back to our conversation with the directors of My name is Pauli Murray, Betsy west and Julie Cohen.

[C]

And with consulting producer Professor Patricia Bell Scott. The other just big table setting question I had, and I guess this is for Julie and Betsy, what is the pivot from making a movie about RBG to making a movie about Pauli Murray? Like, because it just is so striking that one is an icon larger than life, known to all. There's a coffee mug in every, you know, every cabinet. And then Pauli Murray, who, but for dints of accident, dints of race, dints of not having a Marty to push them forward, just is almost completely unknown to history. And so you have these two people who, by many metrics, and I want to probe the ways in which they're profoundly different, one is larger than life. One is not in any way been given her place in life. And I'm trying to think about this as a question of sort of who gets famous in America, who gets credit in America. I think Patricia said this essentially important thing, which is Pauli Murray spent her life wanting to be seen and heard, and we didn't give her that. And so I don't exactly know what buried in there, what the question is, but it's such an extraordinary move to go from somebody who almost, by the end takes up too much space to somebody who doesn't get any space at all. Julie, you're nodding, so I feel like I should let you go first.

[F]

Okay, I'm nodding because I certainly agree with you. You know, it really. Actually, though, for Betsy and I, it wasn't exactly a pivot to go from RBG to Pauli Murray. It was a very straight line because it was RBG herself who put Polly's name on a 1971 Supreme Court brief, the first one that RBG wrote, Reed v. Reed, and Pauli Murray did not specifically work on that case. However, previously, in both a law journal paper and even in a case that Pauly argued in federal court, Pauly had made the argument that the 14th Amendment, the equal protection clause, could be used to secure gender equality, just as it had been used to secure racial equality. This essentially was RBG's argument in read v. Read and that series of cases that we talk about in our film. RBG and RBG took the unusual position that, like, I actually am going to give credit where it's due. RBG was absolutely aware. She knew Pauli from having served together on the board of the aclu. Actually, previously they had briefly crossed paths at Paul Weiss, where RBG was a summer associate when Pauli was a full time ongoing associate. And RBG had read Pauly's legal work. And she just decided, like, why wouldn't I give. Pauli Murray deserved credit. Very unusual move for a Supreme Court litigator. But RBG went for it.

[E]

Yeah, I mean, this is. Betsy, to add to that. I feel that, yes, RBG was deservedly larger than life. And I think as Julie and I started to research Pauli Murray, we realized Pauli Murray should be larger than life. I mean, we're just blown away by Pauli Murray's story. All of the things that you mentioned at the beginning, all of the accomplishments, the ahead of the times ness of Pauli Murray. It just kind of went on and on. And so that it seemed like the logical conclusion to do a film about Pauli Murray. The other thing that animated us, I think, was the desire to have Pauli be seen and heard. And luckily for us, despite all the challenges in Polly's life, economic challenges wasn't all that well compensated for much of Pauli's life managed to save so much material. And so there's a giant archive at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard. And that archive includes audio tapes of a series of interviews that were done with Polly, most of them in the 70s. I think there were a few a little bit earlier. And also our intern helped us track down an audio tape of Pauli reading a large portion of Pauli's autobiography. And when we heard Polly's voice, it was speaking to us like it had been left there for people to discover and to learn the story. Unfortunately, after Polly was no longer here. But, you know, that was really our mission to bring that story to life.

[C]

And Patricia, I feel like you also, because your work was again, in this relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Pauli Murray. This weird. Again, the same paradox of people who were fundamentally deeply connected, deeply respectful, deeply transformational. One of them is an icon. The other one was really almost lost to history. And I guess I'm wondering if you have a theory of how it is possible that Pauli Murray, moving in the circles she moved in accomplishing what she accomplished, almost kind of slid through history's fingers.

[A]

Well, I think there are several factors involved. In fact, your question reminds me of a question that I've heard over and over again from young people, particularly young law students, who are almost in tears and sort of shaking their heads at me and saying, how is it that I don't know this? I'm angry that I don't know this, I don't know about this person. And I think there are several factors. First of all, I think we have to be mindful of the historical context in which she lived, in which people with her background and her intellect who presented as female and who were lawyers found it very difficult to get heard. Pauli talked about not being allowed or being discouraged from speaking in classes, and the sense to which professors said that there's really no place for a woman in as she presented at that time as an attorney or as a legal scholar. So I think some of it was the restrictions and the oppressions that she felt as a person of color, as someone who identified as female in many ways, we use the term often now, intersectionality. Pauli Murray was the embodiment of that concept. She is a person who knew from personal and professional and in every way that one might imagine what restrictions are placed upon one because of race, class, gender and economic background. And she was vulnerable in all of those areas. There are also some personal factors beyond just those having to do not only with the gender identity. But Pauli had an interesting personality. I feel fortunate in that I was able to interview several of her long term friends and many of them talked about her brilliance, but how impatient she was. And so what that meant was that she might be in a meeting or in a situation where she presents really innovative ideas and the people in the room would be very impressed. But if Polly thought that the people were boring, she would move right along and leave the idea there, but not seek to claim it. And so there's a pattern of particularly male colleagues, lawyers, who would take her ideas and not bother to give her credit. And I'm sure there are many women and people who are marginalized in various settings who've had that experience. Pauline also, and this is related to her economic vulnerability also, over the course of her life was never adequately compensated and for a good portion of her life suffered young life, suffered from malnutrition. So we end up with a person who is compromised in terms of her physical health. In addition to dealing with gender identity conflict issues and in addition to her impatience, she was someone who really didn't care a whole lot for the hierarchy of institutions. And it's within those hierarchies and the people who reside in them, that history is written. And so when people wrote the history of the NAACP and continue to do that, because Pauli would offer her ideas but not stay around to insist that that be part of the minutes, who writes the minutes really shapes the perception of what actually happened. And so that her frustration with hierarchies, her general just insistence on moving ahead, often meant that she was not around to claim credit for her ideas. And I also think the fact that she was more than a lawyer in many ways. I think there's a clip in the film where someone is about to interview her or speaking to her, and they say something like, oh, we have a lawyer turned writer. And she says, no, I think you have it wrong. I'm actually a poet who became a writer. So that her sense of being a creative person is something else that makes it really hard for some people to get a real sense of her personality because. And her contributions. Because Pauli is so huge in the film, we talk primarily about her as a. As an activist and a lawyer, a human rights activist. But Pauli is huge as a creative writer. I mean, she is a person who, I argue, set early precedent in her work as a writer of family history and family memoir. But in her time, people didn't know what to do with that work because the reviewers said it read like a novel. Now, what do we say now about what we consider to be the best memoirs? They're family stories that read like novels. So she was just. She was a Renaissance person, and she was complex. She was huge. She regularly said to her friends and colleagues, you know, it is my quest to live an authentic life, and I want to experience the wholeness of life. And for Pauli, that meant moving forward on multiple terrains. And so she just didn't approach life in a narrow, straight line. And many people found that hard to believe and to process.

[C]

Patricia, I love what you just said, because you've preempted my ninth question, which is in all caps. Ask about the poetry. Because the poetry is kind of like the soundtrack of this film. And the. And I think you have to just stop and sit for a minute with how exquisite her poems are, because, you know, I was watching it as a lawyer and as somebody who was really, really got very excited when we started talking about the 13th and 14th amendments. But the poetry is. It's breathtaking. And it's just. I'm trying to imagine, you know, the poems of Stephen Breyer, the poems of Antonin Scalia. Like, we don't think. Think of them in those terms. And I guess I want to ask. I guess this is for Julie or Betsy, but it's so clear that we are talking about somebody who is so outside the scope of. I'm a worker bee and I really, really. You know, by the way, I wrote the spine of Brown v. Board years earlier and never got credit. But all these other lifetimes she's lived. It's almost as though by the time the civil rights movement catches up to her in the 60s, she's moved on to the next thing. You know, by the time sit ins have caught up to her, she's moved on to the next thing. It's just freakishly capacious, this kind of imagination and worldview.

[E]

This is Betsy. I think that at the beginning of putting the documentary together, Julie and our producer, Taleah Bridges McMahon and I were not intending to include as much poetry as wound up in the final film. It was really when our editor, Cinque Northern, put together the sequence in the film about Pauli's childhood and then the looming fear and backdrop of Pauli's life where lynchings were on the rise. And, you know, it was such a devastating sequence. And then he edited together the poem about her experience of slavery, Crush us. Which of course then ends with a kind of, but we will rise. I've forgotten the exact words, but it was so moving that then we realized at various points in the film that it could be a good idea to include some of the moments of Pauli's poetry. Because to us, it did take it to another level. I mean, she was, you know, very profound.

[F]

Yeah, this is Julie. Pauli actually said in some interview that we listened to that given the choice of all of Pauli's many identities, writer was actually the most important. And if it hadn't been for one after another after another obstacle that was placed, you know, along the path of life, like, Pauli would have just been an artist and a writer and would have written this incredible poetry, memoirs, short stories, novels, journalism, because there were a number and, you know, taken photographs, because Pauli was a very skilled still photographer. But when you're being kept out of colleges and graduate schools and institutions, both because of your race and your gender or perceived gender, you sort of gotta fight those things. Or when you're having the struggles that so many people were having in terms of workers rights, because Pauli had A number of jobs in the circumstance, particularly in the 1930s, where workers were being treated horrendously, and Pauli felt like there was really no choice but to join the labor movement, the civil rights movement, to not only join, but be a part of forming the women's rights movement. So that actually takes away from your writing time. But if this is what Pauli was able to write with all of these things standing as obstacles, like, just imagine. I mean, and actually, Pauli was relatively prolific, even with all these other complete careers.

[C]

I actually want to follow up for one quick second, Julie, because it strikes me that again, in contrast with Justice Ginsburg, who made. Again, she was between historic moments, right? It was too late for her to march. She didn't want to march. Like, by the time the woman's movement was taking off, she was almost outdated. She certainly wasn't doing direct action. She wasn't doing sit ins. Pauli Murray, really, interestingly, was both a legal architect and, you know, you have some sense that she couldn't even be contained by that. And so then she really is.

[B]

Doing.

[C]

You know, the sit ins. And I wonder if there's some. It's really striking that years before Rosa Parks, she refuses to move to the back of the bus. She gets hauled off the bus and put in jail. She connects with the naacp. There's a moment at which it looks like she could be the plaintiff, and then the case just vaporizes. It's dismissed on other grounds. I wonder if there's a way in which, even when she's trying to be visible by resisting injustice, sometimes she gets erased. It's just such an interesting story that even when, sometimes when she's trying again to go back to Patricia, Patricia's opening to just be seen and heard so frequently, you get the sense she doesn't even get the merit of having protested these things.

[E]

This is Betsy. I mean, I think, you know, the bus arrest is such an interesting story because it starts out with Polly and a friend just going down to visit Polly's family. And as Polly says, we did not intend to protest these segregationalist laws, but there are times when you just have no choice. Polly saw the injustice, being asked to go and sit in a broken seat when there were available seats. And so Polly was going to stand up for herself and for her friend. The dismissal of that case is kind of interesting. I mean, the resolution of the case. Thurgood Marshall was involved in defending her. There's been some question about whether or not Polly and her friend were perceived to be too odd. Perhaps to make a good test case. And it's also the question of the judge himself, who saw that maybe I don't want to go there. So he dismissed the charges. That would have given the NAACP grounds to take it to a higher route. But, yes, that was a sort of missed opportunity. Pauli then went on to actively protest the segregation of restaurants near Howard University at Howard Law School, which was another, you know, activism. And again, these things were covered in the black press, but they weren't. Nobody else knew about them, you know, so many years before the movement gained the traction and people started to pay attention. I don't know if that's because of the. Of television, of the pictures that we could see of the protesters in the 1960s, and we didn't have that earlier, or, you know, I'm sure that historians have many other factors for why these earlier protests. And Pauli wasn't actually the only person doing this. There's evidence that many African Americans had refused to go to the back of the bus, had protested injustices, but they were sort of considered isolated incidents before the. I guess, the modern civil rights movement.

[A]

This is Patricia. One of the things that impressed me when I. As I followed the story of Pauli's life as a lawyer was that she reached the point where she was reviewing her career, Reviewed her career, as Paula reviewed her career as a lawyer and wrote in a journal that she had gotten to the point where she was questioning how much of her time and energy she had put into being a lawyer. Because, not to say that she wasn't very appreciative of all the strides that had been made, but she said that lawyers are focused primarily on the facts. And writers or poets, which was her dream, with the dream job she preferred, her identity was poets were focused on the truth, as opposed to lawyers who were focused on facts. And if you read the collection of Pauli's poetry, I think that is where she comes closest to expressing the fullness of her identity. Because you do not have to read too closely to see her love of another person, presumably a woman. You don't have to read too closely to see her disappointment in prior relationships. I think it's all there. And it was in the creative writing, where you see her working very seriously and diligently on the expression of issues of identity and feeling that the law can be a restraining force. And I think. I think so often now about the fact that as Pauli moved into midlife, the career or the job that she coveted most was a position on the Supreme Court. Now, Let me ask you, what do you think the court would be like if we could be so privileged to have a Pauli Murray, Associate Justice. She very much wanted to and felt that she was qualified and deserved to be considered for such a post, and wrote President Nixon and said when they were considering, when there was a position open, that she was ready and available, and that if he wanted to nominate a woman that she was ready and.

[C]

Available, probably Nixon wasn't her guy. Yeah.

[A]

Yes. Yes.

[C]

But before we leave that, two things that strike me, Patricia. One is so amazing that she was talking about dignity as a constitutional right protected in the 13th and 14th amendment. I mean, that was way before I started hearing Justice Kennedy and Justice Ginsburg talking about dignity. So there's a way in which, just as she just saw the inherent weakness in separate but equal, she was like, I'm not gonna sit here and waste my time making equal facilities. This is about human dignity. There's a way in which, in all the ways that she's ahead of her time, she really sees the Constitution as a document that is promoting equal dignity long before Obergefell, long before Justice Kennedy is writing it in. And it does seem to me that it's another way in which she's just so boundlessly ahead of her time.

[A]

Absolutely. So. So foundational. So that many of the signature rulings that we have seen recently, to me, go all the way back to Pauli's notion of human dignity and human equality and authentic selfhood. So, yes, that undergirds Brown. It undergirds. The civil rights work of the 60s and her fight to ensure that Title VII, which would include sex as a category in that bill. She almost single handedly saved that by drafting a memorandum that was sent to every congressperson to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. And she and a network of women activists got that memorandum to Lady Bird Johnson with a cover letter in which Pauli Murray said, you know, women are being discouraged from speaking out about this, but I want you to know that the bill without the sex amendment in it would mean that only black men would have equal protection and not black women. And she was on edge until she got a note from Lady Bird's social secretary in which it said that Lady Bird had shared the argument with her husband, President Johnson, and that the amendment, the bill, would remain as it was. So the other thing about Polly, I'm going back to an earlier question you raised about how her contributions are just not forefront, in the forefront. And there's another part of her personality that kind of. It's confusing in the sense that here's a person with these bold ideas, but temperamentally shy, an introvert in many ways, and, you know, she would call you out, but interpersonally shy. So that when NOW is formed, Pauli Murray was comfortable with the idea of Betty Friedan being the national spokesperson who represented the newly found National Organization for Women in with the media and the larger community. So I think it is Pauli Murray's shyness, too, that has contributed somewhat to the extent that she is not identified with projects and organizations for which she clearly is one of the founders.

[C]

We'll be back in just a moment.

[B]

With more about Pauli Murray's life and legacy in the law with the directors of My name is Pauli Murray, Betsy west and Julie Cohen, and consulting consulting.

[C]

Producer Professor Patricia Bell Scott.

[B]

But first, a few brief messages from our sponsors.

[C]

And before we leave the law, I want to give Betsy or Julie or both of you a chance to just talk about this arc, because I think Patricia sort of laid out, she gets really interested in the law. She feels that this is the vehicle for bringing about massive social change. As we've suggested now a couple times, her name is on the brief and read v. Reed. She ends up, although totally uncredited, doing some of the work that becomes the foundation of Brown v. Board. All of this happens and she presumably could find a life in the law. And yet in the end, and this is, I can't help but contrast her to rbg. RBG lashes herself to institutions. She lashes herself to the ACL youth. She then lashes herself to the federal appeals court and then the Supreme Court. There's a way in which, and I guess I'm just so curious about this, I think Patricia makes this point that Polly gets really frustrated with institutions that aren't moving fast enough, that are blinkered, that are just not getting it done quickly enough. And I can't help but want again, either Betsy or Julie for you to walk me through this counterfactual where if she had stuck with some institution, if she had just said, I rise and fall, either with the courts or the universities or some institution, that this might have been an easier road for her, or if just the institution of the law itself, in the end wasn't enough for her, the way it was enough for rbg.

[F]

Yeah, this is Julie. I mean, I think the easy road was really not of much interest to Pauli Murray. I think, you know, that's at the sort of at the premise of all this. Pauli said on a number of occasions that Pauly was super interested in Being at the vanguard of all kinds of different movements. Once others joined in and wanted to take up that fight, then Paulie was ready to move on to the next thing. I mean, we love the moment in our film where Eleanor Holmes Norton, who was a classmate of Paulie when Pauly was getting doctorate at Yale Law School, and Eleanor Holmes Norton was a J.D. student. You know, Eleanor Holmes Norton and some of the other black Yale Law students were out there fighting for civil rights, as people were in the 1960s. And Pauli, by that point, really was most interested in talking about feminism, which was not a very well known concept in the early 60s. And basically, Eleanor Holmes Jordan just said to himself, we were all like, what are you talking about? You know, Pauli liked being way ahead of the curve and was willing to do that, maybe at the expense of becoming a central figure in a movement that Pauli stuck with over a course of decades. I mean, there's a great moment where Pauli says, I like to think that I have lived and will live more to see my lost causes found. So even if it wasn't Pauly that was going to drag something over the finish line, if Pauli started something and then it moved forward with or without Pauly, then that's still a victory.

[E]

I mean, there's. I think that Patricia captured this, but there's a restlessness to Pauli Murray. And you see that always pushing, always going to the next thing finally gets to Paul Weiss has a measure of stability, meets a partner, and yet is not satisfied with being a corporate lawyer. That's, you know, and then just gives it all up to go and explore what is going on in Africa with some of the independence movements in Africa, and then returns to the United States and is, you know, on to feminism now. And then finally, the move that surprised Polly's friends and family the most after the death of Pauli's partner, Rini turns to religion, turns to spirituality, and people just cannot believe that Pauli is going to go to the, you know, in her 60s, basically go to theology school and become an Episcopal priest. It's just unfathomable. But to Pauli, in a way, it made sense because it's like she had exhausted what she could do with the law and felt that the spiritual satisfaction of ministering to people would be more important.

[A]

I would like to add just a couple of things, and that is that it's important for us to remember that the opportunities RBG had were not available to Paulie. So RBG did get into Harvard. Pauli was denied after Pauli got the master's of law from UC Berkeley, and after she got the doctorate from Yale, she very much wanted to become a law professor. She did not have that opportunity, never had that opportunity here. When she finally returned from Africa and finished the law degree, the doctorate in law at Yale, She finally got a job in a university, teaching. But she never got to teach law full time. She taught law part time at Boston University University. So because of her restlessness, she was always moving forward, but there were doors that were closed to her. And so she was not willing to keep waiting and agitating to get the doors completely open. She cracked the door, and RBG and other women and other people of color were eventually able to walk through. So we cannot forget, you know, the limitations placed upon her by the strictures of the time.

[C]

That's so important. I'm so glad you said it, because I think in some sense, even when she lashed herself to institutions, they let her down. I mean, I think, you know, her.

[B]

Attempting to get tenure at Brandeis, it's.

[C]

An extraordinary set of stories of no matter what she did, it wasn't good enough. I also just want to point out, in all my years of this podcast, my husband, the sculptor, has never handed me a note, but he handed me a note as I was taping it. Says, Pauli Murray was an artist, not an institutionalist. And so that when we think about RBG as somebody who put the friendship with Scalia, put the institution of the law, put all her anger, stuffed it in a box, never burned a bridge, never, ever turned her back on an ally, she was an institutionalist. We are living in a moment where we have such grievous doubts about institutions and institutionalism. I almost wonder if that's why Pauli Murray is having a moment. Because the compromises one has to make for institutions are starting to feel like they don't necessarily pay off. I'm going to ask just one last question before I let you go, although I want you all to know that I've got a about 30 more that I would love to ask, but I feel like we should talk a little bit about just Pauli Murray's kind of pain and brokenness, because it is so pervasive through the movie that, you know, Paulie is imploring physicians for help, is imploring somebody to sort of see and understand how sad she is and, you know, how difficult it is. And at the same time, I think at the end, you get some sense that that is healed when she finds the church. And that as Patricia Says, there's something about that turn to God and to spirituality I love at the end of the film where you get the sense that she becomes a listener and not a talker. And I wonder if there's some guidance in there for any of you about what it is that she needed and what it is that the law failed to give her. That toward the end of her life, she got by kind of turning inward and turning upward.

[F]

Wow. You know, I think, like, in many ways, Polly felt like the law was just too small and that the big questions of, like, seeking justice and seeking neighbors that love and respect one another and the dignity that all human beings deserve. Like, in the end, are those really legal questions or are they spiritual questions? Of course, this wasn't coming out of the blue at all. Polly was very much raised in the church and had such a deep closeness to the aunt, who was actually an adoptive mother, Aunt Pauline, that that sort of placed Paulie in a deep sense of strength. And even though, I mean, pain is right, I'm not sure I'm going along with brokenness, though, because Paulie was pretty unbreakable. There was a lot that happened throughout Paulie's life that could have just crushed Pauli right in half. And that's just never quite what happened.

[A]

I'm thinking of one of the responses she gave one of her friends who. And there's a couple of people in the. In the film who, when they're asked, you know, if they knew that she was on her way to the priesthood or they knew how that she would become a priest, and, you know, many of them say no. And I. When I interviewed her friends, several of them said to me, I had no idea. And their major concern was here she was resigning this named professorship at Brandeis. To go into the seminary at a time when the church had not decided whether or not the church had not voted to ordain women. When Pauli entered the seminary, and she said to this friend, you know, I think the missing element is theological. And she was thinking about issues of dignity. She was talking about issues of dignity and justice. She wasn't. She was saying. She was saying that the law was impossible, important, but that the missing element in her life was theological. So, and as Julie just said, religion, being Episcopalian, was very much part of Pauli Murray's core. She was like sixth or seventh generation Episcopalian. So this was a very deep part of who she was. And it is my sense that it was in later years, in later life, that Pauli Murray felt that there was acceptance on the. I mean there were people along the way who had always been accepting. Aunt Pauline was just incredible. Aunt Pauline referred to Pauli as my boy girl. Eleanor Roosevelt was accepting. I had never discovered any letters of correspondence between them that suggested that there was a discussion about sexuality or gender identity. But I had this strong sense that Eleanor knew who Polly was and Pauli knew that Eleanor knew who she was and she just felt tremendous acceptance. And that relationship became a surrogate mother daughter relationship. That was very important to Pauli Murray's sense of well being. So this sense of finding community and acceptance in others pronounced as in mid and later life. And so I guess I feel that the decision to move into the ministry was evidence of her healing and her desire to be as her niece, says a listener in support of the healing of others, which I think is important.

[E]

You know, this is Betsy. Just one thing to add. When you start to make a film, you don't know what discoveries you're going to make. And one of the most amazing discoveries was something that Julie found in the Schlesinger library that had been sort of misfiled. It wasn't with the Pauli Murray collection, but it was an interview that a young woman had done, woman named Lynn Conroy, putting together a feminist syllabus and interviewed Pauli Murray in Pauli's priest collar, sitting at the desk, working at the typewriter. And we were of course thrilled to have this video. We had a lot of audio tapes, but to have video, the thing about it that is to me was so wonderful. In addition to seeing Polly's relationship with one of, of Polly's beloved dogs who keeps, you know, barking and she get down downroy. But was was Polly's smile. It was just a beautiful, beautiful one. Just welcoming, fantastic smile. And you know, we used it throughout the film to give a sense of who this person was. And certainly at that point, Pauli seems happy.

[C]

Oh, I'm so, so glad you said that, Betsy. Because I also was so struck by that beatific smile. It just was really quite visceral how this is somebody who had really found peace. The film is My Name is Pauli Murray. It premiered at Sundance. It will be released by Amazon this fall. It was made by directors Betsy west and Jul Cohen, who made the phenomenal pathbreaking documentary rbg. And Professor Patricia Bell Scott was a consulting producer on the film. She is professor emerita of Women's Studies and Human Development and Family Science at the University of Georgia. Her biography the Firebrand and the first portrait of a friendship Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Struggle for Social justice won the Lillian Smith Book Award. I cannot thank the three of you enough, both for your time today, but also really for helping excavate and bring to life something that Patricia said it best. I cannot believe how angry I am that nobody told me about this in law school. Thank you so, so much for joining us today.

[A]

Thank you.

[E]

Thank you.

[F]

Thanks, Dalia.

[B]

And that is a wrap for this episode of Amicus. Thank you so, so much for listening in.

[C]

And thank you.

[B]

Thank you for your letters and your comments and your feedback and questions. You can always keep in [e-mail] or you can find [e-mail] Amicus Podcast.

[C]

And if you can, please do rate.

[B]

Us and leave a review on whatever platform you may be listening on. Today's show was produced by Sarah Burningham. We had research help from Daniel Maloof. Gabriel Roth is editorial director, Alicia Montgomery is executive producer, and June Thomas is senior managing producer of Slate Podcasts. We will be back with another episode of Amicus in two short weeks.