feeling rebloggy
So now you know, Pauli Murray was key figure in legally securing black rights and women's rights as well.
Being born black and female was probably enough to stop her from becoming the Supreme Court Justice she should have been. But her being brave enough to be openly gay completely blocked her from rising as high as Thurgood Marshall too. Yet what she did do is more important.
She came up with the key arguments that won cases for blacks, women, and black women at the Supreme Court level. That enabled women like Daisy Bates, Diane Nash, and Jo Ann Robinson to fight down at street level and win OUR REAL RIGHTS, our real day-to-day living rights in towns and cities.
Pauli stands as a Black American icon for all of us, but especially for LGBTQ folk everywhere.
read more about Pauli Murray here:
https://paulimurrayproject.org/pauli-murray/biography/
While she wasn't mentioned in the Thurgood Marshall movie, I hear she is at least mentioned in the Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg movie, ON THE BASIS OF SEX.
A black feminist lesbian who "favored a masculine-of-center gender performance during her 20s and 30s," she dedicated her work to challenging preconceived notions of race, gender, sexuality and religion. But, as Cooper notes, Murray isn't well-known or celebrated outside academic circles:
"The civil rights struggle demanded respectable performances of black manhood and womanhood, particularly from its heroes and heroines, and respectability meant being educated, heterosexual, married and Christian. Murray's open lesbian relationships and her gender nonconforming identity disrupted the dictates of respectability, making it easier to erase her five decades of important intellectual and political contributions from our broader narrative of civil rights."
...Dr. Pauli Murray is hardly the household name that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is, but a recent profile in Salon argues she should be.
As Salon's Brittney Cooper explains, Murray, who graduated from the Howard University School of Law in 1944, was one of the first lawyers to argue that the Equal Protection Clause's approach to racial discrimination should apply equally to gender-based discrimination.
Ginsburg credits Murray's work as the inspiration for her 1971 brief in Reed v. Reed, which ruled that women could not be excluded as administrators of personal estates based on their gender. The Supreme Court case marked the first time that the Equal Protection Clause was applied to sex discrimination, and has served as precedent for many arguments in the decades since then. Ginsburg found Murray's prior arguments so important to her own that she elected to put Murray down as an honorary co-author on the milestone brief.
In Cooper's piece and other profiles, there's no end to examples of Murray's trailblazing, both in the legal world and far beyond...
Read More At NPR https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/19/387200033/the-black-queer-feminist-legal-trailblazer-youve-never-heard-of
So now you know, Pauli Murray was key figure in legally securing black rights and women's rights as well.
Being born black and female was probably enough to stop her from becoming the Supreme Court Justice she should have been. But her being brave enough to be openly gay completely blocked her from rising as high as Thurgood Marshall too. Yet what she did do is more important.
She came up with the key arguments that won cases for blacks, women, and black women at the Supreme Court level. That enabled women like Daisy Bates, Diane Nash, and Jo Ann Robinson to fight down at street level and win OUR REAL RIGHTS, our real day-to-day living rights in towns and cities.
Pauli stands as a Black American icon for all of us, but especially for LGBTQ folk everywhere.
read more about Pauli Murray here:
https://paulimurrayproject.org/pauli-murray/biography/
While she wasn't mentioned in the Thurgood Marshall movie, I hear she is at least mentioned in the Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg movie, ON THE BASIS OF SEX.
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