Murray was elected chief justice of the Howard Court of Peers, the highest student position at Howard, and in 1944 she graduated first in her class. [51] Traditionally, Howard's top graduate received a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship for graduate work at Harvard University, but Harvard Law did not accept women at that time. Murray was thus rejected, despite a letter of support from sitting President Franklin D. Roosevelt. [31] Murray wrote in response, "I would gladly change my sex to meet your requirements, but since the way to such change has not been revealed to me, I have no recourse but to appeal to you to change your minds. Are you to tell me that one is as difficult as the other?" [52] Three-year-old Pauli Murray was sent to Durham, North Carolina, to live with her mother's family. [14] There, she was raised by her maternal aunts, Sarah (Sallie) Fitzgerald and Pauline Fitzgerald Dame (both teachers), as well as her maternal grandparents, Robert and Cornelia (Smith) Fitzgerald. [15] She attended St. Titus Episcopal Church with her mother's family, as had her mother before Murray was born. [16] When she was 12, her father was committed to the Crownsville State Hospital for the Negro Insane, where he received no meaningful treatment. Pauli had wanted to rescue him, but in 1923 (when she was 13), he was bludgeoned to death by a white guard with a baseball bat. [5] Last year the band released its third studio album, 36 years after their second album, to much acclaim. I’ve taken all sorts of gambles’ … Pauline Murray with Penetration on their 40th anniversay tour in 2017. Photograph: ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy

The band debuted on vinyl with the single "Don't Dictate", issued by Virgin Records in November of the same year. The band went on to release two studio albums, Moving Targets (1978) and Coming Up for Air (1979), as well as an official bootleg, Race Against Time (1980). Later there would be a Best of Penetration compilation album. After a measure of success during 1978/79, including a headline show at the Rainbow Theatre and a five-week American tour, they announced a split in October 1979. [4] Underappreciated female pioneer of punk redresses the balance. A well illustrated, rounded, reflective book.' Jon Savage, MOJO, 4****From the upbeat and melodic opening bars of Shadows In My Mind it is evident that the album draws on the tried and tested formula of Pauline’s previous solo albums with a synth-driven pop sound full of positivity and hope, regardless of the lyrical content. The song is about the dialogue we constantly have with ourselves, both positive and negative, and how we can be our own best friend or our own worst enemy. This is certainly a message which assumes a certain poignancy more than ever before with so many people living in isolation. In 1963, she became one of the first to criticize the sexism of the civil rights movement, in her speech "The Negro Woman in the Quest for Equality". [59] In a letter to civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, she criticized the fact that in the 1963 March on Washington no women were invited to make one of the major speeches or to be part of its delegation of leaders who went to the White House, among other grievances. She wrote: Pauline explains, “I originally conceived the book to write my story for my children, and I may not have written it without some encouragement. But as someone who was involved in the early days of punk and from a small village in the north east rather than London, it’s my story of how our band used our energy, creativity and passion to help propel the punk movement forward in the late 1970s.”

The 1930s were also a time in which Murray began to struggle with their gender identity. Murray changed their birth name from “Anne Pauline” to “Pauli.” Murray also began looking for gender-affirming treatments, including hormone therapy, but was denied. Murray seems to have mostly internalized this struggle; Murray’s autobiography omits any mention of their sexuality, gender orientation, and quest for medical treatment. Proud Shoes: The Story Of An American Family, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956. ISBN 0-8070-7209-5. I have been increasingly perturbed over the blatant disparity between the major role which Negro women have played and are playing in the crucial grassroots levels of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions. It is indefensible to call a national march on Washington and send out a call which contains the name of not a single woman leader. [60] People are being de-sensitised to their own emotions that’s worrying because when they do explode that could be nasty.”

Events

All words by Robin Boardman. More writing from Robin for Louder Than War can be found at his author’s archive As Rosalind Rosenberg, a biographer of Murray, observes: “Her sense of in-betweenness made her increasingly critical of boundaries, and that allowed her to make one of the most important ideas of the 20th century: that the categories of race and gender are essentially arbitrary and not a legal basis for discrimination.” Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage (New York: Harper & Row, 1987). (Reissued in 2018 with a new introduction by Liveright Publishing, a division of W.W. Norton & Company) Kujawa-Holbrook, Sheryl A., ed. (2002). "Anna Pauline 'Pauli' Murray (1911–1985)". Freedom Is a Dream: A Documentary History of Women in The Episcopal Church. New York: Church Publishing. pp.272–279. Anne Pauline Murray was born on November 20, 1910 in Baltimore Maryland, the fourth of six children born to Agnes Fitzgerald and William Murray. When Murray was three, her mother died from a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Murray’s father—a graduate of Howard University and a teacher and later principal in the Baltimore public school system—was left to raise six children on his own. Dealing with his own grief, William sent Murray to live with a maternal aunt, Pauline Fitzgerald, and grandparents in Durham, North Carolina. Three years later, an impoverished and still grieving William was committed to the Crownsville State Hospital for the Negro Insane. In 1922, William was beaten and killed by a white guard in the basement of the hospital. Murray, now an orphan, thought this status was “the most significant fact of my childhood.”