I have previously mentioned the many yet-to-be-known stories of people that dedicated lives and huge quantities of energy to Civil and Human Rights. With the recent rain of shame brought on my Alma Mater by Governing Boards it seems right to reflect on some more of that history.
The remarkable story of the Life of Pauli Murray is beginning to emerge. It isn’t that she is/was unknown - she rocked the boat of injustice plenty - even did so globally - just that she and her stories ought to be known by all and yet the reality is that so few of us do. Today, July 1 is her Death Day.
Here is a good place to start to know her:
https://nmaahc.si.edu/.../pioneering-pauli-murray-lawyer...
On This Day:
#OTD (July 1) 1987 ‘Pauli’ Murray died. An Episcopal priest(1st AFAM woman), lawyer, and Civil Rights Activist, she grew up in Durham. She said, “one woman with a typewriter constitutes a movement” and then proved it. UNC denied her admission in the 1930s - and at HBCU Howard Law gender was held against her yet in 1944 she graduated first in her class. When Harvard denied her admission she went to UC Berkeley where she earned a Master of Laws. She earned her J.S.D. at Yale in 1965. Her dissertation there was titled, “Roots of the Racial Crisis: Prologue to Policy.”
She overcame. Rededicating her life to Christian Service - in 1977 as an Episcopal Priest she held her first Eucharist at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, where her grandmother had been baptized as a slave.
https://www.ncdcr.gov/.../07/01/pauli-murray-broke-barriers
In July 2020 the The UNC History Department along with the departments of Sociology, Political Science, and Peace, War, And Defense began the renaming of
#HamiltonHallas
#PauliMurrayHall.
An important aside is that Hamilton Hall, so well-known by UNC students for generations, in particular for the large first-floor lecture hall, is named for the Dunning School White Supremacist historian, James G. deRoulhac Hamilton. This is not newly ‘discovered’ information but was known at the time the building was dedicated. On that occasion, a 1972 ‘Daily Tar Heel’ editorial commented that, “A member of the History Department pointed out that James G. de Roulhac Hamilton [sic] was a follower of William A. Dunning and the ‘Dunning school’ was best known for its anti-Negro view of Reconstruction.” [More on Hamilton here:
https://unchistory.web.unc.edu/building.../hamilton-hall/]
As of July 1, 2025, the request to rename the building for Pauli Murray has not been honored. As of March 31, 2024, four years after the departments of History, Political Science, Sociology, and Peace, War, & Defense, a letter sent to UNC Chancellor Guskiewiezc and reported on by ‘The Daily Tar Heel’ had still gone unanswered. [See here:
https://www.dailytarheel.com/.../university-pauli-murray...] There is no report of new Chancellor Roberts responding. All the everyday struggles and everyday resistance continue. Again our so-called leaders let us down.
In 2021, “My Name is Pauli Murray,” a documentary of her life debuted at The Sundance Film Festival:
https://www.indiewire.com/.../my-name-is-pauli-murray.../
More recently the trump administration suspended funding for the Pauli Murray Birthplace Memorial in Durham. The page hosting Pauli Murray’s biography has also been removed from National Park Service website. According to the administration, the centerand commemorative site, “No Longer Serves the Interest of the United States”
Durham’s Pauli Murray Center Told Its Federal Grant “No Longer Serves the Interest of the United States”
www.wunc.org
