From “What We’re Writing” week on Jungle Red Writers:
The young Pauli Murray, who graduated from Hunter College, worked with the NAACP, and was the first woman to graduate from Howard University’s law school. She was a critic of “Jane Crow” — laws and prejudices against Black women. And Pauli Murray is the inspiration for the character Andi Martin in MRS. ROOSEVELT’S CONFIDANT.
The real Pauli Murray did have a friendship with Mrs. Roosevelt, and in 1941 tried to persuade the First Lady to intercede when a black man, Odell Waller, was sentenced to death for self-defense.
WUNC, the public radio station in Chapel Hill, North Caroline—Pauli Murray’s home and base of Duke University’s Pauli Murray Project—to the has just done a wonderful piece on Pauli Murray, called “Imp, Crusader, and Dude: The Many Identities of Pauli Murray,” written by Anita Rao and Frank Stasio:
Duke University’s Pauli Murray Project has been working to document this legacy and recently reached an important milestone: the project begins the restoration of Pauli Murray’s historic house in southwest Durham this summer.
Today they are also unveiling a new exhibit on view at The Scrap Exchange that features an intersectional look at Pauli’s many identities, from priest to crusader.”
Please give a listen and learn more about the amazing American Pauli Murray — a Black, queer, feminist hero, nearly erased from U.S. history.