02/06/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/1FmCYiNM3c/
"I have been standing on her shoulders."
Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that.
She wasn't talking about a President. She wasn't talking about a famous judge.
She was talking about a priest who had been erased from the history books.
Pauli Murray.
If you look closely at the architecture of American freedom, you will find Pauli Murray’s fingerprints on every single brick.
She was the Forrest Gump of the Civil Rights movement except she wasn't an accidental witness. She was the architect.
It was 1940. Petersburg, Virginia.
Fifteen years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in Montgomery, Pauli Murray was sitting on a bus.
The driver told her to move to the back.
She refused.
She was arrested. She was thrown in jail.
But unlike the later movements, the NAACP didn't want to make her a test case. She was too "eccentric." She was too brash. She didn't fit the image of the respectable victim.
So, Pauli decided to stop waiting for a savior. She decided to become a lawyer.
She went to Howard University Law School. She was the only woman in her class.
The professors were giants of the Civil Rights era. They were teaching the students how to fight "Separate but Equal" by proving that the black schools weren't equal.
Pauli raised her hand.
"Why are we arguing about the quality of the schools?" she asked. "Why don't we just argue that segregation itself violates the Constitution?"
The class laughed. The professors told her she was naive. You couldn't overturn Plessy v. Ferguson. It was impossible.
Pauli wrote her final thesis on the idea anyway. She wagered $10 with her professor that she was right.
Ten years later, that professor Thurgood Marshall picked up Pauli’s old college paper.
He used her exact legal theory as the core argument in Brown v. Board of Education.
He won. Segregation was ruled unconstitutional.
He never paid her the $10, but he called her book the "bible" of the movement.
But Pauli wasn't done.
She looked at the world and saw that while Black men were fighting racism, they were often s*xist. And while white women were fighting s*xism, they were often racist.
She was caught in the crossfire.
She coined a term for it: "Jane Crow."
She argued that race and s*x were intertwined. You couldn't fight one without the other.
In the 1960s, she joined the board of the ACLU.
A young lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg was looking for a way to convince the Supreme Court that discrimination against women was unconstitutional.
The Court didn't take gender discrimination seriously.
Ginsburg stumbled upon a law review article written by Pauli Murray.
It laid out a brilliant strategy: Use the 14th Amendment's "Equal Protection Clause" which was written for former slaves to protect women too.
It was the "lightbulb" moment.
In 1971, Ginsburg wrote the brief for Reed v. Reed, the case that finally made gender discrimination illegal.
On the cover of the brief, Ginsburg listed two authors: Herself, and Pauli Murray.
Pauli hadn't worked on the case. But Ginsburg knew the truth: "She drafted the blueprint. I just built the house."
Pauli Murray lived a life of constant "firsts" and constant struggles.
She struggled with her identity. In private journals, she described herself as a man trapped in a woman’s body, decades before the term "transgender" was understood. She asked doctors for testosterone in the 1940s. She lived in a world that had no language for who she was.
She was rejected by Harvard Law because she was a woman.
She was rejected by the Roosevelt administration for being too radical.
But she never stopped breaking doors down.
In 1977, at the age of 66, she decided she had one more barrier to break.
The Episcopal Church had just allowed women to be ordained.
Pauli Murray put on the vestments.
She became the first African American woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest.
She celebrated the Eucharist in the same North Carolina church where her grandmother had been baptized as a slave.
She died in 1985.
For a long time, she was forgotten. She was too complex, too q***r, too intellectual for the simple history books.
But she was the prophet.
She sat so Rosa could sit.
She wrote so Thurgood could argue.
She dreamed so Ruth could win.
She proved that the person with the quietest voice in the room is often the one writing the future.
