Pauli Murray: A Twentieth-Century American Life

FAIN: FT-51378-03

Davison McDowell Douglas
College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, VA 23186-0002)

I propose to write a biography of Pauli Murray and to use her life as a vehicle for re-examining several of the major social movements of the twentieth century. Murray, an African-American woman born in 1910 in the Jim Crow South, lived an extraordinarily rich life as a social activist, author, poet, lawyer, educator, and priest. Her life provides a wonderful prism through which to consider several of the central social movements of the twentieth century, as Murray engaged all of them: the labor movement, the black freedom struggle, the women’s liberation movement, and the Black Power movement. Although Murray has received some attention in book chapters and dissertations, no one has ever written her biography.