She was an architect of the civil-rights struggle—and the women’s movement. Why haven’t you heard of her?
With that résumé, Murray could have easily earned a spot at the North Carolina College for Negroes, but she declined to go, because, to date, her whole life had been constrained by segregation. Around the time of her birth, North Carolina had begun rolling back the gains of Reconstruction and using Jim Crow laws to viciously restrict the lives of African-Americans. From the moment Murray understood the system, she actively resisted it.
For the next five years, Murray drifted in and out of jobs—among them, a stint at the W.P.A.’s Workers Education Project and the National Urban League—and in and out of poverty. She learned about the labor movement, stood in her first picket line, joined a faction of the Communist Party U.S.A., then resigned a year later because “she found party discipline irksome.” Meanwhile, her relatives in North Carolina were pressuring her to return home.
In March of 1940, Murray boarded a southbound bus in New York, reluctantly. She had brought along a good friend and was looking forward to spending Easter with her family in Durham, but, of all the segregated institutions in the South, she hated the bus the most. The intimacy of the space, she wrote, “permitted the public humiliation of black people to be carried out in the presence of privileged white spectators, who witnessed our shame in silence or indifference.
Murray applied. Marshall wrote her a recommendation. Ransom kept his word. By the time Odell Waller’s final appeal was denied and he died in the electric chair, she had enrolled at Howard, with “the single-minded intention of destroying Jim Crow.” Apparently so. Neither Murray’s own efforts nor F.D.R.’s intercession persuaded Harvard. She went to Berkeley instead, then returned to New York to find work.
When Murray returned , the civil-rights movement was in full swing. The women’s movement, however, was just beginning. For the next ten years, Murray spent much of her time trying to advance it in every way she could, from arguing sex-discrimination cases to serving on President Kennedy’s newly created Presidential Commission on the Status of Women.