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Pauli Murray was a lawyer, women’s rights and civil rights activist, Episcopal priest, scholar, author, and poet. She graduated from Yale Law School with her J.S.D. in 1965, making her the first African American woman to earn that designation. While researching and writing her 1,308 page dissertation “Roots of the Racial Crisis: Prologue to Policy,” Pauli was also engaged in activism that would change the course of history for African Americans and women.
During her time at YLS Pauli Murray was an active member of the Civil and Political Rights Committee of John F. Kennedy’s President’s Commission on the Status of Women , helped plan and organize the March on Washington with Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Phillip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin, lobbied the executive and legislative branches to include sex as a protected class for employment discrimination in the Civil Rights Act, and tirelessly wrote and spoke about issues impacting marginalized Americans across the country.