Becoming Jane Crow
Note: Since Pauli Murray lived in a gender-binary world, this article follows the historical precedent of using she/her pronouns.
As a teenager in 1920s Durham, North Carolina, Pauli Murray strode each May across the Whites-only cemetery where a sea of Confederate flags marked the graves of Civil War veterans. She climbed over a fence to enter her family burial ground and defiantly planted a U.S. flag where her grandfather Robert Fitzgerald rested. “Upon this lone flag, I hung my nativity and the right to claim my heritage,” Murray later wrote. “It bore mute testimony to the irrefutable fact that I was an American and it helped to negate in my mind the signs and symbols of inferiority and apartness.”
Pauli Murray was a key mid-20th century American figure who linked the legal equity crusades of the civil rights and feminist movements. Along the way, searching for self and soul, she navigated settings in which people of color or women were unwelcome and poor people were scarce. Her skin looked too dark to some, to others too light; she didn’t feel female but didn’t appear male. She was drawn to social activism but also loved to write poetry and to research law briefs. Her private struggle to reconcile her gender identity and public persona is only beginning to be understood.
Her challenges began early. Born Anna Pauline Murray in 1910 to a biracial family in Baltimore, Maryland, she lost both parents young. Local relatives took in her siblings; she grew up with her maternal grandparents and aunt in segregated Durham. With white and black forebears on both sides of the family, her Carolina kin lived in a precarious social situation.
“The world revolved on color and variations in color,” Murray wrote. Grandfather Fitzgerald, born free in Pennsylvania, settled in Durham after his Civil War service, teaching freed people and helping them claim new lives. Grandmother Smith was the
