Pride Month Spotlight: Pauli Murray
Throughout June, we’re celebrating LGBTQIA+ people who have shaped our church and our world — trailblazers, advocates, saints, and quietly persistent troublemakers who got us here. We’re kicking off with one of the greatest.
Anna Pauline Murray (1910-1985) was a lawyer, poet, civil rights activist, and the first African American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest. Murray’s groundbreaking legal scholarship on the Equal Protection Clause directly influenced arguments made by Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in landmark civil rights and women’s rights cases — though Murray’s contributions went largely uncredited for decades. Murray co-founded the National Organization for Women in 1966 and lived a gender nonconforming identity long before modern vocabulary could name it. The Episcopal Church canonized Murray as a saint in 2012.