I received the book "Pauli Murray's Revolutionary Life" as a participant in Library Thing's early reviewer program, and I am very glad that I did. Pauli Murray was an extremely important figure in the Civil Rights Movement and Women's Rights Movement of the 20th century, and I had never heard of her before. She was a descendant of slaves and slave owners in the American South, and an activist for equal right for more than fifty years, from the 1930's through the 1980's. Among Pauli's many accomplishments were degrees from Hunter College and Howard University Law School. Among other positions over the course of a long career, Pauli worked for the WPA, was a tenured faculty member at Brandeis University, and was the first Black woman in the U.S. to become an Episcopal priest, all while continuing to act as an activist for the rights of women and people of color.
The author of this book, Simki Kuznick, has done a very good job at presenting Pauli's life, both personal and professional. Pauli is an important figure in American history and her story deserves to be more widely known. Recommended! ( )

Pauli Murray’s Revolutionary Life is a biography of the extraordinary human rights activist who struggled against Jim and Jane Crow her entire life. An activist ahead of her time, she was arrested for sitting in the wrong seat of the bus in the 40s and argued that separate but equal was inherently unequal a decade before Brown vs. Board of Education. Her arguments for women’s rights were so ahead of their time, Ruth Bader Ginsburg added her as an author in her famous brief for women’s rights. Her life was filled with adventure. She rode the rails dressed as a man during the Depression. She moved to Ghana and taught constitutional law until she was forced to flee to avoid arrest by an increasingly authoritarian regime. She called Eleanor Roosevelt friend and even went skinny-dipping while visiting her.

She was a co-founder of the National Organization of Women and the first woman ordained as an Episcopal priest. She also felt she was a man in a woman’s body and though she didn’t have today’s terminology, she sometimes dressed in men’s clothes and called herself the Dude.

She also came from an extraordinary family. Her great-grandmother was a white woman who eloped with the Black freedman who worked on her father’s farm in 1840. And they lived in a slave state. This was a huge risk for both of them, they must have loved each other deeply. Their sons fought for the Union in the Civil War and helped build one of the first HBCUs.

Pauli Murray was extraordinary. She embodied intersectionality by living openly as a Black lesbian in the decades before the civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements. She ran right through the barriers. She seems irrepressible. I am grateful to this book for introducing me to her. It is written for adolescents, though, and I now want to read a biography intended for adults. I want more information, deeper information. Young adult histories and biographies suffer from the mentioning disease, mentioning everything of significance, though not always explaining why it’s significant. This is no exception, it follows the demands of the genre which makes it great for its intended audience.

I received an ARC of Pauli Murray’s Revolutionary Life from the publisher through LibraryThing.

Pauli Murray’s Revolutionary Life at Rootstock Publishing
Simki Kuznik author site

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2022/02/21/9781578690763/ ( )

Simki Kuzninick's life of Pauli Murray is listed as a YA biography but it is a book for anyone who is not familiar with Dr. Murray and her achievements against the background of racism and sexism which she resisted throughout her life. Kuznick's book is straightforward, not all sensational despite the sensational achievements the Rev. Dr. Murray kept recording throughout her life. For me, the best thing about this book is that it led me to Murray's own memoir, which I am now reading. ( )

The Reverend Dr Pauli Murray (1910-1985) was one of the most unsung, unique and accomplished members of the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights Movements in the United States, whose life was notable for her struggles with her transgender identity. She was born in Baltimore, and was raised mainly by a maternal aunt and her family in Durham, North Carolina after the premature death of her mother and her father’s institutionalization for severe mental illness. Facing limited educational opportunities in the South she sought to attend Barnard College, the private women’s college associated with Columbia University in New York, but her limited education in segregated schools did not adequately prepare her for that rigorous institution. She completed college entrance requirements in a high school in Queens, and was accepted to the Brooklyn annex of Hunter College, which at that time was a public women’s college that was open to all students regardless of race or religious background. She graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in English in 1933, as one of only four African American women to earn an undergraduate degree from the school that year.

After graduation Murray taught literacy classes through the Works Progress Administration, one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs meant to provide jobs and stimulate the economy during the Great Depression. During that time, and before then when she worked odd jobs to support herself through college, she became an active participant in small protest movements against racial injustice in restaurants and other public settings in New York. Her first notable protest came in 1940, when she and a friend attempted to spend the Easter holiday with the aunt who raised her in Durham, and were arrested in St Petersburg, Virginia for disorderly conduct after they challenged the state’s segregation policy on the public bus they rode on. Her imprisonment and trial attracted the attention of the local branch of the NAACP and the Workers’ Defense League, and she was hired by the latter group to work in its New York office. She traveled back to Virginia to give a speech requesting financial and moral support for a Black man who was sentenced to death for murdering his White landlord, and while there she met future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who at that time was one of the chief lawyers for the NAACP. He encouraged Murray to apply to Howard Law School, and she was awarded a full scholarship to attend, graduating at the top of her almost entirely male class. As a student she continued her activities against discrimination, and while doing so she met First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and the two become lifelong friends and colleagues in the battle for racial and gender equality. She subsequently earned a master’s degree in law from the University of California, Berkeley, she became the first African American woman to serve as deputy attorney general of California, and the first to earn a doctorate from Yale Law School in 1965.

Murray’s most important published work was States’ Laws on Race and Color, which was the basis for the successful Supreme Court argument in the famous Brown v. Board of Education case that overturned state sanctioned racial segregation in the nation’s schools. She wrote a legal memorandum that ensured that women had equal rights under the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which until then only protected against racial discrimination, she was one of the co-founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and she was credited by future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for her essential legal contributions to the Reed v. Reed Supreme Court case that extended equal protection by law to women under the Fourteenth Amendment.

In later years Murray taught law in several universities in the United States and Ghana, and, after she earned a master’s degree in Divinity from the General Theological Seminary, she became the first African American woman ordained as an Episcopal minister. Her last years were spent ministering to the sick in Baltimore and Washington, and giving sermons to other churches across the country, before she died of pancreatic cancer in Pittsburgh in 1985.

Pauli Murray’s Revolutionary Life is a young adult book which compellingly shines a light onto Murray’s inspiring family background and extraordinary life, along with her struggles with her sexual identity, to readers who may not be familiar with her story. I learned far more about this amazing woman as a result of reading it, and I’ll use it as a stepping stone to learn more about her, and her role in the movements for racial and gender equality in this country. ( )

A well-intentioned attempt, but this falls flat. It shouldn’t be possible to make a biography of Pauli Murray — a dynamic, vivid and complicated character — both lacking in depth and a slog to read. Space is devoted to unnecessary details (does it add that much to keep mentioning Murray’s dogs?) and there’s one whole chapter about a quirky but not crucial escapade with Eleanor Roosevelt; in comparison, Murray’s work on behalf of the civil rights and women’s rights movements is given short shrift. I kept wavering between 1 1/2 and 2 stars with this, and decided to downgrade it because while I did learn some facts about Murray’s life, I probably would’ve gotten more out of reading Murray’s own family memoir or some of the adult biographies that have come out in recent years. ( )