Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray by Rosalind Rosenberg (review)

Kathryn Schulz's April 27, 2017, New Yorker profile, "The Many Lives of Pauli Murray," described Pauli Murray as an "architect of the civil-rights struggle—and the women's movement" and asked, "Why haven't you heard of her?" Scholars protested that many had studied and written on Murray. A JSTOR search backs their claims, yielding more than two thousand references to her in academic publications. But scholars' treatments of Murray thus far have addressed her life and its milestones in pieces. Rosalind Rosenberg's exquisite volume brings Murray into focus in whole and in context.

Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray follows Murray through the major social justice campaigns of the twentieth century. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1910, and raised in Durham, North Carolina, she played key roles in the labor, civil rights, and feminist movements. As an activist and a law professor, Murray found overlooked potential in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments as tools for building social equality. She also framed the concept of "Jane Crow" to analogize race and sex discrimination (p. 261). Murray helped establish the National Organization for Women and was the first African American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest. After her death in 1985, theorists drew from Murray's ideas about how race and sex are "interconnected" as they developed the concept of intersectionality (p. 370). Jane Crow gives these achievements due attention, but it also presents less familiar details of Murray's life: she hitchhiked cross-country by car and rail, taught law in Ghana, worked as a journalist and poet, and was a longtime breadwinner for the aunts who raised her.

Rosenberg argues that Murray's sense of herself as "someone in between" social categories spurred and shaped her persistent activism (p. 5). Murray's ancestors included white slaveholders, enslaved African Americans, and freedpeople whose light complexions permitted many of them to melt undetected into white society. Her class status was similarly ambiguous. Murray became a nationally known legal expert who built deep friendships with elites such as Eleanor Roosevelt, but financial security eluded her.

Murray's gender identity was the source of her deepest inner turmoil. According to Rosenberg, it is the key to understanding Murray's worldview. Murray sensed that she was a heterosexual man inhabiting a female body. Early in her life, she sought out a medical cause for her situation and lobbied physicians for treatment. Confidantes regarded Murray "'as one of nature's experiments; a girl who should have been a boy'" (p. 81). By middle age, Rosenberg recounts, Murray "had come to see her trouble with 'boundaries,' her sense of herself as 'queer,' as strengths, qualities that allowed her to understand gender and race not as fixed categories, but rather as unreasonable classifications" (p. 3). Murray's liminal status proved to be a good launching pad for her attacks on social taxonomies.

Murray did not plot out the landmarks that have defined her legacy. Rather, she fought barriers as she encountered them, drawing from her personal experiences to push for broader social and political change. Her experience of poverty during the Great Depression led her to class- and labor-based activism. Her rejection from graduate study at the University of North Carolina in 1938 because of her race—despite being the descendant of a white trustee—led her to challenge racism in the law and in the academy in a campaign that received national attention. Murray later met sex-based exclusion as the only woman in her class at Howard Law School. She found this encounter with Jane Crow especially bitter considering her discomfort with her female body. Toward the end of her life, the death of a dear companion compelled Murray to deepen her connection to the Episcopal Church.

Jane Crow humanizes a complex figure many of us thought we knew. Rosenberg shows us that behind Murray's public edifice was a deeply relatable person, far more compelling...