Pauli Murray (1910-1985), a lifelong civil rights advocate, served as a lawyer, college professor, deputy attorney general, and ordained minister. Often the first African American woman to fill the positions she occupied, Murray worked tirelessly to destroy the legal and political obstacles created by racism and racial discrimination and fought at the same time against the Jane Crow stereotypes that limited the lives of women---especially African American women---in equally vicious ways.

Born November 20, 1910, in Baltimore, Maryland, Anna Pauline Murray was, as she noted in her autobiography Song in a Weary Throat, the result of "several generations of a generous intermixture of African, European, and Native American stocks." The granddaughter of a slave and the great-grandaughter of a slave owner, she was the fourth of six children born to Agnes (Fitzgerald) and William Murray, a nurse and school teacher. The family was a warm and loving one, but Murray...