Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, born in Baltimore in 1910 and orphaned and raised in Durham, became one of the 20th century’s most consequential yet least recognized civil rights figures.
Murray was raised in Durham by an aunt, Pauline Fitzgerald Dame, in a house at 906 Carroll Street built by Murray’s maternal grandfather, a Union Civil War veteran born into slavery. Murray graduated at the head of the class in Durham before moving to New York to attend Hunter College, graduating in 1933 with a degree in English. Murray later wrote of that maternal Fitzgerald lineage in the 1956 memoir “Proud Shoes.”
In 1938, Murray applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was refused admission because of race, at a time when every school and public facility in the state was segregated; the NAACP considered a lawsuit but ultimately declined, citing questions over Murray’s state residency…