My Name Is Pauli Murray

Abstract

Posterity has been kinder to Pauli Murray (1910–1985) than many of her contemporaries were. A third of a century after her death, the Department of the Interior designated her childhood home in Durham, North Carolina, a National Historic Monument; and visitors to the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice in that city can learn more about her than this fine documentary has time to reveal. Yale University opened up a residential college named for her in 2017. The Episcopal Church has declared her a saint. (Episcopalians believe that such holiness is associated with a morally exemplary life, rather than with a capacity to intercede in prayer.) Such posthumous recognition tends to undermine the grievance that My Name Is Pauli Murray apparently endorses: that the struggles and successes of her life somehow remain obscure. This documentary arrives in the wake of four biographies (of varying scale and purpose). An entire section of the summer 2002 Journal of Women's History was devoted to her as well—posthumously, of course. That the public and especially the young may be far less familiar with what Murray did—as a lawyer, a poet, a scholar, a teacher, and an activist—justifies a film that efficiently covers a life pocked with impediments that she fiercely surmounted.