Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life

Abstract

When trying to make sense of the twentieth century—civil rights, feminism, religion, literature, law, sexuality, and more—all roads lead to Pauli Murray. Her pathbreaking role in multiple movements for social change has made her an attractive subject for biographers and historians, most recently Rosalind Rosenberg, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Glenda Gilmore. Troy R. Saxby enters this historiographical terrain by staking out his own claim: to look at the “complicated personality behind the achievements” and “to describe as fully as possible her lived experience” (p. xiv). Wary of imposing a coherent narrative, triumphant or otherwise, on her often messy and complicated life, he aims to give as much attention to what she felt as to what she did. Of course, this juggling act between the personal and the political is central to the biographer's craft. What is special or distinctive about Saxby's intervention? The events in Murray's life do not change in...