It's the spring of nineteen during World War Two, students at Howard University, the historically black college and Washington d C. Were frustrated. Many of the students who came to Howard came from other parts of the country where segregation didn't exist, so when they got to Howard, they found themselves in a neighborhood in Washington where the restaurants were segregated and the nearest one was a white restaurant that they couldn't
have a meal at. The students sought help from the most capable person they knew, a thirty two year old black law student named Paully Murray. She was called upon by a group of undergraduates, mostly women, who were interested in trying to desegregate some of the restaurants and lunch counters, and so she advised them, and they actually did something
they called stool sitting. The women, led by Murray, chose the Little Palace Cafeteria for their unusual brand of protests, and so Poli organized a sit in, one of the first in the entire country. On Saturday, April. The students, dressed in their Sunday best, left the Howard campus in groups of four and walked the ten minutes to the Little Palace Cafeteria. The first group of four arrived at the restaurant. Three students went inside, well one remained outside
to observe. When the students were refused service, they took their empty trays to a table and sat down. They pulled out books and pretended to study. No one said a word. Then the next group of four students arrived and did the same thing, and then another. The students outside formed a picket line. They held signs that said things like our boys are fighting for you. Why can't we eat here? And we die together? Why can't we
eat together? Police were dispatched, but they didn't know what to do about a large group of black women protesting peacefully at a restaurant, so they stood aside. The frustrated owners of the Little Palace Cafeteria closed the rest staurant eight hours early that day. Within forty eight hours, the restaurant agreed to serve black customers. It was an astounding civil rights victory, one well ahead of its time. It would be another fifteen years before there were successful restaurants
sit ins in this country. That's right. In the early nineteen forties, a group of black women, led by a second year law student named Polly Murray, led the first successful restaurant sit in in the nation's capital. But you probably didn't read about it in school, nor are you likely to read much else about the Reverend Dr Polly Murray. Murray was a lawyer, scholar, and civil rights activist who was consistently ahead of her time, sometimes too far ahead.
Her efforts laid the foundation for everything from the desegregation of American schools to the early legal victories of the women's movement, including a momentous law called Title nine. Finally, we gaine and ground. Dr Murray would expound, she lived to see her loss. We've made so much headway. Let us play, Let us plays. Welcome back to the thread.
I'm Sean Braswell. This season we began in the summer of Welcome everyone to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, as we prepare for the much anticipated final between China and the United States. Women's World Cup Final was more than a game. It was a defining moment in the
history of sports and of civil rights. Brandy Chastain's game winning penalty kick for the U S national team had the weight of history behind it, And as we've seen on this season of The Thread, there were forces at play on that soccer ball beyond just those from chastain Is left foot. For one thing, that goal was assisted by the members of the first women's national teams in the mid nineteen eighties, whose determination helped pave the way
for the ninety nine team. It was choosing between doing something you loved, playing soccer, or building a career and actually making a living and having money. That was the choice that the players had to make. Chastain's goal was also the result of the members of the nineteen seventy six Yale women's crew team, whose daring naked protest helped
expand opportunities for a new generation of female athletes. And if we were to say it's okay for us to be treated this way, what kind of message would that be for us to send out into the universe. And chast stains goal arose out of the thousands of girls and young women who joined sports teams in the nineteen seventies in the wake of a landmark anti discrimination law called Title nine. It arose thanks to the women who
guided Title nine pass the goal line. Women like Bunny Sandler who when the doors of opportunity were slammed in their faces, decided to push until they opened. For millions of others. The doors gradually began to open as people begin to talk about equal opportunity for girls and women, and including women in sports. And once these doors opened,
women just charged through. Bunny Sandler and others supplied the muscle and the tactics to get Title nine past in nineteen seventy two, but to build the legal case against sex discrimination required a true pioneer, someone uniquely positioned to leverage the games made by the civil rights movement on the question of race during the nineteen sixties and apply them to the area of women's rights in the nineteen seventies.
That person was Polly Murray. She was constantly concerned about the fact that she didn't fit into the society around her. In an era that did not appreciate difference. Polly Murray was about as different as you could get. She was mixed race and transgender, discriminated against on the basis of her race and her x But by the sheer force of her own will, Polly Murray turned her difference into a source of strength. Anna Pauline Polly Murray was born
in nineteen ten into very challenging circumstances. She was orphaned at three. Her mother died of a stroke. Rosalind Rosenberg is a professor Emerita at Barnard College in New York and the author of Jane Crowe, The Life of Polly Murray. Her father was committed to a mental hospital, and she was raised by her maternal grandparents and aunts in Durham, North Carolina. Young Polly experienced a profoundly segregated society in
North Carolina. Barbara Law is executive director of the Polly Murray Center for History and Social Justice in Durham, North Carolina. Paully grew up in an important time period when there was a shift between the hope and excitement of reconstruction and the reinscription of Jim Crow and many segregation laws in the South. Both sides of Murray's family were of mixed race. She had ancestors who were slaves and slave owners. Skin color varied quite a bit within her own immediate family.
This is Murray herself in an interview from the Southern Oral History Program Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She's talking about a time when she was nine years old and went to the movies with her five siblings. It was very clear that at least four of us could go downtown to the movie soun Saturdays to the right movie houses, and two of us couldn't. And I happened to be one of the two. So that says something to you about why I would become
a crusader for civil rights. But there were other reasons besides her race that made life hard for Murray. She believed from an early age that she was really a boy boy, and her family uh indulged her in this belief, calling her their boy girl. Throughout her youth, Murray preferred boys clothes, boys chores, boys games. But when she graduated from college and began writing, she chose the name Pauli p a U l I for herself because it corresponded
to the sense of in between. This that she felt the sense of being in between was something that she felt from a very early age. Today, Murray might have been able to embrace her transgender identity and live as a transman if she wanted, but in the early twentieth century it was a bumpy road. She suffered nervous breakdowns, She had no language for her condition, no social movement or support network. She grew up looking her whole life for a way of becoming more male. But Murray didn't
let her identity struggles hold her back. She was determined to succeed, and she was smart, really smart. She graduated first in her high school class in North Carolina. She was fifteen. She moved to New York, where her education was relegated to a series of second choices. She was rejected by Columbia University because she was a woman, so
she attended Hunter College. Then, after the University of North Carolina rejected her for graduate school because of her race, she took up the cause of civil rights Barbara law again. She realized that she was strong enough to be the activist she wanted to be. She wrote in her journal that one woman plus a typewriter equals a movement, and Murray's activism inspired her to pack up her typewriter and
go one step further and become a lawyer. Murray got a scholarship to attend Howard University Law School in Washington, d c. She wanted to learn how to fight back against racial discrimination. Author Rosalind Rosenberg again following Murray entered Howard Law School at the beginning of World War Two, and she thought that she had really found an institution where she could fit in. It had become the leading training ground of civil rights activists and lawyers. So she thought,
this is perfect. I'm at a place I'll be accepted as African American. But Murray wasn't accepted. Howard Law School was an all male environment. Murray was the only woman in the entire school besides the school's registrar. She became aware of a whole new form of discrimination for the first time. This is how Murray described it. I became aware of sex prejudice. I became aware of it in my freshman year at law school. It came upon me
as a terrible shop. I had not grown up in a family where limitations were placed upon women, and I never thought of myself in terms of women. I thought of myself in preparing to be a civil rights lawyer, you know, for this cause. Murray's realization happened quickly Rosalind Rosenberg.
But on the first day of class, one of the professors, Uh and the other students began um lamenting the fact that here was a woman who had taken the place of a man, and she couldn't understand how people who were training to be civil rights lawyers could fail to see the parallel between discrimination on the basis of race Jim Crow and what she came to call discrimination on the basis of sex Jane Crowe. Murray was humiliated that first day of class, but she did not respond to
her professor. She put it later, he guaranteed that I would become the top student in his class. Murray quickly learned that no matter how often she raised her hand in class, she would rarely be called on. Murray only worked harder. By the end of her first year, she ranked first in her class. She focused her energies elsewhere to including on the sit in she organized in the local community. Murray graduated from Howard Law School in still
first in her class and the only woman. But Murray had accomplished even more than that in law school, more than she or anyone else could have known. By the time she graduated from law school, Murray had sketched out a legal argument that would change the face of America.
That's next on the thread. Polly Murray attended law school in the nineteen forties when racial inequality was still rampant in America, segregation was legal thanks to a Supreme Court decision in the famous case of Plessy versus Ferguson, in which the court blessed separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites. Murray decided to address the Plessy case in segregation in her final year of law school Barbara Law
the director of the Polly Murray Center. As a third year student, Poully wrote a final paper, and she decided to take on what had been a very thorny issue uh school desegregation. And instead of the strategies that had been employed by many of these attorneys to push for the separate but equal, improving the equal side of the equation, Paully felt like it was important to take on schools
segregation head on. Murray senior paper laid out a legal strategy to strike down Plessy and racial segregation in the US. She argued that it violated the thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution, which outlawed slavery, and the fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees blacks
and other Americans equal protection of the laws. Again. Author Rosalind Rosenberg Paully's contribution was to argue that it was time for lawyers to attack discrimination and segregation head on, and to argue that both were illegal under the Thirteenth and the fourteenth Amendments because they were based on categories that were illegitimate. Murray made her case with a deep dive into the history surrounding the Plessy case and other
decisions and laws supporting segregation. My intense desire was to find a legal basis for overruling the segregation positions, and I worked on that intensively for almost a whole year, going back through the congressional records of the period to try to see if I could not show that the thirteenth Amendment was intended to strike down not only the legal relationship of slavery but also the badges of servitude. Marie's classmates and professors laughed when they heard her argument.
Most civil rights lawyers considered Plessy to be settled law and therefore pointless to attack. Barbara Lau people didn't think much of this argument at the time she wrote the paper. She actually made a bet with one of her law professors that Plessy versus. Ferguson would be overturned in twenty
five years and people thought that was actually comical. But as we know, she won that bet Rosalind Rosenberg, Murray was able to persuade an old friend Third Good Marshal, who was head of litigation at the Double A CP, that her argument could work, and in fact, in only ten years ninety four the argument one in Brown versus Board of Education and segregation was deemed illegal. The Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown versus Board of Education is
perhaps the most significant in its history. Third Good Marshall called Murray's scholarship the quote bible of the civil rights movement. The few law students learned about Murray's role in crafting the argument that carried the day in Brown Barbara Law. Unfortunately, Pauli was never acknowledged for that contribution, but her ideas and legal strategies would win out over and over throughout
her life. The victory and Brown was just the start of Murray's legal legacy and her impact as a legal scholar, but the journey was riddled with setbacks. Murray won a prestigious fellowship when she graduated from Howard. The fellowship allowed its recipients to attend Harvard Law School for a graduate
legal study, at least its male recipients. Paul Murray, I did not know that Harvard did not admit women, and and did not believe my professors and fellow students when they kidded me and said how Harvard would not let me in because I was a woman. Murray experienced another
formative rejection at the March on Washington. In Those of you who listened to season three of The Thread about the History of non violence will remember the important role that a Quaker name Bayard Rustin played in organizing the famous march. Rustin, like Murray, was an outsider, an unsung civil rights leader who suffered from what he called the double cross of being black and gay. His non violent protest tactics were one of the inspirations for the sit
in Murray organized at Howard. Author Rosalind Rosenberg Well Rustin was an old friend. They had met in the early forties, and she admired him greatly, but she was furious when she learned that Ruston was going to confine the speakers at the March on Washington two men. The March on
Washington was a historic event. Just before dawn, the marchers began to assemble here first in a trickle of hundreds, then by the thousands, still by eleven this morning, they stood almost a shoulder to shoulder, nearly two hundred thousand strong, ready to make the long walk down Constitution Avenue to the Lincoln Memorial. But that day, not a single woman walked alongside leaders like Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr.
At the front of the march. Not a single woman stood at the podium to address the massive crowd at the Lincoln Memorial, a fact that did not go unnoticed by Polly Murray Barbara laugh She just couldn't understand why they couldn't see the hypocrisy of this, that they were fighting for the rights of people independent of their race, but they couldn't see how their actions were turning around and discriminating against women when women were the backbone of
the organizations and the actions of the civil rights movement. Murray could see the hypocrisy, and that understanding might have frustrated her, but it also set her apart from most
of the other civil rights leaders of her generation. Murray called race and sex her quote, two problems I must always be concerned not theoretically, but I must be involved with and necessarily concerned with racial liberation, but I must also personally be concerned with sexual liberation because the two is I often say the two meet in meet Rosalind Rosenberg. Pably Murray coined the term Jane Crowe while at law
school as a alternative to Jim Crowe. And what she meant by Jane Crowe was that discrimination on the basis of sex or we would now say gender, was just as rumful as discrimination on the basis of race, and that in fact, Black women had the double discrimination of race and gender. And in nineteen sixty four, Polly Murray got to put her ideas about double discrimination to good
use in support of a historic piece of legislation. The civil rights movement had been pressing for federal legislation to support civil rights for decades, but it had always been buried in committee in Congress by Southern conservatives. The Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four was fiercely debated in Congress. A key amendment added a single word to Title seven, the part of the bill that dealt with discrimination and employment,
and that amendment was the word sex. That employers should be barred from discriminating not only on the basis of race and national origin and religion, but also on the basis of sex. Many members of Congress did not think that sex discrimination should be in the bill. Others hoped its inclusion would sink the bill altogether. So supporters were desperate to make their case that sex belonged alongside race and the legislation. Not surprisingly, they came to Murray for help.
Pauly Murray decided to write a memo, and she wrote a memo um advancing the idea that in order for race discrimination to be effective, it had to be effective for black women as well as black men. Murray's argument that sex and race discrimination operated to reinforce one another provided the ammunition needed to solidify support around the bill, and that that memo, among massive support from many other women leaders UH, finally led to sex being put back
in the bill. Murray had quietly shaped the course of legal history. Yet again, Longress passes the most sweeping civil rights bill ever to be written into the law, and thus reaffirms the conception of equality that began with Lincoln
and the Civil Law. One years ago, Paully Murray was just getting warmed up Title seven of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four created a new legal framework for enforcing equality in America, but it did not outlaw sex discrimination wholesale, and most Americans, including everyone from members of Congress to civil rights lawyers, still did not take
sex discrimination seriously. To get from Title seven to Title nine eight years later, not to mention, the landmark cases won by lawyers like Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the nineteen seventies required much more work up next. How Polly Murray crafted another winning legal strategy, one that would help extend the gains made by the civil rights movement during the nineteen sixties to the women's movement of the nineteen seventies. The late nineteen sixties was a period of frustration in
the women's movement in America. Women's groups were disorganized. They couldn't agree on the best legal or political strategies to advance their interests. Should they be pushing for a constitutional amendment, the so called Equal Rights Amendment, in order to achieve ginger equality, could they afford to wait for such a measure?
Pauli Murray stepped into this chaos with an answer, one built upon her own experiences with discrimination and her successful legal argument in Brown versus Board of Education, Murray wrote a key legal article entitled Jane Crow and the Law. She argued the solution to the problem of sex discrimination lay in an expanded understanding of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court had endorsed Murray's argument in Brown that race was an unreasonable basis for
classification under the Equal Protection Clause. Why not try to persuade the court that sex was also an unacceptable basis? Author Rosalind Rosenberg and the argument was the argument she'd been making all of her life, that gender, like race, is an arbitrary category without clear boundaries, and therefore an illegitimate basis for discrimination in the law. Murray's legal arguments also had an impact on one particular young lawyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, took a position at Rector's Law School in
the late nineteen sixties. A group of students asked her to teach a course on women in the law. Ginsburg had never taught that before, so she spent the summer researching the area. One of the articles that she read over that summer was Jane Crow and the and the Law. The article itself became the basis of the first brief that she wrote that one a victory in the Supreme Court.
The case was read the read decided in ninetee, in which the Supreme Court for the first time ruled that the equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment could be used to protect women from gender discrimination. Ginsburg acknowledged her debt to Paully Murray. She put Murray's name along with the name of another trailblazing lawyer, Dorothy Kenyon, on the Supreme Court brief in read. Two names appear on the cover of Paully Murray and Dorothy Kenyon. This is Ginsburg,
now a justice on the U. S. Supreme Court. In we knew that we were standing on their shoulders. They were saying the same thing in the fifties and the sixties that we were saying in the seventies. Thanks to lawyers like Ginsburg, Murray's Fourteenth Amendment strategy was vindicated, and over the course of the nineteen seventies, a series of victories were one based on Murray's argument that sex discrimination paralleled race discrimination. One of those victories was the passage
of Title nine Rosalind Rosenberg. Pauly Murray's argument that gender was like race an arbitrary category with no clear boundaries was essential to the passage of Title nine. By arguing that discrimination against someone just because she was a girl was constitutionally impermissible. That meant a there was tremendous pressure brought against schools to begin to provide girls with the same kinds of opportunities that boys had always been able to take for granted. Poly Murray died in at the
age of seventy four. Before her death, she accomplished many more historic firsts. She was a co founder of now, the National Organization for Women. She was the first African American to receive a doctorate from Yale Law School. She was ordained as the first black female priest in the
Episcopal Church. The list goes on. Rosalind Rosenberg says poly Murray used her own in between identity as a bridge, a bridge between white and black, male and female, rich and poor, a bridge to fight for the acceptance of all people's society detegrated as different. Poly Murray never publicly identified herself as a lesbian or as transgender. She never argued that uh there should should be equality for gays and lesbians or for transgender people, but she spoken code
she spoke about the importance of protecting social minorities. Barbara laugh She was just so ahead of her time in so many ways that people didn't understand the gravity of what she was suggesting. So what I always say is, while she might not have been a woman of her time, she is certainly a woman of our time. And Murray's words continue to resonate today. As one begins to assume that one is equal to other people, not superita, not in fury, but equal as a human being, one does
begin to feel free. I cannot persuade or force other Americans to live up to this tree, but I do have a personal responsibility for doing my part to make this dream come true as as much as possible. Next, in our final episode of this season, we arrive at the origin of our thread, title seven of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four. Paul Murray helped keep the words sex in that law, but she was not the woman responsible for the word being in there in
the first place. When the laughter stops, Martha Griffith stands up and says, you know, I guess if there's any question that women are a second class, you know your response would prove that we'll learn more about Martha Griffith's the formidable congresswoman behind Title seven sex discrimination ban, and we'll bring things full circle back to women's soccer. In March nineteen, the current U S women's national team filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the US Soccer Federation that
alleges unequal pay in working conditions. And do you know what the main law is that the team claims was violated? You got it? Title seven of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen has the author William Faulkner famously put it, the past is never dead. It's not even past. Let us play, let us play la let us Play. The Threat is produced by Robert Coolos, Shannon Williamson, and me Sean Braswell. Evan Roberts edited our show and it was
mixed and mastered by Matt Temarillo. This episode features the song let Us Play, written and performed by Tea cup Jack. To learn more about the thread, visit azzy dot com, Slash the Threat all one word, and make sure to subscribe to the thread on Apple Podcasts, follow us on I Heart Radio, or listen wherever you get your podcasts