WEBVTT - The Civil Rights Pioneer That History Forgot 0:00:01.560 --> 0:00:05.920 It's the spring of nineteen during World War Two, students 0:00:05.920 --> 0:00:09.399 at Howard University, the historically black college and Washington d C. 0:00:09.840 --> 0:00:13.040 Were frustrated. Many of the students who came to Howard 0:00:13.080 --> 0:00:17.600 came from other parts of the country where segregation didn't exist, 0:00:18.079 --> 0:00:20.520 so when they got to Howard, they found themselves in 0:00:20.520 --> 0:00:24.880 a neighborhood in Washington where the restaurants were segregated and 0:00:24.920 --> 0:00:28.400 the nearest one was a white restaurant that they couldn't 0:00:28.440 --> 0:00:30.360 have a meal at. The students sought help from the 0:00:30.360 --> 0:00:33.319 most capable person they knew, a thirty two year old 0:00:33.360 --> 0:00:37.720 black law student named Paully Murray. She was called upon 0:00:37.840 --> 0:00:41.920 by a group of undergraduates, mostly women, who were interested 0:00:42.159 --> 0:00:47.279 in trying to desegregate some of the restaurants and lunch counters, 0:00:47.520 --> 0:00:51.720 and so she advised them, and they actually did something 0:00:51.760 --> 0:00:55.760 they called stool sitting. The women, led by Murray, chose 0:00:55.800 --> 0:00:59.520 the Little Palace Cafeteria for their unusual brand of protests, 0:00:59.640 --> 0:01:03.040 and so Poli organized a sit in, one of the 0:01:03.080 --> 0:01:07.800 first in the entire country. On Saturday, April. The students, 0:01:07.880 --> 0:01:10.480 dressed in their Sunday best, left the Howard campus in 0:01:10.520 --> 0:01:13.080 groups of four and walked the ten minutes to the 0:01:13.080 --> 0:01:16.360 Little Palace Cafeteria. The first group of four arrived at 0:01:16.360 --> 0:01:20.200 the restaurant. Three students went inside, well one remained outside 0:01:20.200 --> 0:01:23.520 to observe. When the students were refused service, they took 0:01:23.560 --> 0:01:26.360 their empty trays to a table and sat down. They 0:01:26.400 --> 0:01:29.320 pulled out books and pretended to study. No one said 0:01:29.360 --> 0:01:32.320 a word. Then the next group of four students arrived 0:01:32.560 --> 0:01:36.240 and did the same thing, and then another. The students 0:01:36.240 --> 0:01:39.240 outside formed a picket line. They held signs that said 0:01:39.280 --> 0:01:42.479 things like our boys are fighting for you. Why can't 0:01:42.520 --> 0:01:46.320 we eat here? And we die together? Why can't we 0:01:46.360 --> 0:01:49.800 eat together? Police were dispatched, but they didn't know what 0:01:49.880 --> 0:01:52.680 to do about a large group of black women protesting 0:01:52.760 --> 0:01:57.080 peacefully at a restaurant, so they stood aside. The frustrated 0:01:57.120 --> 0:02:00.360 owners of the Little Palace Cafeteria closed the rest staurant 0:02:00.400 --> 0:02:04.520 eight hours early that day. Within forty eight hours, the 0:02:04.600 --> 0:02:10.799 restaurant agreed to serve black customers. It was an astounding 0:02:10.800 --> 0:02:14.200 civil rights victory, one well ahead of its time. It 0:02:14.240 --> 0:02:19.919 would be another fifteen years before there were successful restaurants 0:02:19.960 --> 0:02:23.320 sit ins in this country. That's right. In the early 0:02:23.440 --> 0:02:25.760 nineteen forties, a group of black women, led by a 0:02:25.800 --> 0:02:28.600 second year law student named Polly Murray, led the first 0:02:28.639 --> 0:02:32.160 successful restaurant sit in in the nation's capital. But you 0:02:32.240 --> 0:02:34.760 probably didn't read about it in school, nor are you 0:02:34.800 --> 0:02:37.880 likely to read much else about the Reverend Dr Polly Murray. 0:02:38.280 --> 0:02:41.519 Murray was a lawyer, scholar, and civil rights activist who 0:02:41.520 --> 0:02:44.960 was consistently ahead of her time, sometimes too far ahead. 0:02:45.480 --> 0:02:48.600 Her efforts laid the foundation for everything from the desegregation 0:02:48.680 --> 0:02:51.560 of American schools to the early legal victories of the 0:02:51.560 --> 0:03:00.680 women's movement, including a momentous law called Title nine. Finally, 0:03:01.040 --> 0:03:06.960 we gaine and ground. Dr Murray would expound, she lived 0:03:07.120 --> 0:03:16.600 to see her loss. We've made so much headway. Let 0:03:16.720 --> 0:03:22.959 us play, Let us plays. Welcome back to the thread. 0:03:23.160 --> 0:03:26.519 I'm Sean Braswell. This season we began in the summer 0:03:26.639 --> 0:03:32.280 of Welcome everyone to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, 0:03:32.680 --> 0:03:36.720 as we prepare for the much anticipated final between China 0:03:37.200 --> 0:03:42.680 and the United States. Women's World Cup Final was more 0:03:42.720 --> 0:03:45.120 than a game. It was a defining moment in the 0:03:45.200 --> 0:03:49.120 history of sports and of civil rights. Brandy Chastain's game 0:03:49.160 --> 0:03:51.839 winning penalty kick for the U S national team had 0:03:51.840 --> 0:03:54.480 the weight of history behind it, And as we've seen 0:03:54.520 --> 0:03:56.840 on this season of The Thread, there were forces at 0:03:56.840 --> 0:03:59.920 play on that soccer ball beyond just those from chastain 0:04:00.080 --> 0:04:03.440 Is left foot. For one thing, that goal was assisted 0:04:03.440 --> 0:04:05.720 by the members of the first women's national teams in 0:04:05.720 --> 0:04:09.120 the mid nineteen eighties, whose determination helped pave the way 0:04:09.160 --> 0:04:13.800 for the ninety nine team. It was choosing between doing 0:04:13.840 --> 0:04:18.160 something you loved, playing soccer, or building a career and 0:04:18.200 --> 0:04:21.359 actually making a living and having money. That was the 0:04:21.480 --> 0:04:24.640 choice that the players had to make. Chastain's goal was 0:04:24.680 --> 0:04:27.200 also the result of the members of the nineteen seventy 0:04:27.240 --> 0:04:30.840 six Yale women's crew team, whose daring naked protest helped 0:04:30.880 --> 0:04:34.800 expand opportunities for a new generation of female athletes. And 0:04:34.880 --> 0:04:37.680 if we were to say it's okay for us to 0:04:37.760 --> 0:04:41.200 be treated this way, what kind of message would that 0:04:41.240 --> 0:04:45.880 be for us to send out into the universe. And 0:04:45.960 --> 0:04:48.640 chast stains goal arose out of the thousands of girls 0:04:48.640 --> 0:04:50.840 and young women who joined sports teams in the nineteen 0:04:50.920 --> 0:04:54.279 seventies in the wake of a landmark anti discrimination law 0:04:54.360 --> 0:04:57.200 called Title nine. It arose thanks to the women who 0:04:57.240 --> 0:05:00.360 guided Title nine pass the goal line. Women like Bunny 0:05:00.400 --> 0:05:03.200 Sandler who when the doors of opportunity were slammed in 0:05:03.200 --> 0:05:06.400 their faces, decided to push until they opened. For millions 0:05:06.400 --> 0:05:09.880 of others. The doors gradually began to open as people 0:05:09.920 --> 0:05:13.440 begin to talk about equal opportunity for girls and women, 0:05:13.839 --> 0:05:17.520 and including women in sports. And once these doors opened, 0:05:17.640 --> 0:05:21.960 women just charged through. Bunny Sandler and others supplied the 0:05:22.040 --> 0:05:24.640 muscle and the tactics to get Title nine past in 0:05:24.720 --> 0:05:27.640 nineteen seventy two, but to build the legal case against 0:05:27.680 --> 0:05:31.839 sex discrimination required a true pioneer, someone uniquely positioned to 0:05:31.960 --> 0:05:34.320 leverage the games made by the civil rights movement on 0:05:34.360 --> 0:05:37.120 the question of race during the nineteen sixties and apply 0:05:37.240 --> 0:05:40.120 them to the area of women's rights in the nineteen seventies. 0:05:40.600 --> 0:05:45.839 That person was Polly Murray. She was constantly concerned about 0:05:46.120 --> 0:05:49.560 the fact that she didn't fit into the society around her. 0:05:49.880 --> 0:05:52.799 In an era that did not appreciate difference. Polly Murray 0:05:52.839 --> 0:05:55.000 was about as different as you could get. She was 0:05:55.080 --> 0:05:58.719 mixed race and transgender, discriminated against on the basis of 0:05:58.760 --> 0:06:01.799 her race and her x But by the sheer force 0:06:01.839 --> 0:06:05.000 of her own will, Polly Murray turned her difference into 0:06:05.040 --> 0:06:15.320 a source of strength. Anna Pauline Polly Murray was born 0:06:15.320 --> 0:06:19.680 in nineteen ten into very challenging circumstances. She was orphaned 0:06:19.800 --> 0:06:23.600 at three. Her mother died of a stroke. Rosalind Rosenberg 0:06:23.680 --> 0:06:26.160 is a professor Emerita at Barnard College in New York 0:06:26.320 --> 0:06:29.480 and the author of Jane Crowe, The Life of Polly Murray. 0:06:29.560 --> 0:06:32.760 Her father was committed to a mental hospital, and she 0:06:32.920 --> 0:06:37.640 was raised by her maternal grandparents and aunts in Durham, 0:06:37.640 --> 0:06:42.000 North Carolina. Young Polly experienced a profoundly segregated society in 0:06:42.040 --> 0:06:45.440 North Carolina. Barbara Law is executive director of the Polly 0:06:45.480 --> 0:06:49.159 Murray Center for History and Social Justice in Durham, North Carolina. 0:06:49.440 --> 0:06:53.920 Paully grew up in an important time period when there 0:06:53.960 --> 0:06:57.880 was a shift between the hope and excitement of reconstruction 0:06:58.160 --> 0:07:03.599 and the reinscription of Jim Crow and many segregation laws 0:07:03.640 --> 0:07:06.240 in the South. Both sides of Murray's family were of 0:07:06.279 --> 0:07:10.160 mixed race. She had ancestors who were slaves and slave owners. 0:07:10.600 --> 0:07:13.520 Skin color varied quite a bit within her own immediate family. 0:07:14.120 --> 0:07:17.800 This is Murray herself in an interview from the Southern 0:07:17.920 --> 0:07:21.160 Oral History Program Collection at the University of North Carolina 0:07:21.200 --> 0:07:23.760 at Chapel Hill. She's talking about a time when she 0:07:23.840 --> 0:07:26.120 was nine years old and went to the movies with 0:07:26.160 --> 0:07:29.880 her five siblings. It was very clear that at least 0:07:29.920 --> 0:07:33.400 four of us could go downtown to the movie soun 0:07:33.480 --> 0:07:37.480 Saturdays to the right movie houses, and two of us couldn't. 0:07:37.920 --> 0:07:41.040 And I happened to be one of the two. So 0:07:41.160 --> 0:07:45.120 that says something to you about why I would become 0:07:45.200 --> 0:07:48.920 a crusader for civil rights. But there were other reasons 0:07:49.000 --> 0:07:55.840 besides her race that made life hard for Murray. She 0:07:56.200 --> 0:07:59.760 believed from an early age that she was really a 0:07:59.800 --> 0:08:04.560 boy boy, and her family uh indulged her in this belief, 0:08:04.600 --> 0:08:07.920 calling her their boy girl. Throughout her youth, Murray preferred 0:08:07.960 --> 0:08:12.680 boys clothes, boys chores, boys games. But when she graduated 0:08:12.720 --> 0:08:17.200 from college and began writing, she chose the name Pauli 0:08:17.440 --> 0:08:22.800 p a U l I for herself because it corresponded 0:08:22.840 --> 0:08:25.560 to the sense of in between. This that she felt 0:08:26.160 --> 0:08:29.040 the sense of being in between was something that she 0:08:29.160 --> 0:08:32.840 felt from a very early age. Today, Murray might have 0:08:32.840 --> 0:08:35.960 been able to embrace her transgender identity and live as 0:08:35.960 --> 0:08:38.880 a transman if she wanted, but in the early twentieth 0:08:38.880 --> 0:08:42.439 century it was a bumpy road. She suffered nervous breakdowns, 0:08:42.679 --> 0:08:45.840 She had no language for her condition, no social movement 0:08:45.960 --> 0:08:49.960 or support network. She grew up looking her whole life 0:08:50.480 --> 0:08:55.680 for a way of becoming more male. But Murray didn't 0:08:55.720 --> 0:08:58.640 let her identity struggles hold her back. She was determined 0:08:58.640 --> 0:09:02.719 to succeed, and she was smart, really smart. She graduated 0:09:02.760 --> 0:09:05.400 first in her high school class in North Carolina. She 0:09:05.520 --> 0:09:08.520 was fifteen. She moved to New York, where her education 0:09:08.600 --> 0:09:11.600 was relegated to a series of second choices. She was 0:09:11.679 --> 0:09:15.079 rejected by Columbia University because she was a woman, so 0:09:15.160 --> 0:09:18.520 she attended Hunter College. Then, after the University of North 0:09:18.520 --> 0:09:21.440 Carolina rejected her for graduate school because of her race, 0:09:21.960 --> 0:09:25.160 she took up the cause of civil rights Barbara law again. 0:09:26.040 --> 0:09:28.920 She realized that she was strong enough to be the 0:09:28.960 --> 0:09:32.160 activist she wanted to be. She wrote in her journal 0:09:32.240 --> 0:09:36.160 that one woman plus a typewriter equals a movement, and 0:09:36.240 --> 0:09:39.240 Murray's activism inspired her to pack up her typewriter and 0:09:39.320 --> 0:09:46.480 go one step further and become a lawyer. Murray got 0:09:46.520 --> 0:09:49.600 a scholarship to attend Howard University Law School in Washington, 0:09:49.720 --> 0:09:52.160 d c. She wanted to learn how to fight back 0:09:52.200 --> 0:09:57.320 against racial discrimination. Author Rosalind Rosenberg again following Murray entered 0:09:57.920 --> 0:10:01.000 Howard Law School at the beginning of World War Two, 0:10:01.720 --> 0:10:05.319 and she thought that she had really found an institution 0:10:05.360 --> 0:10:09.160 where she could fit in. It had become the leading 0:10:09.240 --> 0:10:14.400 training ground of civil rights activists and lawyers. So she thought, 0:10:14.400 --> 0:10:17.040 this is perfect. I'm at a place I'll be accepted 0:10:17.160 --> 0:10:21.600 as African American. But Murray wasn't accepted. Howard Law School 0:10:21.640 --> 0:10:24.600 was an all male environment. Murray was the only woman 0:10:24.600 --> 0:10:28.360 in the entire school besides the school's registrar. She became 0:10:28.360 --> 0:10:30.600 aware of a whole new form of discrimination for the 0:10:30.640 --> 0:10:34.120 first time. This is how Murray described it. I became 0:10:34.280 --> 0:10:37.560 aware of sex prejudice. I became aware of it in 0:10:37.640 --> 0:10:41.800 my freshman year at law school. It came upon me 0:10:41.880 --> 0:10:44.920 as a terrible shop. I had not grown up in 0:10:44.960 --> 0:10:48.880 a family where limitations were placed upon women, and I 0:10:49.040 --> 0:10:51.240 never thought of myself in terms of women. I thought 0:10:51.240 --> 0:10:54.720 of myself in preparing to be a civil rights lawyer, 0:10:54.920 --> 0:11:00.960 you know, for this cause. Murray's realization happened quickly Rosalind Rosenberg. 0:11:01.600 --> 0:11:04.920 But on the first day of class, one of the professors, 0:11:05.040 --> 0:11:09.200 Uh and the other students began um lamenting the fact 0:11:09.280 --> 0:11:11.280 that here was a woman who had taken the place 0:11:11.400 --> 0:11:14.800 of a man, and she couldn't understand how people who 0:11:14.840 --> 0:11:18.120 were training to be civil rights lawyers could fail to 0:11:18.160 --> 0:11:22.800 see the parallel between discrimination on the basis of race 0:11:23.120 --> 0:11:26.160 Jim Crow and what she came to call discrimination on 0:11:26.200 --> 0:11:33.040 the basis of sex Jane Crowe. Murray was humiliated that 0:11:33.080 --> 0:11:35.440 first day of class, but she did not respond to 0:11:35.480 --> 0:11:38.679 her professor. She put it later, he guaranteed that I 0:11:38.720 --> 0:11:42.080 would become the top student in his class. Murray quickly 0:11:42.120 --> 0:11:44.080 learned that no matter how often she raised her hand 0:11:44.080 --> 0:11:47.280 in class, she would rarely be called on. Murray only 0:11:47.320 --> 0:11:49.480 worked harder. By the end of her first year, she 0:11:49.559 --> 0:11:52.880 ranked first in her class. She focused her energies elsewhere 0:11:52.880 --> 0:11:55.200 to including on the sit in she organized in the 0:11:55.240 --> 0:12:00.319 local community. Murray graduated from Howard Law School in still 0:12:00.320 --> 0:12:03.320 first in her class and the only woman. But Murray 0:12:03.320 --> 0:12:05.920 had accomplished even more than that in law school, more 0:12:05.920 --> 0:12:08.320 than she or anyone else could have known. By the 0:12:08.360 --> 0:12:11.240 time she graduated from law school, Murray had sketched out 0:12:11.240 --> 0:12:13.880 a legal argument that would change the face of America. 0:12:14.440 --> 0:12:24.000 That's next on the thread. Polly Murray attended law school 0:12:24.040 --> 0:12:27.120 in the nineteen forties when racial inequality was still rampant 0:12:27.120 --> 0:12:30.600 in America, segregation was legal thanks to a Supreme Court 0:12:30.640 --> 0:12:33.760 decision in the famous case of Plessy versus Ferguson, in 0:12:33.800 --> 0:12:36.920 which the court blessed separate but equal facilities for blacks 0:12:36.920 --> 0:12:40.360 and whites. Murray decided to address the Plessy case in 0:12:40.440 --> 0:12:43.880 segregation in her final year of law school Barbara Law 0:12:44.200 --> 0:12:47.080 the director of the Polly Murray Center. As a third 0:12:47.160 --> 0:12:51.559 year student, Poully wrote a final paper, and she decided 0:12:51.640 --> 0:12:54.240 to take on what had been a very thorny issue 0:12:54.960 --> 0:12:59.760 uh school desegregation. And instead of the strategies that had 0:12:59.800 --> 0:13:04.440 been employed by many of these attorneys to push for 0:13:04.520 --> 0:13:08.679 the separate but equal, improving the equal side of the equation, 0:13:09.080 --> 0:13:12.439 Paully felt like it was important to take on schools 0:13:12.440 --> 0:13:15.960 segregation head on. Murray senior paper laid out a legal 0:13:16.000 --> 0:13:20.200 strategy to strike down Plessy and racial segregation in the US. 0:13:20.240 --> 0:13:23.280 She argued that it violated the thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution, 0:13:23.360 --> 0:13:27.080 which outlawed slavery, and the fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees blacks 0:13:27.120 --> 0:13:30.920 and other Americans equal protection of the laws. Again. Author 0:13:31.000 --> 0:13:35.640 Rosalind Rosenberg Paully's contribution was to argue that it was 0:13:35.760 --> 0:13:41.640 time for lawyers to attack discrimination and segregation head on, 0:13:42.080 --> 0:13:45.800 and to argue that both were illegal under the Thirteenth 0:13:45.920 --> 0:13:50.480 and the fourteenth Amendments because they were based on categories 0:13:50.600 --> 0:13:54.240 that were illegitimate. Murray made her case with a deep 0:13:54.320 --> 0:13:57.520 dive into the history surrounding the Plessy case and other 0:13:57.559 --> 0:14:02.560 decisions and laws supporting segregation. My intense desire was to 0:14:02.600 --> 0:14:08.400 find a legal basis for overruling the segregation positions, and 0:14:08.559 --> 0:14:12.520 I worked on that intensively for almost a whole year, 0:14:13.240 --> 0:14:18.560 going back through the congressional records of the period to 0:14:18.760 --> 0:14:23.240 try to see if I could not show that the 0:14:23.360 --> 0:14:28.240 thirteenth Amendment was intended to strike down not only the 0:14:28.320 --> 0:14:34.239 legal relationship of slavery but also the badges of servitude. 0:14:34.680 --> 0:14:37.800 Marie's classmates and professors laughed when they heard her argument. 0:14:38.200 --> 0:14:41.000 Most civil rights lawyers considered Plessy to be settled law 0:14:41.240 --> 0:14:44.960 and therefore pointless to attack. Barbara Lau people didn't think 0:14:45.040 --> 0:14:48.040 much of this argument at the time she wrote the paper. 0:14:48.480 --> 0:14:50.400 She actually made a bet with one of her law 0:14:50.440 --> 0:14:54.480 professors that Plessy versus. Ferguson would be overturned in twenty 0:14:54.520 --> 0:14:57.600 five years and people thought that was actually comical. But 0:14:57.680 --> 0:15:01.800 as we know, she won that bet Rosalind Rosenberg, Murray 0:15:01.880 --> 0:15:04.920 was able to persuade an old friend Third Good Marshal, 0:15:05.120 --> 0:15:08.120 who was head of litigation at the Double A CP, 0:15:08.920 --> 0:15:11.840 that her argument could work, and in fact, in only 0:15:11.880 --> 0:15:17.280 ten years ninety four the argument one in Brown versus 0:15:17.400 --> 0:15:22.200 Board of Education and segregation was deemed illegal. The Supreme 0:15:22.240 --> 0:15:25.480 Court's unanimous decision in Brown versus Board of Education is 0:15:25.520 --> 0:15:28.800 perhaps the most significant in its history. Third Good Marshall 0:15:28.800 --> 0:15:32.080 called Murray's scholarship the quote bible of the civil rights movement. 0:15:32.640 --> 0:15:35.400 The few law students learned about Murray's role in crafting 0:15:35.400 --> 0:15:39.560 the argument that carried the day in Brown Barbara Law. Unfortunately, 0:15:39.640 --> 0:15:44.080 Pauli was never acknowledged for that contribution, but her ideas 0:15:44.400 --> 0:15:47.880 and legal strategies would win out over and over throughout 0:15:47.960 --> 0:15:52.000 her life. The victory and Brown was just the start 0:15:52.040 --> 0:15:55.280 of Murray's legal legacy and her impact as a legal scholar, 0:15:55.720 --> 0:15:58.440 but the journey was riddled with setbacks. Murray won a 0:15:58.480 --> 0:16:02.320 prestigious fellowship when she graduated from Howard. The fellowship allowed 0:16:02.320 --> 0:16:04.960 its recipients to attend Harvard Law School for a graduate 0:16:05.040 --> 0:16:10.760 legal study, at least its male recipients. Paul Murray, I 0:16:10.840 --> 0:16:15.520 did not know that Harvard did not admit women, and 0:16:15.520 --> 0:16:19.160 and did not believe my professors and fellow students when 0:16:19.200 --> 0:16:21.920 they kidded me and said how Harvard would not let 0:16:21.920 --> 0:16:24.840 me in because I was a woman. Murray experienced another 0:16:24.920 --> 0:16:29.240 formative rejection at the March on Washington. In Those of 0:16:29.280 --> 0:16:31.480 you who listened to season three of The Thread about 0:16:31.520 --> 0:16:34.320 the History of non violence will remember the important role 0:16:34.360 --> 0:16:37.080 that a Quaker name Bayard Rustin played in organizing the 0:16:37.080 --> 0:16:41.480 famous march. Rustin, like Murray, was an outsider, an unsung 0:16:41.560 --> 0:16:43.920 civil rights leader who suffered from what he called the 0:16:43.960 --> 0:16:47.920 double cross of being black and gay. His non violent 0:16:48.000 --> 0:16:50.880 protest tactics were one of the inspirations for the sit 0:16:51.000 --> 0:16:55.800 in Murray organized at Howard. Author Rosalind Rosenberg Well Rustin 0:16:55.920 --> 0:16:59.560 was an old friend. They had met in the early forties, 0:17:00.080 --> 0:17:04.000 and she admired him greatly, but she was furious when 0:17:04.080 --> 0:17:08.800 she learned that Ruston was going to confine the speakers 0:17:08.800 --> 0:17:11.919 at the March on Washington two men. The March on 0:17:12.000 --> 0:17:15.320 Washington was a historic event. Just before dawn, the marchers 0:17:15.320 --> 0:17:18.120 began to assemble here first in a trickle of hundreds, 0:17:18.440 --> 0:17:21.520 then by the thousands, still by eleven this morning, they 0:17:21.560 --> 0:17:25.439 stood almost a shoulder to shoulder, nearly two hundred thousand strong, 0:17:25.640 --> 0:17:28.840 ready to make the long walk down Constitution Avenue to 0:17:28.920 --> 0:17:32.560 the Lincoln Memorial. But that day, not a single woman 0:17:32.600 --> 0:17:35.720 walked alongside leaders like Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr. 0:17:35.760 --> 0:17:37.920 At the front of the march. Not a single woman 0:17:37.920 --> 0:17:40.359 stood at the podium to address the massive crowd at 0:17:40.359 --> 0:17:43.280 the Lincoln Memorial, a fact that did not go unnoticed 0:17:43.280 --> 0:17:47.240 by Polly Murray Barbara laugh She just couldn't understand why 0:17:47.240 --> 0:17:49.920 they couldn't see the hypocrisy of this, that they were 0:17:49.960 --> 0:17:54.240 fighting for the rights of people independent of their race, 0:17:54.359 --> 0:17:58.800 but they couldn't see how their actions were turning around 0:17:58.880 --> 0:18:03.600 and discriminating against women when women were the backbone of 0:18:03.680 --> 0:18:07.479 the organizations and the actions of the civil rights movement. 0:18:08.000 --> 0:18:10.960 Murray could see the hypocrisy, and that understanding might have 0:18:11.040 --> 0:18:13.600 frustrated her, but it also set her apart from most 0:18:13.600 --> 0:18:16.760 of the other civil rights leaders of her generation. Murray 0:18:16.800 --> 0:18:20.560 called race and sex her quote, two problems I must 0:18:20.640 --> 0:18:24.639 always be concerned not theoretically, but I must be involved 0:18:24.680 --> 0:18:30.600 with and necessarily concerned with racial liberation, but I must 0:18:30.680 --> 0:18:35.840 also personally be concerned with sexual liberation because the two 0:18:36.000 --> 0:18:39.679 is I often say the two meet in meet Rosalind Rosenberg. 0:18:39.960 --> 0:18:43.840 Pably Murray coined the term Jane Crowe while at law 0:18:43.880 --> 0:18:49.840 school as a alternative to Jim Crowe. And what she 0:18:49.960 --> 0:18:55.200 meant by Jane Crowe was that discrimination on the basis 0:18:55.520 --> 0:18:59.399 of sex or we would now say gender, was just 0:18:59.600 --> 0:19:04.600 as rumful as discrimination on the basis of race, and 0:19:04.680 --> 0:19:08.159 that in fact, Black women had the double discrimination of 0:19:08.280 --> 0:19:12.320 race and gender. And in nineteen sixty four, Polly Murray 0:19:12.359 --> 0:19:15.080 got to put her ideas about double discrimination to good 0:19:15.200 --> 0:19:18.359 use in support of a historic piece of legislation. The 0:19:18.400 --> 0:19:21.600 civil rights movement had been pressing for federal legislation to 0:19:22.240 --> 0:19:26.600 support civil rights for decades, but it had always been 0:19:26.600 --> 0:19:31.160 buried in committee in Congress by Southern conservatives. The Civil 0:19:31.240 --> 0:19:34.879 Rights Act of nineteen sixty four was fiercely debated in Congress. 0:19:35.200 --> 0:19:38.000 A key amendment added a single word to Title seven, 0:19:38.280 --> 0:19:41.000 the part of the bill that dealt with discrimination and employment, 0:19:41.560 --> 0:19:45.399 and that amendment was the word sex. That employers should 0:19:45.480 --> 0:19:48.679 be barred from discriminating not only on the basis of 0:19:48.800 --> 0:19:52.119 race and national origin and religion, but also on the 0:19:52.119 --> 0:19:56.000 basis of sex. Many members of Congress did not think 0:19:56.000 --> 0:19:58.880 that sex discrimination should be in the bill. Others hoped 0:19:58.920 --> 0:20:02.480 its inclusion would sink the bill altogether. So supporters were 0:20:02.480 --> 0:20:05.560 desperate to make their case that sex belonged alongside race 0:20:05.600 --> 0:20:09.720 and the legislation. Not surprisingly, they came to Murray for help. 0:20:11.080 --> 0:20:13.840 Pauly Murray decided to write a memo, and she wrote 0:20:13.840 --> 0:20:18.680 a memo um advancing the idea that in order for 0:20:18.920 --> 0:20:22.320 race discrimination to be effective, it had to be effective 0:20:22.440 --> 0:20:26.000 for black women as well as black men. Murray's argument 0:20:26.080 --> 0:20:29.439 that sex and race discrimination operated to reinforce one another 0:20:29.760 --> 0:20:33.120 provided the ammunition needed to solidify support around the bill, 0:20:33.680 --> 0:20:40.200 and that that memo, among massive support from many other 0:20:40.240 --> 0:20:44.440 women leaders UH, finally led to sex being put back 0:20:44.520 --> 0:20:47.240 in the bill. Murray had quietly shaped the course of 0:20:47.320 --> 0:20:52.879 legal history. Yet again, Longress passes the most sweeping civil 0:20:52.960 --> 0:20:55.399 rights bill ever to be written into the law, and 0:20:55.520 --> 0:20:59.160 thus reaffirms the conception of equality that began with Lincoln 0:20:59.200 --> 0:21:04.080 and the Civil Law. One years ago, Paully Murray was 0:21:04.160 --> 0:21:06.840 just getting warmed up Title seven of the Civil Rights 0:21:06.920 --> 0:21:10.080 Act of nineteen sixty four created a new legal framework 0:21:10.119 --> 0:21:13.440 for enforcing equality in America, but it did not outlaw 0:21:13.560 --> 0:21:17.720 sex discrimination wholesale, and most Americans, including everyone from members 0:21:17.720 --> 0:21:20.560 of Congress to civil rights lawyers, still did not take 0:21:20.640 --> 0:21:24.679 sex discrimination seriously. To get from Title seven to Title 0:21:24.800 --> 0:21:27.800 nine eight years later, not to mention, the landmark cases 0:21:27.840 --> 0:21:30.399 won by lawyers like Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the nineteen 0:21:30.440 --> 0:21:34.920 seventies required much more work up next. How Polly Murray 0:21:34.960 --> 0:21:38.359 crafted another winning legal strategy, one that would help extend 0:21:38.359 --> 0:21:40.440 the gains made by the civil rights movement during the 0:21:40.520 --> 0:21:43.919 nineteen sixties to the women's movement of the nineteen seventies. 0:21:49.119 --> 0:21:51.800 The late nineteen sixties was a period of frustration in 0:21:51.840 --> 0:21:55.080 the women's movement in America. Women's groups were disorganized. They 0:21:55.119 --> 0:21:57.760 couldn't agree on the best legal or political strategies to 0:21:57.800 --> 0:22:01.480 advance their interests. Should they be pushing for a constitutional amendment, 0:22:01.560 --> 0:22:04.320 the so called Equal Rights Amendment, in order to achieve 0:22:04.359 --> 0:22:07.520 ginger equality, could they afford to wait for such a measure? 0:22:08.240 --> 0:22:11.320 Pauli Murray stepped into this chaos with an answer, one 0:22:11.359 --> 0:22:14.879 built upon her own experiences with discrimination and her successful 0:22:14.960 --> 0:22:18.480 legal argument in Brown versus Board of Education, Murray wrote 0:22:18.520 --> 0:22:21.359 a key legal article entitled Jane Crow and the Law. 0:22:21.880 --> 0:22:24.760 She argued the solution to the problem of sex discrimination 0:22:25.119 --> 0:22:28.240 lay in an expanded understanding of the Equal Protection Clause 0:22:28.280 --> 0:22:31.639 of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court had endorsed Murray's 0:22:31.720 --> 0:22:34.919 argument in Brown that race was an unreasonable basis for 0:22:35.000 --> 0:22:39.000 classification under the Equal Protection Clause. Why not try to 0:22:39.040 --> 0:22:42.920 persuade the court that sex was also an unacceptable basis? 0:22:43.440 --> 0:22:47.160 Author Rosalind Rosenberg and the argument was the argument she'd 0:22:47.160 --> 0:22:51.280 been making all of her life, that gender, like race, 0:22:51.840 --> 0:22:56.479 is an arbitrary category without clear boundaries, and therefore an 0:22:56.560 --> 0:23:01.640 illegitimate basis for discrimination in the law. Murray's legal arguments 0:23:01.640 --> 0:23:05.080 also had an impact on one particular young lawyer, Ruth 0:23:05.080 --> 0:23:07.600 Bader Ginsburg, took a position at Rector's Law School in 0:23:07.640 --> 0:23:10.639 the late nineteen sixties. A group of students asked her 0:23:10.680 --> 0:23:13.440 to teach a course on women in the law. Ginsburg 0:23:13.480 --> 0:23:16.040 had never taught that before, so she spent the summer 0:23:16.080 --> 0:23:20.320 researching the area. One of the articles that she read 0:23:20.359 --> 0:23:25.080 over that summer was Jane Crow and the and the Law. 0:23:25.600 --> 0:23:29.959 The article itself became the basis of the first brief 0:23:30.080 --> 0:23:34.760 that she wrote that one a victory in the Supreme Court. 0:23:34.960 --> 0:23:39.679 The case was read the read decided in ninetee, in 0:23:39.720 --> 0:23:43.359 which the Supreme Court for the first time ruled that 0:23:43.480 --> 0:23:47.959 the equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment could be 0:23:48.080 --> 0:23:52.640 used to protect women from gender discrimination. Ginsburg acknowledged her 0:23:52.640 --> 0:23:55.439 debt to Paully Murray. She put Murray's name along with 0:23:55.480 --> 0:23:58.480 the name of another trailblazing lawyer, Dorothy Kenyon, on the 0:23:58.480 --> 0:24:02.239 Supreme Court brief in read. Two names appear on the 0:24:02.280 --> 0:24:06.440 cover of Paully Murray and Dorothy Kenyon. This is Ginsburg, 0:24:06.560 --> 0:24:08.800 now a justice on the U. S. Supreme Court. In 0:24:10.000 --> 0:24:13.320 we knew that we were standing on their shoulders. They 0:24:13.359 --> 0:24:16.520 were saying the same thing in the fifties and the 0:24:16.600 --> 0:24:20.399 sixties that we were saying in the seventies. Thanks to 0:24:20.480 --> 0:24:24.520 lawyers like Ginsburg, Murray's Fourteenth Amendment strategy was vindicated, and 0:24:24.640 --> 0:24:26.800 over the course of the nineteen seventies, a series of 0:24:26.880 --> 0:24:30.120 victories were one based on Murray's argument that sex discrimination 0:24:30.480 --> 0:24:34.360 paralleled race discrimination. One of those victories was the passage 0:24:34.359 --> 0:24:39.760 of Title nine Rosalind Rosenberg. Pauly Murray's argument that gender 0:24:40.520 --> 0:24:45.480 was like race an arbitrary category with no clear boundaries 0:24:46.400 --> 0:24:50.920 was essential to the passage of Title nine. By arguing 0:24:51.119 --> 0:24:55.280 that discrimination against someone just because she was a girl 0:24:56.080 --> 0:25:01.520 was constitutionally impermissible. That meant a there was tremendous pressure 0:25:01.640 --> 0:25:05.359 brought against schools to begin to provide girls with the 0:25:05.480 --> 0:25:08.840 same kinds of opportunities that boys had always been able 0:25:08.880 --> 0:25:15.000 to take for granted. Poly Murray died in at the 0:25:15.040 --> 0:25:18.240 age of seventy four. Before her death, she accomplished many 0:25:18.280 --> 0:25:21.359 more historic firsts. She was a co founder of now, 0:25:21.520 --> 0:25:24.679 the National Organization for Women. She was the first African 0:25:24.720 --> 0:25:27.760 American to receive a doctorate from Yale Law School. She 0:25:27.880 --> 0:25:30.199