American civil-rights lawyer, legal scholar, poet, memoirist, and — late in life — the first African American person perceived as a woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. Murray's life sits at the crossroads of nearly every major American emancipatory movement of the twentieth century, and her fingerprints are on several of them in ways only recently and reluctantly acknowledged by the traditions she shaped.
Refused admission to the University of North Carolina in 1938 on account of race and to Harvard Law School in 1944 on account of gender (Murray, who was gender-nonconforming long before the language existed, called the latter experience "Jane Crow"), Murray graduated first in the class at Howard Law in 1944 and went on to publish States' Laws on Race and Color (1950) — the encyclopedia of American segregation law that Thurgood Marshall called "the Bible" of the NAACP's litigation strategy in Brown v. Board of Education. A 1965 law-review article Murray co-wrote with Mary Eastwood laid out the argument that sex discrimination could be challenged under the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause — the argument Ruth Bader Ginsburg later used to win Reed v. Reed (1971), acknowledging Murray as co-author in gratitude. Murray co-founded the National Organization for Women in 1966.
Her 1956 family memoir Proud Shoes traced her North Carolina ancestors across slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Her posthumous autobiography Song in a Weary Throat (1987) is one of the essential American civil-rights memoirs. In 1977, at sixty-seven, Murray was ordained to the Episcopal priesthood — among the first women ordained in that tradition — and served congregations until her death. The Episcopal Church now commemorates her as a saint on its liturgical calendar. She belongs equally to the histories of constitutional law, Black freedom struggle, feminist thought, queer and trans prehistory, and American religious life — and the intersectionality concept for which Kimberlé Crenshaw is rightly known was in substance Murray's long before it had a name.