This episode of Ballot and Beyond, contributed by the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center, is written and read by Christine R. Valeriann, a long-time board member of the Baltimore chapter of the National Organization for Women and a volunteer with the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center.
The Reverend Doctor Pauli Murray was ahead of her time and a pioneer in the areas of civil rights, feminism, labor, the law, academia, gender, and religion. Fifteen years before Rosa Parks, Murray was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a Virginia bus. Twenty years before Greensboro, she organized a sit-in to desegregate a restaurant. And 40 years before the language of intersectionality, she was invoking the race-sex analogy to describe black women’s positionality within the law.
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