Fighting Racism, Skirting Gender Lines
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            Murray’s list of unheralded accomplishments is a long one. Among many firsts, she was the first African-American to receive a Yale law doctorate (1965) and the first Black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. Her signal contribution occurred in the field of jurisprudence. Murray’s cutting-edge argument that segregation was unconstitutional influenced the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, though her contribution was credited only privately and after the fact. Years later, when Ruth Bader Ginsberg successfully argued before the Supreme Court that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited sex discrimination, she publicly credited Murray’s work and brought it to the attention of filmmakers West and Cohen.

            The resulting documentary is ambitious and informative. Interviewees include legal scholars, friends, students, and family members. A display of Murray’s words on the screen opens the film, followed by a clip from Murray in an interview telling her dog to “lie down” as they pose for the camera. This humanizing start cuts to a shot of Murray’s great-niece Karen Rouse Ross recounting their last phone call in 1985, and the discovery of the 141 boxes of memorabilia housed at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library. The film next moves to the account of the 1940 Petersburg, Virginia, bus incident in which Murray and her friend and probable lover Mac were jailed for a night. This narrative is accompanied by images of the jail and the segregated South in 1940, and concludes with Mac’s daughter talking about her mother’s experience. What is omitted from the film is that fact that Murray was passing as a man during the encounter.

            West and Cohen have deliberately eschewed chronology in favor of a structure highlighting key moments in their subject’s life. Accordingly, the film next shifts to 1913, the year of Murray’s mother’s death when she was three. Family pictures combine with historical images of lynchings and the impoverished Black school that Murray attended. The narrative goes along in this way, touching on Murray’s time in New York, her freight riding period, an interval at a New Deal Women’s Camp (where she met lover Peggy Holmes), and periods of scholarship and teaching at various academic institutions. While practicing at the prestigious Paul, Weiss law firm as the only African-American and one of three female lawyers, Murray met an enduring lover and partner, Irene Barlow. The relationship lasted until Barlow’s death fifteen years later, through Murray’s eighteen-month sojourn in Ghana and tumultuous time as a professor at Brandeis. Personal writings rendered in Murray’s voice explain that the devastation occasioned by Barlow’s death prompted Murray to turn her attention to spirituality and enter the Episcopal seminary to become a priest. (She achieved sainthood posthumously.)

            Not surprisingly, West and Cohen make liberal use of archival footage. Of this material, the most effective tools in bringing Murray to the audience are her own words: selections of poetry and prose displayed on the screen and often read by Murray herself. Interspersed with this material are segments from educational settings: Rutgers lectures by African-American scholar Brittney Cooper; clips from a Yale seminar in which students consider Murray’s work. Short segments showing biographer Patricia Bell Scott talking to a group of young people in front of Murray’s family home in Durham underscore her importance for posterity. Speeches and interviews with transgender activists like Chase Strangio from the ACLU seek to contextualize Murray’s transgender identity historically and for our times. The documentary ends with an acknowledgement of the posthumous honors Murray has received, and a final shot of a female African-American North Carolina student reading a selection of Murray’s poetry.

            West and Cohen are to be commended for choosing to spotlight Murray and for the depth and diligence of their research. Moments of pathos occur in the reproduction of the private notes of Murray and Barlow and in interview excerpts when Murray directly addresses the camera. And yet, somehow Pauli Murray never really comes alive in this film. It may be that the filmmakers tried to do too many things, or that 91 minutes just wasn’t enough. That said, even if the film doesn’t quite complete the picture of a highly complex person, My Name Is Pauli Murray is an important beginning.