“Murray’s journey of racial and gender self-definition through mobility, travel, and transmasculine jouissance was intrinsic to their creativity and self-expression.”

Pauli Murray (1910–1985) was an African American gender-nonconforming feminist, civil rights activist, legal scholar, and teacher, and, later in life, an Episcopalian priest. Raised largely in Durham, North Carolina, by their maternal aunts, Murray was the author of a wide range of written works, from the 1951 legal treatise criticizing segregation, States’ Laws on Race and Color, to their autobiography and family history Proud Shoes (1956), to Dark Testament and Other Poems (1970), a collection of three decades of previously published and unpublished poetry. With a compendium of public and private writing, family and personal photographs, newspaper clippings, political memos and publications, and other ephemera preserved in their archive, Murray left contemporary scholars much to work with.