The Woman Who Refused to Choose

In June 1966, Pauli Murray sat among delegates at the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women in Washington, D.C., frustrated by decades of being told to fight one injustice at a time. As a Black woman and legal scholar — the first African American woman to earn a Doctor of Juridical Science from Yale Law School — Murray had challenged racial segregation since the 1940s. She had also coined the term "Jane Crow" to name what few would acknowledge: that Black women faced a double wall of discrimination, for their race and their sex.

When it became clear the government commissions would not press for enforcement of women's rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, Murray joined Betty Friedan and other delegates to co-found the National Organization for Women. That October, NOW held its organizing conference in Washington, with Murray helping shape its founding statement of purpose — a declaration that no American should face discrimination on the basis of sex.

Murray refused to accept a world where you could only dismantle one wall at a time. She saw what the apostle Paul proclaimed to the Galatians centuries earlier: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). Paul did not rank these divisions or suggest we address them in sequence. The Gospel dismantles every wall at once — because in Christ, the dignity of every person is whole and indivisible. When your church fights for justice, fight for all of it. God never intended liberation to come in installments.