Twenty-Two Years of Learning to Do Right

In 1944, Pauli Murray graduated first in her class from Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C. She applied to Harvard Law School for graduate study. Harvard rejected her — not for lack of credentials, but because she was a woman. Murray could have walked away from the fight. She didn't.

For over two decades, she labored steadily — writing legal scholarship, coining the term "Jane Crow" to name the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, and serving on President Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women. Her legal arguments helped ensure that the word "sex" remained in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, extending workplace protections to women across America.

On June 30, 1966, in Washington, D.C., Murray joined Betty Friedan and others to co-found the National Organization for Women. She was fifty-five years old. The movement she helped launch that day stood on more than two decades of patient, persistent work that few had noticed.

Isaiah 1:17 tells believers to "learn to do right; seek justice, defend the oppressed." That word "learn" is no accident. Justice is not a single dramatic gesture — it is a discipline practiced across years, often without recognition. Murray spent twenty-two years between her rejection at Harvard and the founding of NOW, never abandoning the cause. Faithful obedience to God's call rarely follows our timeline, but every season of unseen faithfulness becomes part of the foundation on which lasting change is built.