Friday’s @ncdhc headline, from the Carolina Times, describes the arrest of two women on a Greyhound bus in Virginia in 1940: “Jim-Crow Bus Dispute Leads To Girls Arrest.” One of the women arrested was Pauli Murray.
Murray, who had lost a battle to enroll in the University of North Carolina in 1938, was living in New York at the time and was returning home to recover from an illness. She and Adelene McBean were arrested for their refusal to move to the back of the bus when asked by the driver. This was fourteen years before a similar incident in Montgomery, Alabama launched a nationwide movement, and just one of many occasions on which Pauli Murray fought against injustice.
Murray, described in the Carolina Times article as a “honey-tongued legal mind,” was an author, lawyer, activist, and Episcopal priest who grew up in Durham. Her life and work is celebrated today by the Pauli Murray Project at the Duke Human Rights Center.
