![]() ![]() ![]() Yet time and time again, Pauli was “the first” – the first African American, the first woman, the first African American woman – and she had to face all that went with that. In her article about Pauli for The New Yorker, “ The Many Lives of Pauli Murray,” Kathryn Schulz sums up her life by saying that it was Pauli’s fate “to be both ahead of the time and behind the scenes.” Yet for years Pauli was relatively unknown. Pauli was a problem child for the American status quo. ![]() Pauli also wrote a paper that Ruth Bader Ginsberg would later use to develop her argument that the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment should be recognized as extending to women, too. ![]() Although her classmates and teachers laughed at her, Thurgood Marshall is known to have made use of that paper when he was preparing for Brown v. She proposed instead that you could attack the “separate” part, and in her final paper she laid out the arguments to do so. Ferguson was not to attack the “equal” part, which had been the strategy for roughly the previous 50 years. While a law school student – the only woman in her school – Pauli suggested that the way to overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine enshrined in Plessy v. ![]()
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