Walking in Pauli Murray’s Proud Shoes

Abstract Pauli Murray was a civil rights activist, lawyer, and pioneering feminist who coined the term Jane Crow to describe the discrimination that Black women faced because of their sex. She was also a writer and a poet. Her family history Proud Shoes asserted that the story of an unknown Black family in the South was worthy of consideration and argued that American history was fundamentally skewed because it did not include the contributions of African Americans. As she focused on preserving the legacies of her Black female ancestors as central to that history, she linked African American women’s history and feminist biography. Her insight that race and gender were arbitrary categories, and that all fixed classifications should be treated with profound skepticism, also applied to her own experience with gender non-conformity, which is documented in her extensive archive.