“My Name Is Pauli Murray,” the plainly pedagogical documentary by the filmmakers Betsy West and Julie Cohen, hinges on the audience not knowing who Murray was: an activist, writer, attorney and priest.
The easier to wow us with the onslaught of information, which rightfully situates Murray — a Black, gender nonconforming intellectual who died in 1985 — as a thinker ahead of the times.
As the first African American student to receive a doctorate from Yale Law School, Murray was a civil rights trailblazer, and an early architect of the idea that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment should guarantee not just racial but gender equality.