The Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline Murray fiercely challenged social, political, and religious powers in her quest for equality for people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community. Her legacy continues to speak to us in healing our broken world today.

When civil-rights and women’s-rights leader Pauli Murray made Emmanuel Church her spiritual home, she extended our long tradition of social action in her own groundbreaking way. Having discerned her priestly vocation at Emmanuel, she would become the first African American woman priest in the Episcopal Church. Our rector Pamela Werntz declares that Murray’s influence is

hidden in plain sight throughout this nation. We at Emmanuel are in a special way heirs of her legacy gifts of subverting dominant paradigms in the law, social justice, poetry, and the Episcopal Church. I think the more you know Pauli Murray the more you will love her; and the more you know Emmanuel Church, Boston, the more you’ll understand why Murray called this her spiritual home.

In addition to Pauli Murray 101 and our pages about the roles she played (linked on the right), see Wikipedia‘s outline of her life and Chronology of the Life of Pauli Murray (1910-1985) by the blog The Power of Language: Philosophy and Society.