Many of Murray's essays, poems, and books including "Negroes Are Fed Up" and “New testament” were considered essential, foundational works of the civil rights movement. Murray co-founded the Congress of Racial Equality and the National Organization for Women in 1966 alongside many noted feminists of the time, and was appointed to President John F. Kennedy's Committee on Civil and Political Rights. 

Her father, a Howard University graduate, taught in the Baltimore public schools.  Both of Murray’s parents died when she was a child.  Her mother suffered from a brain haemorrhage and died in 1914. Her father was the victim of typhoid fever and died in 1923. 

Despite such heartbreaking tragedy, Murray pursued her life goals. In 1933 she graduated from Hunter College in New York City, New York. Despite a stellar academic record, Murray in 1938 was denied admission into the University of  North Carolina Law School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She later enrolled in the Howard University Law School in Washington DC and graduated in 1944. Not long afterwards, Murray sought admission to Harvard University Law School in Cambridge for an advanced law degree but was denied admission because of her gender.  She enrolled at the University of California  at Berkeley where she received a Master of Law degree in 1945. Twenty years later, in 1965, she became the first African American awarded a J.S.D. (a law doctorate) from Yale University in New Haven,  Connecticut.  Her degree was based on her dissertation, “Roots of the Racial Crisis: Prologue to Policy.” 

Murray argued that her experiences encountering and overcoming racial and gender discrimination gave her special insight into the nature of racial and sexual hierarchies in the U.S. and wrote about its various manifestations in America’s legal history.  Murray coined the term “Jane Crow and  Jim Crow” to describe the impact of dual discrimination.  She also joined both the civil rights movement and the feminist movement.  In 1966 Murray was one of the founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW) with feminist icon Betty Friedan.

Murray’s life took an abrupt turn when at the age of 62 she entered a seminary and became in 1977 the first black female priest ordained by the Episcopal Church.  On July 1, 1985, cancer claimed the life of Pauli Murray in Pittsburgh. Her autobiography Song in a Weary Throat: an American Pilgrimage was published posthumously in 1987.

Murray embarrass civil disobedience including sit-ins to desegregate buses and restaurant, decades before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. 

The 1930s labour movement provided some inspiration. She studied protest methods at Brookwood Labor College and participated in widespread automobile industry strikes, where sit-down strikes often featured. She also joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation and its offshoot, the Congress of Racial Equality. Through these activities she met pacifist activists, such as A. J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, and James Farmer.

Sexual orientation and gender identity were often viewed inseparably in the 1930s and 40s, when Murray grappled most with these issues. Falling in love with women felt natural to her, and aside from a very brief marriage, she only pursued relationships with women. But widespread homophobia made embracing the label “homosexual” difficult. It did not help that homosexuality was often considered a mental illness — her father had been confined to an “insane asylum,” so any suggestion that she might be mentally ill heightened concerns that she had inherited insanity.

She always fought for the rights of African American’s, women’s and gay rights in the US and many people looked back on her works during the recent BLM movement of 2020.  

Randolph was a child of hard-working parents who respected learning, and he moved from Crescent City, Florida to Jacksonville, Florida which had a thriving, well-established African American community. He learnt from his father that colour was less important than a person’s character and conduct, and from his mother, he learnt the importance of education and physically defending oneself and their family from harm. Randolph and his brother, James, attended the Cookman Institute in East Jacksonville, the only academic high school in Florida for African Americans. He excelled in literature, drama, and public speaking. After graduation, he worked odd jobs and dedicated his time to singing, acting, and reading. 

 

After reading ‘W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk’, he was convinced he needed to fight for social equality. Being barred by discrimination from all but manual jobs in the South, Randolph moved to New York City in 1911, he continued to work at odd jobs and took social sciences courses at City College.

 

In 1919, he became president of the National Brotherhood of Workers of America which eventually became dissolved. His greatest success came with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), where he became president in 1925. Randolph directed the March on Washington Movement to end employment discrimination in the defence industry, and a national civil disobedience campaign to ban segregation in the armed forces.

 

The nonviolent protest and mass action effort inspired the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Furthermore, he persuaded leaders to pass an order forcing employers to stop discriminating against workers on the basis of race.

 

A. Phillip Randolph became the driving force in ending racial discrimination in government defence factories and desegregating the armed forces. His inspiring actions and involvement later encouraged further movements in the later 1900s, including the Civil Rights Movement- which involved the fight to end social injustice and to gain equal rights under the law in the United States.

Harriet Tubman (aka Araminta Ross) was born in Dorchester County, Maryland, USA in 1822 and died on the 10^th of March 1913. Harriet was enslaved during her life but escaped and helped other slaves to escape as well, she was a “conductor” of the underground Railroad. She also served as a scout, guerrilla soldier ad a nurse for the union army throughout the civil war and was considered the first African woman to serve the military

She didn’t get involved in the movement purposely, but she was more empowered to do thing for herself and to keep her and anyone else from being enslaved as she knew the horrors of enslavement firsthand. 

The most important things she did was when she helped slaves escape, when she was fighting for the union army, her understanding of travel routes in the underground made her very useful, for safehouses and escape routes. She was also a spy who would age herself and wander around the streets under confederate control and learn from enslaved people where the troops were stationed.

These contributions lead her to receiving a $40,000 bounty for her capture or death, with the intel gathered and her knowledge she had gained, she helped with the strategies that where put in place for the Union army to win the civil war. Her herbal remedies and medical knowledge that she used as a nurse also helped solders to return to battle and gain an advantage over the confederate army 

McCauley Parks’s spent her first few years of life on a small farm with her family. Later, the family moved to Montgomery and Rosa went to school there. Rosa became a seamstress and at age of 19, Parks married to a barber- Raymond Parks, they both joined the Montgomery National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), Rosa became the secretary of the association. In the early 1940s, they travelled throughout the state to interview victims of racial discrimination and witnesses of assassinations. 

Rosa Parks helped initiate the Civil Rights Movement in the US when she refused to give her seat up to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was then established and aimed to protest against segregated seating and in general, the segregation of races. The event occurred for a year from 5^th December 1955. Fellow activists including Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as leader of the Boycott. 

On 13^th November 1956, The Montgomery Bus Boycott resulted in the Supreme Court ruling segregation on public buses unconstitutional, which lead to a successful end of the bus boycott on 20^th December 1956. This played a significant role in Civil Rights and equality in transportation in the years later to come. 

- Zoey Tan