The Unsung Hero of the 14th Amendment
Pauli Murray is the most important person you have probably never heard of. Living at the intersection of Black Civil Rights, Women’s Civil Rights, and LGBTQ Civil Rights, Murray’s scholarly writings on the finer points of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution were driven by their own identification as a “Non-Binary” person before there was a word for it. Their work became, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, “The Bible of Civil Rights” litigation. From Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed racial segregation for all U.S. public schools, to Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry – and pretty much everything in between AND thereafter – virtually every Supreme Court case involving the application of the Equal Protection Clause was influenced, in some way, by Pauli Murray.