Photo credit: UNC. Carolina Digital Library and Archives via WikiCommons.

The 77th General Convention of The Episcopal Church resolved to add The Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline Murray to Holy Women, Holy Men and the Calendar of the Church Year, which now commemorates her life on the day of her death, July 1.

Murray attended Emmanuel in the early 1970s and served on our vestry (1973-75).  In her autobiography (1987) , she credits former Rector Al Kershaw with encouraging her to leave her faculty position at Brandeis University and pursue ordination in The Episcopal Church.  In 1977, at the age of sixty-six, she became The Church’s first black-woman priest.

See also

• Our guide to her legacy
• Timeline entries about her: 1951, 1970, 1973, 1974, 1977, 1985, 1987 & 2015.
• Arthur & Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Papers of Pauli Murray, 1827-1985: A Finding Aid.  Select Biography on the left and Digital Content tab for several interviews and images.
• Denise Oliver Velez’ Pauli Murray:  The Episcopal Saint Who Fought Jim & Jane Crow.
• Duke Today Pauli Murray Named to Episcopal Sainthood
• Stephanie Bastek’s review in The American Scholar of
• Patricia Bell-Scott’s The Firebrand and the First Lady (NY: Knopf, 2016).