A Black woman raised in the South, Pauli Murray experienced, and challenged, multiple forms of discrimination from an early age.

As a child in North Carolina, she walked rather than ride on racially segregated street cars. As a law student at Howard University, she answered a professor's question about why a woman would go to law school by graduating at the top of the class. And as a newlywed who did not feel the expected intimacy with her husband, she began pressing the medical community to investigate what it today recognizes as gender dysmorphia.

A pivotal figure in the NAACP's legal strategies to end racially segregated schools, Murray also coauthored a law review article titled "Jane Crow and the Law" which provided the basis for decades of ground-breaking cases on sex discriminatory policies in social security benefits, military service, employment, and more.

Learn more about Pauli Murray.