The Inconvenient True Life and Legacy of Pauli Murray

The Trump administration continues to rewrite history, scrubbing official websites of any mention of transgender, queer and gender nonconforming people and causes. Critics have called its efforts a digital book-burning, reminiscent of the public bonfires staged by the Nazis in the 1930s. The latest target of this growing right-wing cancel culture is Pauli Murray, a pioneering human rights leader whose childhood home in Durham, North Carolina, is a National Historic Landmark.

Journalist David Hunt visited the landmark to learn about Murray’s life and work — and to explore a queer legacy the National Park Service is trying to erase. Listen to Hunt's conversation with historian Angela Thorpe Mason, executive director of the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice.

Pauli Murray, who died in 1985, was a pioneering Black legal scholar whose ideas laid the foundation for Supreme Court decisions overturning segregation and outlawing discrimination based on sex. Murray was also a writer, poet, labor organizer and the first queer saint in the Episcopal Church.

An edited version of this feature aired on This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine.

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David Hunt is an Emmy-winning journalist and documentary producer who has reported on America's culture wars since the 1970s. Explore his blog, Tell Me, David.