“A unifying principle:” Pauli Murray, biography, and the quest for identity

Pauli Murray (1910 - 1985) was involved in many of the social struggles that defined U.S. domestic history during the twentieth century and achieved many pioneering “firsts.” As an African American female of non-heteronormative gender identity and sexuality, who struggled for upward social mobility, she embodied many of the central divisions over race, class, gender, and sexuality that characterized the zeitgeist of her time and place. Her struggle to overcome institutional and cultural barriers to success can be seen through the lens of identity politics. Murray struggled to reconcile the many divergent identities she embodied into a cohesive whole that reaffirmed the heteronormative values and culture of her society; at the same time that she recognized the impossibility of doing so and sought to challenge the social hierarchies of her society. This thesis explores that struggle via an excavation and analysis of her rich personal archive. Murray’s published life writing testifies to her extraordinary public achievements, which scholars have begun to acknowledge. What remains to be done, however, is to bring together evidence from her archives and published memoirs to evaluate Murray’s attempts to fashion a unified sense of self. Murray occupied spaces on the margins of already marginalized social groups and, consequently, continually sought a unifying thread to fashion a cohesive personal identity. Her life opens up multiple conversations about what it means to sit outside of social constructions surrounding race, class, gender, sexuality, and mental health; indeed, it forces a consideration of what it is to be American and, more fundamentally, human. Examining Murray’s identity performances, rather than simply commemorating her public achievements, also facilitates a critique of traditional biographical approaches, which often distort lived experience by having a commemorative focus, purporting to uncover a ‘true self,’ and selectively imposing a purpose on a life.