The first Black woman to be ordained in the Episcopal Church, who was also a trailblazing lawyer, civil rights activist and writer, will be
Pauli Murray, the first Black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest, will be one of five women featured on the U.S. quarter in 2024.
Religion News Service
"But many scholars now recognize that though richly deserving of the honor, Murray, who died in 1985, was also gender-nonconforming and may be the first such person to appear on a U.S. coin.
Murray sometimes presented as a woman and sometimes as a man.
Feeling trapped in a woman’s body, Murray begged doctors to prescribe hormone therapy.
An Internal Family Systems (IFS)–inspired digitalfoot project
Curated by: Latasha Pennant | Morgan State University, Urban Educational and Leadership Doctoral Program
Focus: Integration, ancestral attunement, and closure — honoring Pauli’s internal system as a blueprint for collective healing across time, lineage, and community.
Murray, P. (2018). Song in a weary throat: Memoir of an American pilgrimage (V. Schomburg & P. Ware, Eds.). W. W. Norton & Company.
Discharge Summary
Pauli’s story is not one of pathology but of persistence — a sacred mapping of how brilliance and pain can coexist in the same body. Across these sessions, she moved from fragmentation to flow, from vigilance to belonging. Her parts — the Child, the Watcher, the Scholar, the Activist — each found their place within a larger harmony.
As a therapist and descendant of this same lineage, I felt her story move through me — in breath, in body, in remembering. There are parts of me that resonate deeply with her story and her honoring of lineage. Like Pauli, I, too, have traced legacy origins and family names that have stood at the scene for generations — helpers, motivators, encouragers, and healers. They, too, have their rightful place within me. And as I extend myself in each of these roles, I am reminded to do so with balance, awareness, and grace.
Pauli’s life was a testament to integration — of intellect and faith, activism and rest, mind and soul. Her journey teaches that healing is not linear; it is energetic, ancestral, and communal. It reaches backward to soothe those who came before us and forward to sustain those who will follow.
As this therapeutic pilgrimage closes, I imagine her walking with a steady rhythm, unhurried, finally at peace. The work continues, but the striving has ceased.
Thank you, Ancestor Pauli, for joining me in this sacred space — for imparting ancestral wisdom through attunement that transcends time and place. Thank you to the universe for its generosity, for allowing sacred movement to flow freely, unrestricted by boundaries.
To the descendants of this lineage: walk lightly, and listen closely for the whispers of the ancestors. They speak in many forms — through stillness, through story, through the quiet knowing that healing, too, is a form of remembrance.
May her story — and ours — remind us that healing is not about arrival but remembrance. We heal in community, across time, through the whisper of every ancestor who reminds us: we are already whole.
🌿 Pauli Murray: Major Accomplishments and Firsts
Ancestral brilliance. Sacred defiance. Healing through action.
⚖️ Trailblazing Legal and Academic Achievements
• First Black person to earn a Doctor of Juridical Science (J.S.D.) from Yale Law School (1965).
• Only woman in her Howard University Law School graduating class (1944); graduated first in her class.
• Coined the term “Jane Crow” to describe the intersection of racism and sexism.
• Her Howard thesis later informed the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
• Served on President John F. Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women (1961).
✊🏾 Civil Rights and Women’s Rights Leadership
• Co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966.
• Authored States’ Laws on Race and Color (1951) — called the “bible of the civil rights movement.”
• A visionary voice for intersectional justice long before the term existed.
⛪ Religious and Spiritual Milestones
• First Black woman ordained as an Episcopal priest (1977).
• Integrated faith and activism as twin pathways toward liberation and healing.
📚 Cultural and Literary Contributions
• Proud Shoes (1956) — a family memoir revealing the contradictions of American race relations.
• Dark Testament and Other Poems (1970) — a spiritual and political lament turned song of hope.
• Song in a Weary Throat (1987) — her autobiographical testament to justice, faith, and becoming.
🏛️ Legacy and Recognition
• Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice — 906 Carroll St., Durham, NC 27701 — her childhood home and a National Historic Landmark.
• Honored as a Saint in the Episcopal Church (Feast Day July 1).
• Celebrated by the Smithsonian, Yale, and Duke University for her trailblazing legacy.
💫 Pauli’s Words to Remember
“When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me,
I shall draw a larger circle to include them.”
— Pauli Murray
Post 8: Session 6 – The Integration of Faith: A Home Within Herself
An Internal Family Systems (IFS)–inspired digitalfoot project
Curated by: Latasha Pennant | Morgan State University, Urban Educational and Leadership Doctoral Program
Focus: Spiritual integration and Self-led healing through faith, intellect, and purpose
Murray, P. (2018). Song in a weary throat: Memoir of an American pilgrimage (V. Schomburg & P. Ware, Eds.). W. W. Norton & Company.
Client: Pauli Murray
Date of Birth: November 20, 1910
Date of Death: July 1, 1985
Session Summary
In this session, Pauli explores the culmination of her internal journey — the merging of faith and intellect as pathways toward healing and wholeness.
Faith, like education, was woven into her lineage. She came from a family of believers and educators: teachers, nurses, and community leaders who saw no saw wisdom and worship as kin, not opposites. From childhood, Pauli absorbed the cadence of Scripture alongside the rhythm of study. She remembered reading the Bible aloud to her grandfather and watching Aunt Pauline embody devotion through daily prayer, song, and moral teaching.
For much of her life, faith lived quietly in the background — a hum she could always return to. But as years of activism and striving took their toll, faith emerged as more than ritual; it became refuge. Pauli began to understand that her lifelong pursuit of justice was not only an intellectual or moral endeavor, but a spiritual calling — a sacred act of restoration.
In therapy, she reflected on how her Scholar and Activist parts had worked tirelessly, each believing it alone had to hold the world together. Through Self-led awareness, she began to invite both to rest — to trust the quiet, steady Self within her to guide the system with grace.
Her ordination in the Episcopal Church became the outward expression of an inward transformation. It was not an escape from her struggles but an integration of them — intellect meeting spirit, work meeting worship, the advocate becoming the healer. Ministry, for Pauli, was not a departure from her life’s mission; it was a return to it, through the door of peace.
Therapist Notes
As I read this chapter of Pauli’s journey, I felt a quiet settling — as though her body, long braced for battle, had finally found a rhythm of rest. The same voice that once fought through the language of law now spoke through the cadence of liturgy. Her intellect and her spirit no longer competed; they communed.
Pauli’s life became both testimony and teaching — a living reconciliation between the mind that sought justice and the soul that sought peace. At Howard University, she broke barriers as the only woman in her law school class and boldly challenged the sexism she encountered, coining the term “Jane Crow” to name the dual oppression of race and gender. She later became the first Black person to earn a Doctor of Juridical Science (J.S.D.) from Yale Law School — a distinction that marked not only academic mastery but also the transmutation of exclusion into empowerment.
Her ordination as the first Black woman priest in the Episcopal Church crowned this evolution — the scholar becoming the healer, the activist becoming the minister. Each “first” was not merely a milestone but a spiritual act of restoration, a mending of divides that history had imposed between intellect and faith, struggle and grace.
As I reflected, I felt warmth for the parts of her that had long carried vigilance, finally softening into trust. I imagined her at the altar, grounded and luminous, her ancestors at her back, her own voice echoing through their prayers. The striving quieted. The circle closed.
What once burned as fire in her bones now glowed as steady light in her spirit — sacred, integrated, and whole.
Client: Pauli Murray
Date of Birth: November 20, 1910
Date of Death: July 1, 1985
Session Summary
In this session, Pauli explores how her inner fire — once a response to danger — became the very force that fueled her purpose. What began as the body’s attempt to survive fear evolved into a lifelong devotion to justice.
After years of living in vigilance, Pauli learned to outwork her pain. Knowledge became her armor; advocacy, her language of release. From the classroom to the courtroom, she transformed survival into service. The same energy that once kept her awake in childhood — scanning for threat — now kept her awake in pursuit of equity.
Through reflection, the client began to recognize how this Firefighter part carried layers of inherited energy: her grandmother’s fear, her father’s restless intellect, her mother’s quiet endurance, and Aunt Pauline’s steadfast vigilance and service to community. Each of these ancestral imprints found expression in her drive to achieve, to uplift, to repair.
Yet even as that fire propelled her forward — through law, civil rights, and ministry — it left her weary. She spoke of cycles of intensity and exhaustion, moments of brilliance followed by collapse. What she once called “mood swings,” the therapist reframed as the nervous system’s rhythm — parts moving between hyperactivation and depletion, the body’s plea for rest after years of relentless doing.
Together, they explored somatic grounding as a way to soothe the body that had learned to equate motion with safety. Through breath and awareness, Pauli began to meet her fire not with suppression, but with compassion — to see that rest, too, could be a radical act of faith.
By session’s end, Pauli expressed gratitude for understanding that her purpose was never born of pathology but of transformation. “It wasn’t just that I fought,” she said. “It’s that I refused to forget what needed healing.”
Therapist Notes
As Pauli began to reconstruct her family’s story, she recognized the legacy she carried — a lineage of intellect, endurance, and service. The pursuit of scholarship was not merely personal ambition; it was an act of continuity, a way to honor those who came before her by transforming their struggle into purpose. She used learning as a sacred act — to affirm the humanity of others and to challenge systems that suggested otherwise.
Her activism became a continuation of her family’s unfinished prayers — her grandmother’s vigilance, her father’s restless brilliance, her mother’s compassion, and Aunt Pauline’s community-centered devotion all found renewed life through her. What she inherited, she transmuted into collective freedom.
Pauli once said, "When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them."
An Internal Family Systems (IFS)–inspired digitalfoot project
Curated by: Latasha Pennant | Morgan State University, Urban Educational and Leadership Doctoral Program
Focus: Intergenerational trauma, racialized fear, and embodied inheritance
Murray, P. (2018). Song in a weary throat: Memoir of an American pilgrimage (V. Schomburg & P. Ware, Eds.). W. W. Norton & Company.
Client: Pauli Murray
Date of Birth: November 20, 1910
Date of Death: July 1, 1985
Session Transcript
Therapist: Tell me about the time you returned to North Carolina after your grandfather’s death.
Client: “I remember being at the train station. A group of white men surrounded me, staring, trying to decide what I was. I froze. My body wouldn’t move or speak. Then Aunt Pauline came—her voice cut through the noise. She pulled me close, and the men stepped back. I remember her hand on my shoulder. That’s how I knew I was safe.”
Session Summary
This session explores the transmission of fear, safety, and survival across generations.
Pauli recalled traveling back to North Carolina after her grandfather’s death — a trip marked by a frightening encounter at the train station where several white men surrounded her, questioning her racial identity. The client described being “frozen,” unable to move or speak until Aunt Pauline intervened, grounding her in protection and belonging. This became the body’s template for both terror and safety — fear held in the muscles, comfort found in touch.
Aunt Pauline consistently emerges in Pauli’s story as her secure base — a nurturer, teacher, and emotional anchor who offered wisdom and structure amid chaos. But following her grandfather’s death, the household atmosphere changed. Her grandmother’s mental health declined, marked by vivid hallucinations that the Ku Klux Klan was breaking into the house. At night, she would leap from sleep, dragging a shotgun across the floor, and barricade the doors in terror.
Pauli described lying awake, her body tightening at every sound. Over time, her grandmother’s terror became her own. She grew afraid of the dark, unable to sleep, haunted by inherited fear that “the Klan was coming.” Through somatic exploration, the therapist and client identified how hypervigilance became wired into her nervous system — how her body learned to anticipate danger even in silence.
During this same period, the client recalled moments of refuge across the street, in the home of two school-age girls who, like her, were orphans. Their brother worked during the day, leaving the three girls to care for one another. In that small home, Pauli felt safe — enveloped in quiet companionship and understanding. The shared loss between them created a wordless bond; they did not need to explain their fear or grief. The therapist reflected that this was likely Pauli’s first embodied experience of communal safety — a stark contrast to the nightly terror she was running from.
This session revealed how intergenerational trauma and racialized fear were carried and expressed through the body — yet also how connection and nurturing, particularly among women, became reparative forces in Pauli’s life. Aunt Pauline’s steadiness, the companionship of the orphaned girls, and Pauli’s own capacity for empathy all became part of her internal architecture of survival and love.
Therapist Notes
As I sat with this memory, I felt the tension move through my own body — a heaviness in the chest, a tightening in the jaw. This was not just Pauli’s fear; it was ancestral, the sound of generations bracing for footsteps that might never come.
I imagined the scene — the rifle scraping, the silence after her grandmother’s screams. I sent warmth to the small part of her who stayed awake through the night — the watchful one whose body would not let her sleep. And to the child who found safety in the company of other girls, I sent gratitude. She found rest and connection, and that connection extended into safety, where something new was able to emerge. Their shared play and laughter became medicine — soothing their nervous systems, grounding them in the present.
For a moment, I, too, felt joy as I imagined their giggles breaking through the weight of fear, ushering them into a small sanctuary of Black girl joy, magic, and sisterhood — a space where comfort did not require words and healing could happen quietly.
In their laughter, the body remembers that joy, too, is resistance.
Post 5 – Session 3: The Scholar Who Could Not Rest
An Internal Family Systems (IFS)–inspired digitalfoot project
Curated by: Latasha Pennant | Morgan State University, Urban Educational and Leadership Doctoral Program
Focus: The development of intellectual excellence as protection; embodied responses to early humiliation and pain
Murray, P. (2018). Song in a weary throat: Memoir of an American pilgrimage (V. Schomburg & P. Ware, Eds.). W. W. Norton & Company.
Client: Pauli Murray
Date of Birth: November 20, 1910
Date of Death: July 1, 1985
Session Transcript
Therapist: You’ve described being in Aunt Pauline’s class — learning beside older children and excelling quickly. What did that part of you, the learner, feel like?
Client: “I loved being there. I took in everything the older children were learning. Aunt Pauline said I was her experiment — if I could learn her methods, so could the adults she taught at night.”
Therapist: Tell me about school. You mentioned that, even though you loved learning, it wasn’t always safe.
Client: “No, it wasn’t. I remember one teacher who seemed to target the light-skinned girls. There were three of us. I don’t know why she disliked us, but I remember the day she punished me in front of everyone. She struck me. It hurt, but I refused to cry. I wouldn’t give her that satisfaction. Something inside me locked down that day.”
Session Summary
In this session, Pauli reflects on the emergence of her Scholar part — a Manager that used intellect, control, and endurance as shields against pain.
She recalled her early academic acceleration under the guidance of Aunt Pauline, who taught both children and adults in their Durham community. Pauli described being fascinated by the learning process itself, taking in advanced lessons intended for older students. Her aptitude made her a source of pride in the classroom, and Aunt Pauline often referred to her as her “model pupil.”
However, the classroom was not always a safe space. The client described a vivid memory of being punished by a teacher who appeared to single out light-skinned students. She was one of three such girls. Pauli recalled being struck in front of the class and refusing to cry — “something in me refused to break.”
Through body-based inquiry, the therapist helped the client explore what it required — physically, emotionally, and psychologically — to endure that moment. Pauli identified the numbing and tightening sensations that allowed her to withstand physical pain without emotional collapse. This was recognized as a protective dissociative response — the body’s way of ensuring survival when escape or expression is unsafe.
Over time, this part of her internal system grew stronger. It became the Manager who could tolerate extraordinary mental, emotional, and physical pain — but at a cost. The therapist noted that the body cannot sustain constant rigidity without collapse; when endurance reaches its threshold, another part emerges with dorsal energy — a slowing, shutting-down state that may later resemble mood swings or withdrawal.
This session illuminated how Pauli’s parts began organizing around performance and protection: one part holding structure and excellence, another holding exhaustion and despair. Together, they created a survival rhythm that shaped both her genius and her internal conflict.
Therapist Notes
As I read Pauli’s recollection of that moment — standing before her peers, struck yet refusing to cry — I could feel the stillness move through my own body. Her refusal wasn’t defiance alone; it was a somatic boundary, a declaration that her spirit would not be broken, even if her body trembled.
I imagined the tightening in her chest, the numbing of her limbs, the way her gaze might have fixed forward to steady herself. This was the birth of her Scholar — the one who would endure by knowing, achieving, and controlling what life could not offer freely: safety.
With gentle presence, I sent warmth to that young part — not to undo her strength, but to remind her that strength can soften. She no longer has to hold herself together alone.
The child who refused to cry became the woman who refused to stop learning — both acts of survival, both born from the same quiet fire.
Client: Pauli Murray
Date of Birth: November 20, 1910
Date of Death: July 1, 1985
Therapist: When you float back to early memories about your parents, what comes to your awareness?
Client: My first memory is of standing on the floor of our kitchen in Baltimore when I was around three, entangled in my mother's billowing white skirt to which I clung as she went about her work. I cannot remember her face or her voice—only her movements and the warm fragrance of her body. My only memory of my father when he was alive is a brief visit to him in the hospital when I was eight. I never used the familiar words “Mama” and “Papa” growing up; I always spoke of my parents as “my mother” and “my father.”
Session Summary
In this session, Pauli revisits the earliest fractures in her sense of safety and belonging. Her story begins in separation — a rupture that shaped her internal world and reverberated throughout her life.
The client shared that most of what she knew about her parents came from photographs, letters, and the recollections of others. These objects became her fixed points of identity — the only tangible evidence of belonging she could hold.
Through imagery work, the client connected with her younger self — the small child standing in the kitchen, the little girl later carried to North Carolina to live with Aunt Pauline as her mother’s health failed. She recalled sensations of fear and confusion amid the chaos of separation, and the silence that followed.
When invited to witness her parents through her adult eyes, Pauli expressed empathy for their struggles. She noted that her father, William H. Murray, was a Baltimore public school teacher and Howard University graduate — a rare achievement for a Black man at the time — and her mother, Agnes Fitzgerald Murray, was a nurse trained at Hampton. The client recognized their resilience as an inheritance that shaped her own pursuit of education and justice.
She also recalled a pivotal moment following her mother’s death when her two aunts, Pauline and Rose, discussed who would care for the children. Aunt Pauline asked her directly, “Who do you want to live with?” Pauli said she burst into tears before answering, choosing to stay with Aunt Pauline. She reflected that it was “the first of many hard choices I would have to make.” The therapist and client discussed how this moment of forced decision-making may have imprinted a lifelong pattern — linking love to sacrifice and safety to loss.
Despite inherited burdens — including violence, loss, and mental illness within the family line — Pauli acknowledged the emergence of inner protectors that allowed her to transmute grief into determination. This marks the first session in which she began to identify both her Exile parts (the fearful, abandoned child) and her Protective parts (the determined scholar and moral advocate).
Therapist Notes
As I read Pauli’s account of choosing to stay with Aunt Pauline while watching her siblings go to another home, I could feel the confusion and heartbreak of that moment. It was too much for a child to hold — a decision no child should ever have to make. What she needed was comfort, not choice.
I also recalled her visit to Crownsville, where she saw her father confined and unwell. I imagine the dissonance of recognizing him as both familiar and unfamiliar — a father she could not reach. Her quiet promise to return for him became an anchor of hope, one later shattered by his violent death. When she touched his hand — the only part of him she recognized — I could almost feel her sending warmth to a body that had no warmth to return.
As I sat with these memories, I sent warmth to her child parts — the little girl who longed to be held, the daughter who witnessed too much. In that offering, I imagined a soft ancestral reunion: Ancestor Pauli and Ancestor Murray, meeting again in tenderness beyond words.
Even when the body could no longer respond, love still reached across the silence.
