James Baldwin and civil rights activist Jerome Smith outside of the ANTA Theater during the production of Baldwin’s play “Blues for Mister Charlie” in New York City, 1964.
Pauli Murray was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1910. He was assigned female at birth, and felt his gender was only understood by a few people, who, in his own words “accept me pretty much as one of nature’s experiments, a girl who should’ve been a boy, and react to me as if I were a boy”. After discovering the works of pioneering sexologists such as Magnus Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis, Pauli began to consider taking testosterone. Unfortunately, the lack of understanding of trans people by the medical community meant that his efforts to access hormones failed.
Pauli graduated from college in 1933, one of four black students in a class of 232. After being rejected from further study at the University of North Carolina on account of his race, he became involved with the NAACP, and eventually returned to university to study law, graduating top of his class in 1944.
During his time at university Pauli pioneered a new strategy of fighting racial segregation through protesting its unconstitutionality, which would eventually be successfully used in the 1954 landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled the segregation of public schools unconstitutional.
Pauli passed the bar exam in California in 1945 and began working as a lawyer. He focused his work on fighting for civil rights and women’s rights, and wrote on intersectionality, pioneering the concept of “Jane Crow” to explain to dual oppression experienced by African-American people assigned female at birth. He also penned States’ Laws on Race and Color - a foot-thick book referred to as the Bible of civil rights legislators.
1973 Pauli’s partner Renee passed away from a brain tumour. Following this, Pauli, who had always been Episcopalian, began to study to join the priesthood - although people assigned female at birth could not be admitted at the time. He finished his coursework in 1976, and in 1977, when people assigned female at birth were allowed to become Episcopalian priests for the first time. Pauli was ordained, becoming the first black person assigned female at birth to do so.
Pauli passed away in 1985, aged 74. His groundbreaking legal theories and ideas about intersectionality remain as important today as they were over 50 years ago.
On this day, an anti-Soviet peaceful demonstration demanding secession from the Soviet Union was violently dispersed by the Soviet Army using tanks, guns, and chemical gases in Tbilisi, resulting in 21 deaths and hundreds of injuries. Among the dead were 17 women and 4 men, one of which was a 16 year old girl who had been chased down and beaten to death by soldiers. Many of the victims were between the ages of 15 and 31.
Soviet central television blamed the night’s events on the demonstrators, but the violence had been captured on camera and it told a very different story. The following day, Georgian television showed the bodies of those who had been killed violently. The images of corpses made difficult to identify due to their injuries underlined the inexpressible brutality of the Soviet soldiers.
The Supreme Council of the Republic of Georgia would later proclaim Georgian independence from the Soviet Union on
April 9, 1991 — the second anniversary of the tragedy.
