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MURRAY, PAULI 261with Betty Friedan in the fall of 1965. One year later, Friedan, Murray, and othersfounded the National Organization for Women.After completing her studies at Yale, Murray served briefly as vice presidentat Benedict College, a black school in South Carolina, before accepting a teachingposition at Brandeis University. Although she taught at Brandeis for five yearsand achieved a tenured faculty position, she felt increasingly called to the ordainedministry. She had been a member of the Episcopal Church all her life, beginningwith her baptism by the famed black priest George Freeman Bragg* in Baltimore.In the 1960s, she belonged to St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery in New York, butshe felt increasingly troubled by “the submerged position of women” in her denomination.Pursuing her call, she was eventually accepted as a candidate forordination in the diocese of Massachusetts, and leaving her position at Brandeis,she entered General Theological Seminary in 1973. Murray graduated in 1976, afew months before the General Convention of the Episcopal Church officiallyapproved the right of women to be ordained to the priesthood. She was ordaineda deacon in June 1976, and on January 8, 1977, she was ordained a priest in theWashington National Cathedral. She was, therefore, not only one of the firstwomen priests of the Episcopal Church but also the first African American womanto be ordained in that denomination.Murray served in parishes in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore between 1977and 1985. Although her health was poor, she continued to write until her deathin 1985. Her autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat, was published posthumouslyin 1987 and reissued two years later under the title Pauli Murray: The Autobiographyof a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet.BibliographyA. Papers at the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College; “Negroes Are Fed Up,” CommonSense, August 1943, 274–76; “An American Credo,” Common Ground, winter1945, 22–24; States’ Laws on Race and Color (1951; reprint, Athens, Ga., 1997);Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (1956; reprint, New York, 1978);The Constitution and Government of Ghana (London, 1961); Human Rights U.S.A.(Cincinnati, 1967); Dark Testament and Other Poems (Norwalk, Conn., 1970);Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest,and Poet (1987; reprint, Knoxville, Tenn., 1989).B. ANB 16, 167–68; EAAR, 517–20; EDC, 347; FD, 272–79; Harriet Jackson Scarupa,“The Extraordinary Faith of Pauli Murray,” Essence, December 1977, 91, 107–10;Michelle Burgen, “Lifestyle: Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray,” Ebony, September 1979, 107–12; Casey Miller and Kate Swift, “Pauli Murray,” Ms., March 1980, 60–64.