Class News

Dan Pollack ’64 recommends new movie about Pauli Murray

February 28, 2022

Dan Pollack watched a new documentary movie on Amazon Prime about Pauli Murray, for whom one of the new residential collages at Yale is named. Dan emailed: “I watched this and it’s fascinating. Pauli Murray was a true pioneer. Later, Tony Lavely saw it screened on a Yale Alumni Academy Zoom event, hosted by Lauren Summers, Senior Director of Lifelong Learning and Travel for the YAA.”

Dan continued: “My Name is Pauli Murray is a remarkable documentary of one of the least known people in the civil-rights and gender-rights movements in the 20th century. Pauli was ahead of those movements with almost every step. Pauli was a graduate of Yale Law School.”

The film is streamed from Amazon Prime. If you have a subscription, click here to watch it.

In the following 31-minute video, Professor Tina Lu, Inaugural Head of Pauli Murray College, and Jongnic Bontemps, who created the music for the documentary, discuss what went into its making.

The Reverend Dr. Pauli Murray was a legal strategist whose thinking influenced Thurgood Marshall’s arguments in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case; whose work Ruth Bader Ginsberg relied upon when arguing a Supreme Court case against gender discrimination in 1971; and whose advocacy for the inclusion of the word “sex” in the 1964 Civil Rights bill would define its interpretation as protecting women’s rights in its time and securing LGBTQ rights in our time.

The first African American to receive a J.S.D. degree from Yale Law School, Murray has been called a “one-woman civil-rights movement” by the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Made a saint by the Episcopal church in 2018, and the namesake of Pauli Murray College at Yale in 2017, Murray's vision for a better society lives on in an extraordinary legacy for generations to come.

Before Pauli Murray College opened in 2016, Butch Hetherington and his son, Boomer Hetherington ’06, underwrote the only basketball court that exists in a Yale residential college.

Donyelle McCray at Yale Divinity School is a scholar currently researching Pauli Murray’s life, work, and education. You can learn more about Dr. McCray here.