Following her rejection from UNC, Pauli Murray focused her energies in three areas: writing, organizing, and studying the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi. In 1939, she began working on her poetry book, Dark Testament, and a biography of her maternal family, Proud Shoes. Incidentally, her great-grandmother, Cornelia Smith, was the granddaughter and slave of one of the original trustees of UNC. That same year, Murray began working with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Workers Defense League to bring national attention to the plight of Black and white sharecroppers in the South. Her work with these organizations allowed her to test the effectiveness of Gandhi’s theory and method of nonviolent resistance in the South.
On a trip from Virginia to her family’s home in Durham, North Carolina, Murray entered the white section of a Greyhound bus to request more comfortable seating for her and her companion, Adelene McBean. The women were arrested after a verbal altercation with the white bus driver. With support from Eleanor Roosevelt, the NAACP, and several civil rights organizations, Murray and McBean got off with a fine. Although the legal ordeal that ensued did not strike down segregation in public transportation in Virginia, Murray concluded that nonviolent resistance was a “powerful weapon” in the struggle for civil rights and human dignity.
Soon after her release from jail, Murray remained in Virginia to serve as a fundraiser for the Workers Defense League in the case of Odell Waller. Waller, a Black sharecropper, was charged with murdering a white man after a dispute over pay. His defense argued that Waller would not receive a fair trial because juries in Virginia were filled with white men—individuals who could readily pay fees to participate in local politics and the judicial system. Murray again used her connections in the White House to earn support for the case. Her efforts neither saved Odell Waller from execution nor ended the poll tax in Virginia, but the case did serve to bring clarity to her vocational journey.
Pauli Murray was confident that Howard’s law program would equip her with the tools to chip away at Jim Crow in the U.S. What she did not count on was learning about sex discrimination, or what she called, “Jane Crow,” in the program that produced the most talented Black civil rights lawyers in the nation. As the only woman in her class, Murray was frequently ignored in seminar conversations. The all-male faculty did not invite her to their social events. One professor questioned why a woman would want to attend law school. Though humiliated, Murray became motivated to become the top-ranked student in her class. Further, she emerged as a formidable activist who led sit-ins in Washington, D.C. restaurants and other public facilities.