Mark Reviews Movies: MY NAME IS PAULI MURRAY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 16, 2021

Sometimes, the mere existence of a person is enough to carry a documentary. That's doubly the case with My Name Is Pauli Murray, which traces the life and accomplishments of the eponymous activist, lawyer, writer, professor, priest, and, likely, many other roles and titles. Murray might have been one the most influential thinkers—if not the most influential—in terms of how the arguments for and the law of civil rights evolved from the 1940s and into today's era.

That makes Murray a worthy subject, but then there's the fact of her relative anonymity at the time of these developments. The result is that directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West's film might be the first time most people even learn of Murray's existence.

The filmmakers lean into this almost assured inevitability. Murray's life unfolds, through a series of interviews and recordings and archival footage and documents, in a chronological manner. One could argue that this is a pretty straightforward and, hence, dry approach to someone who's very life was about coming up with ideas that would speak, not only of her own experience and the time in which she lived, but also to generations to come.

That's the balance here, and while Cohen and West don't make any novel narrative leaps in communicating just how important Murray was to questions and decisions of civil rights law, they have assembled a pretty solid collection of experts to help put the subject's life and arguments into a forward-thinking context. It's not essential to understanding the inherent complexity of Murray as an individual, but that framework does help to do justice to the legacy of the film's subject.

The notion that Murray was ahead of her time begins almost from the start. While she was born in Baltimore in 1910, she grew up, after the deaths of her parents at a young age, in Durham, North Carolina. The year of her birth, Murray pointedly notes in a recorded reading of the manuscript of her autobiography, is the same in which a widely accepted scholarly paper asserted a difference between the races, which must be upheld throughout society Segregation was the norm there and throughout the Southern United States, obviously, as she grew up. It was so perniciously effective, though, that she only noticed the differences in schools for Black children when she moved to New York City.

From there, the first of several major events in her life, which would serve as an earlier reflection of pivotal historical events in the future, unfolded. Fifteen years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger, Murray and a friend, having lived in a city where official segregation didn't exist, did the same in Virginia. The only reason, ironically, that we learn of that in the history books is that Murray saw it as an opportunity to fight segregation in the courts, before that would become one of the primary approaches of the civil rights movement. The judge simply threw out the violation of segregation law, meaning her legal battle ended before it could even start.

That, in a way, would continue to define Murray's years-early and behind-the-scenes accomplishments, which have now started to make their way into the world of non-fiction books and academia. We meet Murray's biographers, who explain the wealth of writings and documents that Murray left for study upon her death in 1985, and professors, who have dedicated lectures to Murray's early fights and legal theories in the timeline of the civil rights movement, and current lawyers and/or activists, who have found inspiration in Murray's understanding of discrimination and the ways to tackle it in the courts and in everyday life.

A paper at Howard University's law school would, within a decade, become the foundation for Thurgood Marshall and his team's Supreme Court argument, which would put an end to the "separate but equal" doctrine. Her assertion that the 14th Amendment could be used to make a legal argument against sex discrimination would become a framework for those actual battles by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was interviewed for the film before her death. Cohen and West don't go deep into these arguments and theories that would be the legal norm, but they do explain them without distracting from the flow of Murray's biography.

The subject continually fascinates, and that's true even for some of these experts. Private letters and unpublished writings, preserved in Murray's personal archive, reveal matters of her sexuality and gender identity, and there's a continuing controversy about how much of that should figure into accounts of Murray's life.

The filmmakers acknowledge the biographical/historical debate, but the answer seems almost blatantly obvious. If Murray's experiences and struggles as a Black woman defined so many of her fights and so much of why she has inspired, why should anyone limit the full experience of who Murray was, for what she couldn't fight (on account of prejudices society wasn't addressing during her life), and whom else she could inspire now and in the future?

My Name Is Pauli Murray may not do anything formally or narratively innovative (and may run out of intellectual motivation as Murray's life settles into a routine and toward the spiritual side), but it doesn't need to. The filmmakers know that there's little that's more rewarding in a documentary than the ability to meet and learn from a uniquely great person—especially for, what will seem like to many, the very first time.

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