Early Activism

An excert of Murray's letter to UNC system President Graham

In 1938, Pauli Murray applied to attend graduate school at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She was denied becuase the school was still segregated and only admitted white students. She wrote a letter to UNC System President Frank Porter Graham and argued that the graudate schools for Black students were poorly resourced, preventing them from providing the same quality of education that white schools like UNC offered students. 

Newspaper clipping for Murray's arrest

During a 1940 trip from New York City to North Carolina, Murray was asked to move to the back of the bus. She refused and was arrested in Petersburg, Virginia as a result. This occured fifteen years before Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks' 1955 arrests.