My Name Is Pauli Murray Movie Review …about a woman we should have already known.

Pauli Murray is such an outstanding person that I’d like to know what mistake I made in life for having never heard of her. There is no way to sum up this fantastic human being in a 91-minute film, but directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West did a phenomenal job of introducing the subject of their movie with what time they had.

They highlight her intelligence and accomplishments through interviews, letters, and Pauli Murray archive footage and tapes. Everything we see and hear gives us insight into who she was as a person and what she has done for the people of this country. It seems, with good reason, that the directors were conscientious about including that Pauli completed all these things without ever once getting recognition for her achievements. Her life was so remarkable that instead of films, perhaps they should just teach about her in every high school in this country from today on. She most certainly deserves that much. Luckily for the people in her class, Brittney Cooper, professor at Rutgers University, makes sure her students are very aware of who Murray was.

Pauli tells us herself that her field of concentration is in human rights. She had struggled in that field because, at the time, society was “Dominated by the ideas that blacks were inherently inferior to whites and women were inherently inferior to men.” That being the case, she had more troubles as she fit both of those categories. Luckily for all of us, she wasn’t one to hold her tongue about anything. Patricia Bell Scott offers that Pauli had the nerve to confront discrimination when there was significant risk in doing so. Similarly, Ruth Bader Ginsberg said that Pauli said everything first at a time when no one was prepared to listen.

Rosalind Rosenberg tells us that you can’t understand why Pauli Murray was so far ahead of her time without understanding that her sense of in-betweenness made her increasingly critical of boundaries. And that allowed her to bring one of the most critical opinions of the 20th century. That categories of race and gender are essentially arbitrary and not a legal basis for discrimination. When Pauli didn’t like what she saw, she found out how to correct it. If it meant going to school to become an expert in the field, she went. Pauli hated segregation in schools and wrote letters to President Roosevelt about the issue.
She asked him, “You called on Americans to support a liberal philosophy based on Democracy. What does this mean for the Negro American?” Pauli also demanded that he not be a hypocrite. Shortly after that, she became close friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. This started when corresponding with Eleanor resulted in a better outcome. They were close enough that they were on the cover of the magazine EBONY together.

Pauli Murray was an activist, a writer, a lawyer, a priest, and a poet. She was also non-Binary. The film doesn’t shy away from Pauli’s sexuality at all. At one point, we see images of her and a friend named Peg who didn’t like Pauli as she wanted Peg. Sadly, that friendship ended in disappointment. But then, and this will make you happy, we see that Pauli eventually had true love in her life. That love was Renee. We see letters between her and Renee that prove this. They’re pretty adorable, too, I must admit.

To focus on the prolific, perceptive and beautiful soul she had, Cohen and West post several of Pauli’s poems across the screen. One of them is, ‘Hope is a crushed stalk between clenched fingers. Hope is a song in a weary throat.’ Her words had as much meaning as her prose.
The movie opens with a title card that reads some of her words, “I want to see America be what she says she is in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. America, be what you proclaim yourself to be.” This is what will immediately interest you in learning more about her. What these directors do with the rest of the film is what will make you want to know even more. To do that, I might suggest Pauli’s memoirs, “Song in a Weary Throat,” originally published shortly after her death in 1987. Regardless of whether you do that or not, do not miss this critical documentary.

Coming to Amazon Prime on Oct. 1, 2021.

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