Of the twenty men and women profiled in The Diversity Principle as the people who developed the idea and drove it forward, I think the most remarkable, and least well-know, is Pauli Murray. Pauli Murray was a queer Black woman of the South, born in 1910, who invented the term “Jane Crow” to describe the exclusion experienced by Black women. She was denied entry to the University of North Carolina because she was Black. She was denied entry to Harvard Law School because she was a woman. She was denied the job of general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission because she was a lesbian. She co-founded two leading civil rights organizations and then left in protest, leaving the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) when they wouldn’t let women participate in “freedom rides” and the National Organization of Women (NOW) when they ignored the plight of Black women and poor women. 

As a civil rights organizer and lawyer, she taught Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. critical lessons about nonviolent civil disobedience; persuaded NAACP general counsel (and later Supreme Court Justice) Thurgood Marshall to change his arguments in the desegregation cases to include an argument about the value of diversity for Black children; wrote the first law review article arguing that the U.S. Constitution prohibits sex discrimination; intervened with Lady Bird Johnson to save the sex discrimination section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; persuaded the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to hire Ruth Bader Ginsberg (also later a Supreme Court Justice), and worked with her on the legal arguments that paved the way to add sex discrimination as a protected right under the Constitution; and at the height of a brilliant (if not well known) career, left the law to attend seminary and become an Episcopal priest. She died in 1985 and was honored as a saint in the Episcopal Church in 2012. Yet compared with the other great civil rights lawyers of her time, she is still mostly excluded.

My hope is that when (if) people read The Diversity Principle they will appreciate how Pauli Murray and the 19 other historical figures from the past 200+ years who have brought us the diversity principle have bestowed on us a great gift, and that we should seek opportunities to enrich our lives, our families, our communities, and our country by embracing diversity in its many forms.