In her final law-school paper, Murray had formalized the idea she’d hatched in class that day, arguing that segregation violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. Plessy was overturned in a decade-and, when it was, Robinson owed her a lot more than ten dollars. Then, with the whole class as her witness, she made a bet with her professor, a man named Spottswood Robinson: ten bucks said Plessy would be overturned within twenty-five years. Undeterred, Murray told them they were wrong. Her idea was both impractical and reckless, they told her any challenge to Plessy would result in the Supreme Court affirming it instead. Her law-school peers were accustomed to being startled by her-she was the only woman among them and first in the class-but that day they laughed out loud. Fed up with the limited and incremental results, one student in the class proposed a radical alternative: why not challenge the “separate” part instead? Ferguson, lawyers had been chipping away at segregation by questioning the “equal” part of the “separate but equal” doctrine-arguing that, say, a specific black school was not truly equivalent to its white counterpart. It was 1944, and the law students of Howard University were discussing how best to bring an end to Jim Crow. Photograph courtesy Schlesinger Library / Radcliffe Institute / Harvard University
It was Pauli Murray’s fate to be both ahead of her time and behind the scenes.