Pauli Murray
A lawyer who fought against racial and gender discrimination, and the first Black woman ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church.
Pauli Murray (1910–1985) was a figure who seemed to contain several lives within one person. She was a civil rights lawyer as well as a poet, and later in life even walked the path of the priesthood. Born in an age when discrimination against Black people and against women was taken for granted, she was someone who spent her whole life striving to overcome those two layers of barriers at once.
The reverse of the coin depicts a portrait of Reverend Murray set within the word “HOPE.” Also inscribed is a line taken from her poem “Dark Testament”: “A song in a weary throat.” This composition, in which the word hope embraces her face, directly conveys her life, in which she never lost her song even amid a hard reality.
As a lawyer, Murray logically demonstrated why discrimination based on race and sex was unjust, and her ideas left a deep influence on later American human rights law and court cases. In her later years she became a priest of the Episcopal Church, the first Black woman to rise to that position. In effect, she moved from the courtroom where she fought against discrimination to the pulpit that comforts the human heart.
The barriers she had to overcome were not just one. Because of the color of her skin, and because she was a woman, she had to turn back at the door many times, but Murray transformed that experience not into resentment but into a force toward a broader justice. She became a bridge connecting “the discrimination experienced by one person” to “change for everyone.”
When you quietly look into the word “HOPE” on the coin, you seem to hear the voice of a person who did not stop singing even when weary. Pauli Murray’s quarter quietly tells of how hope can become a power that changes the world.