Pauli Murray's "Past Associations"

In January 2024, the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray had her/their visage minted to the back of a US quarter. This act is only the latest, high-profile piece of memory work around Murray, once a little-known civil and women’s rights lawyer, activist, and priest. Much of the discourse surrounding this upswell of memory is suffused with future-oriented, colonial language that frames Murray as a “trailblazer” and “pioneer” who was “ahead of her/their time.” The author contends this framing conceals as much as it reveals. Specifically, it obscures how crucial the past was to Murray and her/their activism. In conversation with Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman, and Anne Karpf, the author contests this concealing rhetoric by analyzing the key role history and memory played in Murray’s legal and religious activism and in her/their survival in a white supremacist, heteronormative society as revealed in her/their family memoir _Proud Shoes_.