Proud of Them

I've been thinking about this fact that this is Pride month. As a society, we are being asked to “celebrate” Pride 2026 in a context where LGBTQIA+ people—and those who stand with them—are watching their rights erode in real time. Coded homophobia has become overt, and "hysteria-over-data" attacks on trans lives are too commonplace. In corporate America, so many so-called inclusion commitments by institutions who used to call themselves equity leaders just dissolve before our very eyes. I'm not feeling excited about dancing under a shower of rainbow confetti, to be honest.

It's hideous. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has been weakened. Trans children have been turned into political targets. “Diversity” has become negotiable. "Gay" has emerged as the preferred slur among many segments of society, which is horrifying and stupid.

So more than symbolic Pride, I have my mind on refusal. As usual, the refusal I'm thinking about is refusal to be erased. If the opposite of erasure is visibility, June 2026 is an excellent month to consider who we choose to support, protect, and uplift—especially as their agency and rights are being so overtly contested.

And therefore, this issue of #SistoryLessons honors three Foremothers (one of whom might today be understood as a trans man) who remind us that identity itself is only part of the story. The celebration is about how we wield our power, our gifts, and our voice—always up, towards freedom. Please meet three of amazing forces: the great Pauli Murray and Lorraine Hansberry, departed Brave Sis icons from my book, and Chérrie Moraga, who is still living and whose 1970s anthology is still very timely and relevant today.

Gender and sexual identity are not the full expression of a human being. And these three Foremothers—a Black nonbinary legal scholar whose 1944 law school paper supplied the intellectual architecture for Brown v. Board of Education; a Black queer playwright who transformed a Chicago housing battle into the first Broadway production by a Black woman; and a Chicana lesbian poet who co-edited the anthology that showed American feminism what intersectionality felt like decades before Kimberlé Crenshaw gave it language—show us exactly what that fuller expression can look like when it is uninhibited by bias and hatred.

Pauli Murray: The Person Who Coined the Phrase “Jane Crow”

Born Anna Pauline Murray on November 20, 1910, in Baltimore, Maryland, Pauli Murray was raised in Durham, North Carolina, by an aunt after the deaths of both parents. Graduated first in the 1944 class at Howard Law School; refused admission to UNC's graduate program on the basis of race (1938) and to Harvard Law on the basis of sex (1944), and turned each refusal into a published argument that reshaped the field.

Pauli’s accomplishments are so many, this was one of the most challenging entries I wrote in my book Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History. From helping a newly independent Ghana build out its legal system (teaching at the Ghana School of Law in Accra and co-authoring an early textbook on the Ghanaian constitution); to co-founding the National Organization for Women in 1966; to serving as a tenured professor at Brandeis University, helping establish both the African American Studies and Women's Studies programs there, Pauli was a titan of letters and liberation alike. In addition, they were a celebrated memoirist and poet.

Post-academic career, Pauli attended General Theological Seminary and upon ordination, became the first Black “woman” (person assigned female at birth) ordained as an Episcopal priest, and led from the pulpit for eight years. Murray died in 1985 and was added to the Episcopal calendar of saints in 2012.

We’re talking a SAINT, people!

Reflection: What parts of you challenge categories—and teach justice?

Lorraine Hansberry - Storytelling with Truth and Fire

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930, in Chicago, into a family that had already made a mark on the civic life of this country. Her father, Carl Hansberry, brought Hansberry v. Lee (1940) to the U.S. Supreme Court and partially won the right of Black families to live outside Chicago's restrictive-covenant zone known as the South Side.

Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison for two years before leaving school. She moved to New York's Greenwich Village and immersed herself in theater and Black leftist journalism—working as a reporter and editor for Paul Robeson's monthly newspaper, Freedom. She also wrote unsigned (but verified) letters to The Ladder, the first national U.S. lesbian magazine

She wrote her debut play, A Raisin in the Sun, at age 28. The story of the Younger family—three generations under one South Side roof, deciding what to do with a $10,000 life-insurance check and the matriarch's dream of buying a house in a white-restricted neighborhood. It opened on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959, and ran for 530 performances. This was the first Broadway play written by a Black woman, and the first directed by a Black director (Lloyd Richards) on Broadway in nearly fifty years.

Lorraine, was married to white Jewish songwriter and political organizer Robert Nemiroff (a working partnership more than a romantic one; they quietly divorced in 1964, and he served devotedly as her literary executor) and also lived a private lesbian life . She had one more play make it to Broadway, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, in October 1964, before dying of pancreatic cancer on January 12, 1965, in New York City, at the young age of 34. The posthumous To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969), assembled by Nemiroff from her papers and journals, became a touchstone for a generation; Nina Simone wrote the song of the same name in her honor. Her work still stands today as among the most honest and luminous depictions of Black working-class life, love, and perseverance.

Reflection: What parts of you challenge categories—and teach justice?

Cherríe Moraga: Champion for Radical Feminists and Queer Lives

Our third featured Foremother breaks our general convention by honoring someone who is still alive, but she's so significant to scholarship and LGBTQIA+ rights, I needed to include her.

Cherríe Lawrence was born on September 25, 1952, in Whittier, California, to a Chicana mother (Elvira Moraga) and an Anglo father (Joseph Lawrence). She grew up light-skinned in a family where the Mexican grandmother spoke Spanish and the children were raised in English to get ahead. Cherríe earned a B.A. from Immaculate Heart College in 1974 and taught high school English in Los Angeles before moving to San Francisco in 1977 to begin graduate work at San Francisco State University. It was in those graduate-school years, as she came out to herself, to her family, and to the small Bay Area lesbian-feminist writing world, that she took her mother's surname, Moraga, as her writing name and her chosen inheritance, becoming Chérrie Moraga.

In 1981, Moraga co-edited what is arguably the single most influential book in the development of women-of-color feminism in the United States, published first by the small lesbian-feminist Persephone Press and then by Kitchen Table Press in 1983: This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Her co-editor was Gloria Anzaldúa, the Chicana queer poet and theorist from the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas whose own later book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) gave us the language of mestiza consciousness and the political concept of the borderlands.

Moraga also wrote Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (1983), one of the first openly lesbian Chicana memoirs in English. At age 73 as I write, she is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and co-founder of La Red Xicana Indígena, a network linking Chicana feminist thought with Indigenous movements across the Americas through scholarship, art, and political organizing.

Reflection: Turned away by every major feminist press of the late 1970s, Bridge finally found a home only at a tiny lesbian-feminist press in Watertown, Massachusetts. What is something you can think of that has not been accepted by “mainstream” channels but you swear by?

Reflection and Action: Journal Prompts for Everyone

Talk about intersections! Pauli Murray was queer, gender-expansive, Black, Southern, a lawyer, and a priest. The country had no language for any of it at the time. What language are you still missing for the truth of your own life?

Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin is built on a question: what do we do with the inheritance? What is the inheritance—money, expectation, story, trauma, hope—that you are deciding what to do with?

Chérrie Moraga's anthology This Bridge Called my Back is largely about the refusal to rank oppressions. Where in your own thinking—or in the communities or situations you encounter—does that ranking still happen?

HerStory / OurStory: Journal Prompts for Women of Color

Pauli Murray coined the term Jane Crow in the 1940s to name the doubled exclusion of Black women under both racial and sex-based law. What is the Jane Crow of your workplace, your faith community, your neighborhood, right now?

Lorraine Hanberry's Raisin's Beneatha character—a Black college student dating both an assimilationist doctor and a Nigerian student, while trying to grow out her relaxed hair—is the closest thing to a self-portrait Hansberry wrote. Whose story in your family or among friends has been the Beneatha story, and has anyone told it?

Chérrie Moraga's This Bridge was written in part because white feminist anthologies of the late 1970s kept publishing women of color as token contributors and women of color as primary editors of none. Where are you a token? How about where are you the editor?

Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White Friends

Visit or donate to the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice in Durham, North Carolina. The Center is housed in Pauli Murray's childhood home and runs school programs, public history, and community organizing.

In appreciation of Lorraine Hansberry's family legacy, consider that Hansberry v. Lee (1940) is one of the foundational cases in the legal history of housing segregation in the United States. The Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley maintains maps of present-day racial covenant residues. Find out whether the deed to your own house still contains a (now-unenforceable) racial covenant; many still do.

Learn about Audre Lorde, the Black lesbian feminist poet who inspired Chérrie Moraga’s work. Their stories are part of a through-line of the Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous queer organizing ecosystem

More on Their Lives

Pauli Murray (1910-1985)—the Brief, the Priesthood, the Partnership

(Please take note: in deference to Pauli’s descendants’ preference, we use “they/their” pronouns or avoid them as much as possible when writing about this individual.)

Pauli Murray was born Anna Pauline Murray on November 20, 1910, in Baltimore, Maryland, the fourth of six children of Agnes Fitzgerald Murray, a nurse, and William Henry Murray, a Baltimore public-school teacher of mixed Black, white, and Cherokee descent. The lives of Pauli’s parents had tragic ends: Agnes died of a cerebral hemorrhage when Pauli was three; William, suffering from the long-term neurological effects of typhoid fever, was institutionalized and was beaten to death by a white guard at Crownsville State Hospital in 1923. Their twelve-year old child was sent to live with their Pauline Fitzgerald Dame, a schoolteacher in Durham, North Carolina. Dame’s house at 906 Carroll Street now houses the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice.

In 1938, Pauli applied to the University of North Carolina graduate program in sociology and was rejected on the grounds of race. The rejection would become the first of Pauli's lived experiences that would find a way into latter published legal arguments. In 1940, they was arrested in Petersburg, Virginia, for refusing to move to the back of an interstate bus—fifteen years before Rosa Parks in Montgomery, and on the same constitutional ground (interstate commerce) that would eventually carry the bus desegregation cases. The Petersburg arrest cost Pauli a fine and a night in jail; the legal argument went into the “memory/documentation” file.

Pauli enrolled at Howard Law School in 1941 and graduated first in the class in 1944—the only person assigned female at birth in the class. Their senior thesis, Should the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy v. Ferguson Be Overruled?, made the argument that the separate but equal doctrine should be attacked on the basis of its psychological and social damage to Black children, not merely on the basis of unequal facilities. This argument was rejected by every senior civil rights lawyer Pauli circulated it to in 1944. But Pauli's professor Spottswood Robinson III, who graded the thesis and called it brilliant, kept the copy. Robinson would later join Thurgood Marshall's NAACP Legal Defense Fund (the team that argued Brown v. Board of Education in 1953–54) and Pauli’s damage-to-Black-children argument became the centerpiece of the brief.

In 1944, Murray applied to Harvard Law for graduate work, but was rejected on the basis of sex. Pauli used the rejection to write the article Jane Crow and the Law, co-authored with Mary Eastwood and published in the George Washington Law Review in 1965. The piece argued that sex discrimination should be analyzed under the Fourteenth Amendment in the same structural way that race discrimination was. Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited Jane Crow and the Law as the basis for her own 1971 Reed v. Reed brief—the case that established sex as a protected class under the Equal Protection Clause. Ginsburg listed Pauli as a co-author of the Reed brief in honor of her indebtedness to Murray.

Pauli co-founded the National Organization for Women in 1966, with Betty Friedan, Aileen Hernandez, and Pauli's longtime Jane Crow co-author Mary Eastwood, which aimed to bring women into full and equal participation in American public, economic, and legal life. From 1968-73, they taught at Brandeis University and then entered General Theological Seminary in New York in 1973. Upon finishing their divinity degree, Pauli was ordained as one of the first women priests in the Episcopal Church on January 8, 1977—the first Black person assigned female at birth to be ordained. The first Eucharist Pauli celebrated was at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which was amazingly the same chapel where Pauli's enslaved great-grandmother Cornelia Smith had been baptized in 1854.

Pauli's longest partnership was with Irene "Renee" Barlow, a personnel manager at a New York law firm, from the 1950s until Barlow's death from a brain tumor in 1973. Pauli's grief was the immediate cause of the move into seminary. Pauli’s autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, was finished weeks before their death on July 1, 1985, in Pittsburgh, and it was published posthumously in 1987. The Episcopal Church added Pauli to its calendar of saints in 2012, with a feast day on July 1.

Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965)—Raisin, the FBI file, and The Ladder

Lorraine Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930, on the South Side of Chicago, the youngest of four children of Carl Augustus Hansberry, a real-estate broker, and Nannie Louise Perry Hansberry, a schoolteacher and ward committeewoman. The Hansberry household was a Black middle-class center of 1930's-40's Chicago intellectual life; Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, and the poet Langston Hughes were dinner guests. Carl Hansberry's brother William was a Howard University professor of African history and one of the founding scholars of African Studies in the American academy. She grew up surrounded by erudition and agency.

In 1937, when Lorraine was seven, Carl Hansberry bought a house at 6140 South Rhodes Avenue in the white-restricted Washington Park subdivision of Chicago and moved the family in. A white mob attacked the house; a brick came through a front window and barely missed Lorraine's head. Despite the hatred that came their way, the family chose to remain in the house, until they were served an eviction notice. Carl took the resulting eviction case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Hansberry v. Lee (1940) that the specific restrictive covenant in the Washington Park subdivision had not been validly enforced. The narrower ruling did not strike down restrictive covenants generally—that would not come until Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948—but the Hansberry case was the leading edge of the legal attack. Exhausted by the housing fight and planning to move the family to Mexico, Carl Hansberry died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1946, at age 50. Lorraine was fifteen.

Enrolling at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1948, Hansberry became the first Black student in the women's dormitory. After two years, she left college and moved to New York to work as a writer at Freedom, Paul Robeson's monthly newspaper, from 1951 to 1953. She covered important stories including Sojourner Truth's hundredth death anniversary, the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, and the trial of W.E.B. Du Bois (the 1951 Cold War prosecution of the 83-year-old NAACP co-founder for circulating an anti-nuclear peace petition the government alleged was Soviet-aligned). In 1953 she married Robert Nemiroff, a white Jewish songwriter and political organizer; the marriage was a working partnership and, by Nemiroff's later acknowledgment, not a sexual one. They separated in 1957 and quietly divorced in 1964, with Nemiroff remaining Hansberry's literary executor and closest collaborator until her death.

A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959. The cast was Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Claudia McNeil, Diana Sands, Louis Gossett Jr., and Ivan Dixon, and it was directed by Lloyd Richards, the first Black director on Broadway in nearly fifty years. The play ran for 530 performances, winning Hansberry the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award that year for best play. She was the first Black writer and the youngest writer ever to win it. The version most Americans have seen is the 1961 film, with most of the original Broadway cast .

The FBI opened a file on Hansberry in 1952 and kept it open until her death. The file is roughly 1,000 pages. The agents went to her plays and they also read her mail, noting, with particular interest, an unsigned letter Hansberry wrote to The Ladder in May 1957—the first national U.S. lesbian magazine, published by the Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco—in which she argued that lesbianism was a political question as well as a personal one, and that married heterosexual feminists owed lesbian feminists more than tolerance. She signed the letter L.H.N., for Lorraine Hansberry Nemiroff, and a second letter the following August with only her initials. The letters were among the most theoretically advanced pieces of American lesbian-feminist writing of the 1950s. They were unsigned because the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, in 1957, could not be both publicly Black, publicly female, publicly Communist-affiliated, and publicly a lesbian and keep her career.

Hansberry was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1963, at age 33. She continued writing through chemotherapy. The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window opened on Broadway on October 15, 1964; she attended the opening from a wheelchair. She died on January 12, 1965, at University Hospital in New York, at age 34. Nina Simone, who had been a close friend, performed "To Be Young, Gifted and Black"—the song built from a phrase Hansberry had used in a 1964 speech to young Black writers—for the first time at Morehouse College in 1969, four years after Hansberry's death.

Cherríe Moraga (b. 1952)—Living Brave Sis Who Wrote “The Book”

Cherríe Lawrence Moraga was born on September 25, 1952, in Whittier, California, to Elvira Moraga, a Chicana waitress whose family had been in California since before the U.S.–Mexico War, and Joseph Lawrence, a white Canadian-American warehouse worker. Cherríe grew with light-skin privilege, in a family where the Mexican grandmother spoke Spanish and the children were raised in English to "get ahead."

She earned a B.A. from Immaculate Heart College in 1974 and initially taught high school English in Los Angeles before moving to San Francisco in 1977 to begin graduate work at San Francisco State University. The graduate-school years in the Bay were her coming-out years—to herself, to her family, and to the small Bay Area lesbian-feminist writing world that included the poet Audre Lorde, the editor Barbara Smith, and the writer Gloria Anzaldúa, a Chicana queer poet seven years older than Moraga who had grown up in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. Moraga and Anzaldúa met in a writing workshop in 1979 and began the conversation that would turn into their foundational work: This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color.

This Bridge is not a textbook, it’s a working anthology, with poetry, essays, letters, transcripts of phone conversations, manifestos, and one piece of fiction. The list of contributors is a womanist pantheon of latter 20th century feminist titans: Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Cheryl Clarke, Mitsuye Yamada, Nellie Wong, Genny Lim, Chrystos, doris davenport, Hattie Gossett, Norma Alarcón, and roughly thirty others. The thesis of the book is all in the title: the women of color are the bridge that white feminism has been walking on for a decade without saying thank you. Moraga's own essay, "La Güera" (the light-skinned one) is a structural reckoning with her own proximity to whiteness and the privileges that entails. Rejecting colorism as a divisive force, she wrote: “The danger lies in ranking the oppressions."

Persephone Press, a small white-lesbian-feminist press in Watertown, Massachusetts, published the first edition in October 1981 in a press run of 3,000, and This Bridge sold out in months. When Persephone folded in 1983, Moraga and Anzaldúa took the rights to Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the Black-women-led press that Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde had co-founded in 1980 specifically to publish works of this sort. The second edition came out in 1983 and taught the next decade of women's-studies students. The third edition (Third Woman Press, 2002) added a new introduction by Moraga. The fortieth-anniversary edition (SUNY Press, 2021) is the current in-print edition.

Moraga's solo books are the other half of the work: Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (South End Press, 1983, revised 2000) is the lesbian Chicana memoir; The Last Generation (1993) is the essay and poetry collection that introduced the term Queer Aztlán; Heroes and Saints and Other Plays (1994) collected her theater work; A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness (2011) and Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir (2019) are the late-career books. Native Country is a memoir of her mother Elvira's slow decline into dementia and is one of the most precise English-language renderings of the bilingual mother-daughter relationship in the recent American literature.

Moraga co-founded La Red Xicana Indígena in 1997, which brings Chicana feminism into direct dialogue with Indigenous decolonial movements across the Americas, particularly in solidarity with the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. She was an instructor in Drama and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University from 1996 to 2017, and joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2017, where she co-directs Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought, Art, and Social Praxis with her partner Celia Herrera Rodríguez. The Center publishes, teaches, and produces theater. Moraga is 73 in 2026 and still gracing our minds with her writing.

What These Women Knew, and What We Must Remember

Pauli Murray drafted the argument that would later anchor Brown v. Board in a Howard Law thesis their senior classmates dismissed. Lorraine Hansberry signed her most theoretically advanced lesbian-feminist writing with initials, because the full name would have ended her career in 1957. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa carried their anthology from one tiny press to another until it found a home—and it ended up becoming one of the most influential feminist tomes of the past sixty years. From these people, we can remember that you don’t always have to wait to be welcomed to make a difference. Your stubborn, daily willingness to keep doing the work, under conditions designed to shut you up, is the heroism (she-roism).

Thanks for reading this edition of #SistoryLessons, a biweekly newsletter that uses the lessons from Foremothers who led the way as encouragement and guide for these times of resilience. The series is based on stories from my award-winning book, Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History, and other, ongoing research.

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