Growing up in the Bay Area imparted to Simki Kuznick two lifelong lessons: the value of multiculturalism and the power of the written word. She grew up listening to a soundtrack of global music and, as an adolescent, moved to Washington, D.C., with her family. While in Ghana with the humanitarian organization Operation Crossroads Africa—on a break from college in the 1970s—she made a friend who lent her a book written by a compelling figure of feminism and civil rights who was largely obscured by history: Pauli Murray, a mixed-race, queer, and possibly trans scholar, poet, activist, lawyer, and Episcopal priest. Decades later, Murray is now the subject of Kuznick’s first book, Pauli Murray’s Revolutionary Life.

Drawing on Murray’s memoirs as well as papers amassed posthumously, the biography traces Murray’s family history and professional tribulations and how they informed her enduring tenacity working for equality of the races and sexes. Kuznick has some parallels in her own life. She returned to the Bay Area after Ghana to work for the Levi Strauss & Co., where she met and started a family with her first husband, an Eritrean immigrant, and also helped found Interracial and Intercultural Pride (iPride) in Berkeley. She now lives on the East Coast again, having retired from a career in editing for the U.S. government. As a poet who completed her MFA from American University in 2010, Kuznick felt this was the plunge she would take into nonfiction.

“[Murray’s] books are a little bit dense, so combining all her stories and her adventures in a more dramatic form would make her story more accessible to not just young readers, but all readers,” Kuznick says. Her approach was to “expand on it, imagine it as a drama, a play, something active with dialogue. [Murray] was very good at remembering, and there were certain phrases that her family used. My favorite is ‘betwixt and between.’ We’re all betwixt and between.”

Murray was born in 1910 in Baltimore to parents who, unfortunately, never got a solid chance at raising and knowing her. She identified as a Black woman, having descended from multiracial ancestors who included a free Black man and a White woman and a great-grandmother who likely had Native American heritage. Pauli was largely raised by her aunt (and namesake) Pauline in North Carolina, without consistent contact with her siblings. She was a tomboy, abhorring domestic work and preferring to run around with the boys outside.

Murray lived her adulthood as a series of challenges to social norms established by segregation, sexism, and racism. She fought hard to enroll in university and demanded her rights to public spaces then reserved for White people only. She was the only woman in her class to graduate from Howard University’s Law School in 1944, ranked first, which she parlayed into getting her Ph.D. at Yale. She became a personal friend and social justice collaborator of Eleanor Roosevelt’s and coined the term Jane Crow to refer to the intersection of sexism and racism women like herself faced at the time. She helped co-found the National Organization for Women and became the first Black woman Episcopal priest. So how does such a remarkable person fade from collective knowledge?

Kirkus Reviews calls Kuznick’s work a “compelling life story” that serves as “an introduction to Murray that is well written and touches on the many intersecting aspects of her activism and identity.” Kuznick says she started writing the book during the Obama administration, though it took until the late Trump administration to secure a publisher. But the timing, as it turns out, was just right: Murray is now the subject of a high-profile documentary, and her childhood home was deemed a National Historic Landmark in 2016. As Kuznick writes in the book’s introduction:

Pauli Murray knew that she was ahead of her time. She kept some of her life hidden so that she could carry on her work for social justice and equality. Now we can celebrate the fullness of her life. Now her story can inspire a new generation to fight the hard fight for an integrated, just, and equitable world for all living beings to live in harmony on this beautiful earth.

Kuznick theorizes that Murray’s complicated relationships to her gender, sexuality, and relatively radical ideas may have played parts in the obfuscation of her contributions. In the book, Kuznick writes that Murray identified more with masculinity and even sought medical advice for feeling like her body and hormones were betraying her. She suffered mental health crises, had relationships with women, and even went to jail for refusing to sit in the segregated seating of a bus 15 years before Rosa Parks did the same. 

“She was a lesbian. She tried to [file] cases about discrimination, but the NAACP wouldn’t take her case before the Supreme Court because they were very careful about squeaky clean [people]—people more like Rosa Parks [who] didn’t have any background that might be somewhat negative,” Kuznick says. “[Pauli] had worked for a travel agent [who] took people to Russia, so they felt she was tainted with communism. She sometimes had nervous breakdowns, possibly associated with her gender questioning. There was an FBI file about her.” In a time when gender and race have become talking points for banning books from schools and libraries, Murray’s story carries more weight than ever.

Kuznick now lives in Maryland with her second husband, a historian. She doesn’t have concrete plans for another book, but who knows? In the meantime, she’s content to (very occasionally) help her husband feed his pet snake and wait for their backyard frogs to come out of winter hibernation. And, of course, to keep championing Murray and her work.

“I’m most concerned about Pauli Murray’s story getting out there. And I’m really gratified that she is gaining momentum and people are learning about her. We’re all connected, whether physically [or] psychologically. She was really about bringing people together.”

Amelia Williams is a writer living in Brooklyn with bylines in the San Francisco Chronicle, Bay City News, and Leafly.