As part of the celebration of Black History Month and Women's History Month, NOCO NOW honors the life and legacy of Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray (1910-1985), one of the original co-founders of NOW in 1966 and a tireless civil rights and women's rights activist. After graduating first in her class at Howard University, Pauli was denied entrance to Harvard and several other law schools because of her gender and/or her race. Ultimately earning her law degree in California, she was the first African American to receive the Doctor of Juridical Science Degree from Yale Law School. As a lawyer, Pauli spent years trying landmark civil rights' cases and writing/speaking out in protest of "Jane Crow and Jim Crow" discrimination. In 1961 President Kennedy appointed her to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, and she also served on the faculties of several universities and law schools. She eventually left academia to become the first African American woman ordained as a priest by the Episcopal church, devoting herself to ministering to the sick before her own death in 1985. In 2018 she was chosen by the National Women's History Project as one of the honorees of Women's History Month in the United States. More information on Pauli Murray's life is available here https://now.org/about/history/finding-pauli-murray/