Charles Houston was born in Washington, DC in 1895. His father was an attorney. After graduating Dunbar High School, he attended Amherst College in Massachusetts. He graduated valedictorian in 1915 and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. He returned to Washington, DC to teach English at Howard University.

In 1917, he joined the US Army as a First Lieutenant. He was so horrified by the treatment that black officers received that he committed himself attend law school to "use my time fighting for men who could not strike back." After leaving the Army, he entered Harvard Law School. He earned his doctorate of law in 1923 and was the first African-American to serve as editor of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated Harvard cum laude.

After briefly studying in Europe, he was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in 1924. That same year, he became a law professor at Howard University. There, he made it his mission to create as many black lawyers as possible. One of his most promising students was a young man from Baltimore named Thurgood Marshall who would later become the first African-American on the Supreme Court. Beginning in the 1930's, he served as first special counsel for the NAACP was heavily involved with civil rights cases until his death.

Charles Houston's mission was to help engineer an end to segregation and the overturning of the landmark "Plessy v Ferguson" Supreme Court Case. He helped design strategies for attacking segregation laws across the United States. He did not live to see "Plessy" overturned, but his students, strategies and drive for racial equality made this legal champion for civil rights a great American.

Pauli Murray was born in 1910 in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father was a schoolteacher and her mother was a nurse. Her mother died when she was three years old and her father became ill with typhoid fever. She was sent to live with her mother’s family in Durham, North Carolina. When she was 16 years old, she graduated from high school with honors and moved to New York City to live with a cousin. There, she was able to enroll at Hunter College.

Murray was forced to drop out of school due to the Wall Street Crash of 1929. She began working for the Works Projects Administration as a teacher in New York City. She began writing poetry and articles that were published in several different magazines. She picked up a job selling subscriptions to an academic journal, “Opportunity,” published by the National Urban League. She also became involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1930s.

In 1938, she became involved in a campaign to enter the all-white University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She had the backing of the National Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and her cause gain national publicity. During the campaign, she met First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Later, Murray became a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and was active in trying to stop segregation on Virginia busses. She was arrested and imprisoned in 1940 for refusing to sit at the back of a bus in Richmond.

In 1941, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington, DC with the intention of becoming a lawyer. While a student at Howard, Murray joined with three men to create the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). CORE was mainly influenced by Henry David Thoreau and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi with regard to nonviolent civil disobedience. In 1943, she published two essays on civil rights. She also published a poem titled “Dark Testament,” about race relations. She graduated from Howard in 1944 and applied for a Rosenwald Fellowship to Harvard University. After receiving the award, her application to Harvard was rejected due to her gender despite a letter of support from President Franklin Roosevelt. Instead, she enrolled at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley and received her law degree. Her thesis was entitled “The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment,” in which she argued that the right to work is an inalienable right. She passed the California Bar Exam in 1945.

Murray became California’s first black deputy attorney general in 1946. That same year, the National Council of Negro Women named her “Woman of the Year.” She was also lauded in Mademoiselle Magazine. In 1951, she published “States’ Law on Race and Color.” Thurgood Marshall, head of the legal department for the NAACP, described the book as the “Bible for civil rights lawyers.” In 1956, she published a biography of her grandparents and their struggles with prejudice. She travelled to Ghana to explore her African roots. When she returned, President John F. Kennedy appointed her to his Committee on Civil and Political Rights. She worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders at the time, but became increasingly frustrated by the male-dominated leadership of the cause. She gave a speech in Washington, DC titled “Jim Crow and Jane Crow,” outlining the struggles of black women in the civil rights movement.

In 1966, she became the co-founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and argued that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to sexual discrimination as well as racial discrimination. In the brief for the landmark Supreme Court case “Reed v Reed,” future justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg added Murray as co-author for the brief. In 1973, she became a professor at Brandeis University, introducing African-American Women’s Studies to the curriculum. In 1977, she entered seminary and after only three years of study, became the first African-American woman ordained a priest.

Rev. Dr. Murray died in 1985 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2015, Murray’s home in Durham was named a national treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In 2016, Yale University announced that they would be naming two new residential colleges on their campus. One was named Benjamin Franklin College and the other was named Pauli Murray College. Her work in with civil and gender rights in the United States made Murray a Great American.