Simone Ashley Manuel was born and raised in Texas. Both of her parents were student-athletes, as well as her two big brothers. Growing up in an athletic family, Manuel was introduced to different sports from an early age, having her first swimming lesson at 4. A quick learner with a natural talent for swimming, Manuel was advanced to her age and trainקג with older children. At 11, she joined the First Colony Swim Team in Houston and became the top-ranked swimmer in her age group in both 50-meter and 100-meter freestyle events. At 12, after already winning several competitions, Manuel felt ignored at practices and that she was treated differently because of her skin color and almost quit swimming. In 2011, at the age of 15, Manuel made her international debut in the FINA World Junior Championships, finishing fourth in the 100-meter freestyle. In the next couple of years, she competed and won in various national and international events, including the Junior Pan Pacific Swimming Championships and the World Aquatics Championships in Barcelona, Spain. There, she won the gold medal while breaking the American junior swimmer record of the 25-second barrier in the 50-meter freestyle. In 2014, Simone graduated high school and enrolled at Stanford University, studying communications. She joined the Stanford Cardinal women’s swimming team and broke the team’s record in the 50, 100, and 200-yard freestyle. In the following year, when she is 19 years old, Simone became a two-time American and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) champion, winning the 50- and 100-yard freestyle and setting a new record in the 100-yard freestyle with a time of 46.09. At the age of 20, Manuel competed at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, winning four medals – gold in the 100-meter freestyle, gold in the 4×100-meter medley, silver in the 50-meter freestyle, and silver in the 4×100-meter freestyle relay, becoming the first African-American woman to win an individual gold in Olympic swimming. In 2018, Manuel graduated college and signed with the swimsuit manufacturer TYR Sport Inc. In the following year, she made history when she swept the 50 and 100 freestyles at the world swimming championships while breaking the American record in the 100 with a time of 52.04 seconds. Read more...

Anna Pauline Murray was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to parents of mixed racial origins. At age 3, her mother had died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and not long after, her father also passed away in tragic circumstances. She was raised by her mother’s family in North Carolina and then New York City. Her application to Columbia University was declined because of her gender, so she attended Hunter College, as one of few students of color, and earned a degree in English. At the time, she secretly married William Roy Wynn, but she soon regretted that decision, disgusted by the act of having sex, and they parted a few months after. At 28, she applied to the University of North Carolina, this time she was rejected because of her race. Trying to change the university’s position, she wrote to various officials, from the university president to the US President. While on a bus at Petersburg, Virginia, she and her friend moved from the broken seats in the black section and sat in the white section. Refusing to return to the back, they were arrested and convicted of disorderly conduct (15 years before Rosa Parks). The Workers’ Defense League paid for their release. Murray’s personal experience with injustice led her to pursue a career in civil rights law, and at the age of 31, she began to study law at Howard University. Being the only woman in her department, she became utterly aware of sexism and discrimination against women, especially black women. She labeled this behavior as “Jane Crow,” by which she emphasized the struggle of African-American women for racial and gender equality. Murray graduated first in her class, but because of her gender, she was denied the fellowship at Harvard University, traditionally given to the class’s valedictorian. Instead, she did her post-graduate studying at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. At the age of 36, one year after passing the bar exams, she was hired as the state’s deputy attorney general and became the first African-American person to serve in this position. In that year, she was named “woman of the year” by the National Council of Negro Women.   In 1950, Murray published the book “States’ Laws on Race and Color” – an examination of the segregation laws in the US, in which she encouraged civil rights lawyers to claim segregation laws as unconstitutional instead of unequal. Later the book was credited as “The bible of the civil rights movement” and became a turning point for assessing segregation cases. After coining the term 20 years earlier, in 1965, she published the article “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII,” in which she examines Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its implications on women, comparing discriminatory laws as applied to women and men under Jim Crow Laws. The next year, she co-founded the National Organization for Women, as a parallel organization to the NAACP, focusing on women’s rights. In 1966, alongside Dorothy Kenyon, she argued a case in which the court ruled that jury selection cannot be discriminated by race or sex. Throughout her life, although she struggled with her sexual and gender identity, she was open about being a gender-nonconforming person, claiming she has an “inverted sex instinct.” She shortened her name to the gender non-specific “Pauli” and wished for a monogamous married life in which she was the man. She cut her hair short and wore pants instead of skirts. During the 1940s, she pursued hormone treatments to correct what she referred to as “personal imbalance,” and she even asked for an abdominal surgery to test if she had hidden male sex organs. Today she is recognized as one of the earliest transgender figures in US history. At the age of 62, Murray resigned from her academic position and enrolled in a General Theological Seminary. Five years later, she became the first African-American woman priest to be ordained by the Episcopal church. For the next seven years until her death in 1985, she ministered to the sick at a parish in Washington, DC.     More About Pauli Murray: Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice Pauli Murray In Her West End Neighborhood Walking Tour   Read more...