Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice

Pauli Murray was, by any measure, several lifetimes in one: a human rights lawyer whose scholarship underpinned Brown v. Board of Education-era litigation; the thinker Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited on the briefs that won constitutional rights for women; a co-founder of the National Organization for Women; a poet; and, in 1977, the first Black woman ordained an Episcopal priest. Murray was also queer and gender-nonconforming — wrestling in the 1930s, in private letters and in life, with questions of gender identity the world would take another century to name. Murray grew up in this 1½-story frame house in Durham's West End, built by their maternal grandparents in 1898 on a lot bought for $200, and raised here from the age of three by an aunt after their mother's death. The house was named a National Treasure by the National Trust in 2015 and designated a National Historic Landmark in December 2016 — one of the very few NHLs in the country interpreting Black, feminist and LGBTQ+ history in a single site. After a painstaking restoration, it opened to the public in September 2024 as the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice. Visiting: public tours run most Wednesdays and Saturdays (Saturdays typically 10am-1pm, self-guided), with group visits by arrangement — check the calendar at paulimurraycenter.com before coming. The West End location is a short ride from downtown Durham. For travelers tracing queer history beyond the coastal cities, this house is the essential Southern stop: proof that the movement's intellectual foundations were laid as much in Durham as in Greenwich Village.