[Episcopal News Service] The Rev. Pauli Murray, the first African American woman to be ordained a priest and a pioneer in the struggles for racial and gender equality, will be featured on U.S. quarters in 2024, the U.S. Mint announced on February 1, 2023. She and four other women are being honored next year as part of the Mint’s American Women Quarters series, celebrating the contributions of women to American history. 

Murray, whose feast day is celebrated on July 1 in The Episcopal Church’s calendar of saints, was also a lawyer, writer and co-founder of the National Organization for Women. Often the first or only Black woman in the positions she held, Murray was a groundbreaking leader in the civil rights movements of the 1960s, though her contributions were long overlooked. 

Other honorees

She is being honored along with these people:

• Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color to serve in Congress
• Mary Edwards Walker, a Civil War surgeon, women’s rights advocate and abolitionist
• Zitkala-Ša, an advocate for Native Americans’ right to U.S. citizenship
• Celia Cruz, the Cuban-American “Queen of Salsa”

The quarter designs will be unveiled this summer, the Mint said.

“All of the women being honored have lived remarkable and multifaceted lives, and have made a significant impact on our nation in their own unique way,” Mint Director Ventris C. Gibson wrote in the announcement. “The women pioneered change during their lifetimes, not yielding to the status quo imparted during their lives. By honoring these pioneering women, the Mint continues to connect America through coins which are like small works of art in your pocket.”

The American Women Quarters program began last year and will continue through 2025, with the Mint issuing five quarters each year.

Pauli Murray’s brief biography

Murray, who was ordained in 1977, was a largely unsung hero until the 2021 film “My Name Is Pauli Murray” brought her story to an international audience. Fifteen years before Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to white passengers on a bus, Murray and a friend did the same in Virginia, though their case did not gain momentum the way Parks’ did.

In her legal career, Murray was among the first to argue the unconstitutionality of “separate but equal” laws, an argument cited 10 years later in Brown v. Board of Education by Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights attorney who later became a Supreme Court justice. Marshall called Murray’s book on segregation laws “the bible of the civil rights movement.” And Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the future Supreme Court justice, used Murray’s arguments in a legal brief she wrote – listing her as a co-author – while arguing Reed v. Reed, the 1971 Supreme Court case that banned gender discrimination based on the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

Murray was queer, though her specific identity within the LGBTQ+ community has recently been debated, with some arguing that she should be considered nonbinary or a transgender man. Her stature has recently grown among the American public and in The Episcopal Church, where Black and queer leaders today recognize her as a major influence.

—Egan Millard is an assistant editor and reporter for Episcopal News Service. He can be reached at emillard@episcopalchurch.org.

Church of the Redeemer

Church of the Redeemer: Worshiping God, living in community, and reaching out to the world around us. We are an Episcopal Church serving north King County and south Snohomish County, Washington. As you travel your road, go with friends walking the way of Jesus at Redeemer.

Church of the Redeemer is at 6210 Northeast 181st Street in Kenmore, Washington. The campus is a short distance north of Bothell Way, near the Burke-Gilman Trail. The entrance looks like a gravel driveway. The campus is larger on the inside than it is on the outside. And we managed to hide a large building on the side of a hill that is not easily seen from the street.

The Episcopal Church welcomes you.