This readable book on the life and thought of Pauli Murray shows the interconnections of her faith in the realization of American democratic equality between all its citizens and her theological faith in redemption. Pauli Murray (1910–1985) was a prominent lawyer and, in her later life, an Episcopal priest. An African American reared in her mother's family in North Carolina, Murray struggled all her life against racial and gender discrimination. She was repeatedly refused admission to schools or employment either because she was African-American or because she was female. But she persevered with increasing success, earning a Bachelor's of Arts at Hunter College in New York in the 1930s, a law degree at Howard University School of Law in the 1940s, a doctorate in law at Yale University and an Masters of Divinity at General Theological Seminary in New York in her sixties. She was the first African-American woman ordained as a priest at the Washington National Cathedral in 1977.

Murray made significant contributions to American legal theory on the rights of women. A friend of Eleanor Roosevelt since the 1940s, Murray was appointed a member of President Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women in 1961. When the word “sex” was inserted into the 1964 Civil Rights Acts in hopes of defeating it, Murray defended the word, winning equal attention to both sex and race discrimination. She successfully argued that women needed to be given equal rights as individuals, not simply protected as mothers, in American legal practices. All her life she struggled against the tendency of both legal thinkers and Black and feminist leaders to dichotomize the categories of race and gender. For Murray, Black women represented the complexity of these categories. Gender and race were both wrongful forms of discrimination, and Black women experienced the interconnection for the two.

Author Sarah Azaransky studies the full range of Murray's thought and writings from the 1930s to the 1980s. This includes Murray's epic poetry in the 1930s, her family autobiography, Proud Shoes (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), her masters and doctoral theses, her journal and newspaper articles, her sermons after she was ordained a priest, as well as unpublished letters and articles. Azaransky has a very full grasp of the development, as well as the continuity of Murray's thinking over these years. She shows how Murray continually interconnects her democratic faith expressed in her legal work and her theological faith found in her sermons. Azranzky summarizes the relation of the two as her “democratic eschatology.” By this she means that Murray saw both American society and the church as holding forth a promise of redemption that is unfulfilled, but continually in process of being more fully realized.

American society and its legal theory begins with a bold claim that “All men are created equal,” but proceeded to deny this in practice by categorizing Black slaves as “three-fifths of a person” for purposes of representation. It took into the 1960s to rectify this legacy of slavery and to accord African-American people full legal humanity. The Church in turn has had greater difficulty giving women full status as human beings. The Episcopal Church allowed their ordination only after a long struggle that culminated in 1976. When an Episcopal bishop called for women to help in the finances of the Church, Murray replied that there should be “no taxes without representation,” showing how she connected the two struggles in church and state. Murray's sermons as a priest focus on the theme of the coming Kingdom of God as the promise of full redemption of humans in union with God as a process that is continually in process of realization, yet remains incomplete in both the church and society.

Azaransky's book is a helpful contribution to a growing literature on Pauli Murray, which helps to situate her in the context of both American civil rights struggles and the development of a “womanist” or Black woman's perspective on theology and the Christian Church in the United States.