Why did Pauli Murray become a priest?

It's one of the questions we hear most often from visitors exploring Pauli Murray's childhood home. We know Murray as a writer, activist, and attorney, but Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray was also a priest (and later a saint!) in the Episcopal tradition. For Pauli, the priesthood wasn't a departure from a lifetime of justice work. It was a continuation of it. Murray reflects in a sermon that “in my earliest youth I sought to work out intolerable frustrations through poetry. As I became more deeply involved in the civil rights movement in the 1940s, I turned to the law as a means of working within the system for social change. In time, as the world crisis has deepened, I began to realize that the law by itself is inadequate to cope with the fundamental moral and ethical issues of our time, and this led me to theology.”