Originally posted as #SistoryLessons newsletter, June 1, 2026
I've been thinking about the fact that this is Pride month. As a society, we are being asked to "celebrate" Pride 2026 in a context where LGBTQIA+ people—and those who stand with them—are watching their rights erode in real time. So more than symbolic Pride, I have my mind on refusal. As usual, the refusal I'm thinking about is refusal to be erased. If the opposite of erasure is visibility, June 2026 is an excellent month to consider who we choose to support, protect, and uplift—especially as their agency and rights are being so overtly contested.
This issue of #SistoryLessons honors three Foremothers (one of whom might today be understood as a trans man) who remind us that identity itself is only part of the story. The celebration is about how we wield our power, our gifts, and our voice, always toward freedom. Please meet Pauli Murray and Lorraine Hansberry, departed Brave Sis icons from my book, and Chérrie Moraga, who is still living and whose 1970s anthology is still very timely and relevant today.
Gender and sexual identity are not the full expression of a human being. These three Foremothers—a Black nonbinary legal scholar whose 1944 law school paper supplied the intellectual architecture for Brown v. Board of Education; a Black queer playwright who transformed a Chicago housing battle into the first Broadway production by a Black woman; and a Chicana lesbian poet who co-edited the anthology that showed American feminism what intersectionality felt like decades before Kimberlé Crenshaw gave it language—show us exactly what that fuller expression can look like when it is uninhibited by bias and hatred.
Pauli Murray: The Person Who Coined the Phrase “Jane Crow”
Born Anna Pauline Murray on November 20, 1910, in Baltimore, Maryland, Pauli Murray was raised in Durham, North Carolina, by an aunt after the deaths of both parents. They graduated first in the 1944 class at Howard Law School, having been refused admission to UNC's graduate program on the basis of race (1938) and to Harvard Law on the basis of sex (1944)—and turned each refusal into a published argument that reshaped the field.
Pauli's accomplishments are so many: helping a newly independent Ghana build out its legal system; co-founding the National Organization for Women in 1966; serving as a tenured professor at Brandeis University, helping establish both the African American Studies and Women's Studies programs there. They were also a celebrated memoirist and poet. Post-academic career, Pauli attended General Theological Seminary and, upon ordination, became the first Black "woman" (person assigned female at birth) ordained as an Episcopal priest, leading from the pulpit for eight years. Murray died in 1985 and was added to the Episcopal calendar of saints in 2012.
"True community is based upon equality, mutuality, and reciprocity. It affirms the richness of individual diversity as well as the common human ties that bind us together." — Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat
Reflection: What parts of you challenge categories—and teach justice?
Lorraine Hansberry: Storytelling with Truth and Fire
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930, in Chicago, into a family that had already made a mark on the civic life of this country. Her father, Carl Hansberry, brought Hansberry v. Lee (1940) to the U.S. Supreme Court and partially won the right of Black families to live outside Chicago's restrictive-covenant zone. Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison for two years before leaving school, moving to New York's Greenwich Village, and immersing herself in theater and Black leftist journalism.
She wrote her debut play, A Raisin in the Sun, at age 28. It opened on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959, and ran for 530 performances—the first Broadway play written by a Black woman, and the first directed by a Black director (Lloyd Richards) on Broadway in nearly fifty years.
Lorraine was married to white Jewish songwriter and political organizer Robert Nemiroff (a working partnership more than a romantic one) and also lived a private lesbian life. She had one more play make it to Broadway before dying of pancreatic cancer on January 12, 1965, in New York City, at the young age of 34. The posthumous To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969) became a touchstone for a generation; Nina Simone wrote the song of the same name in her honor.
"I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love." — Lorraine Hansberry
Reflection: What parts of you challenge categories—and teach justice?
Cherríe Moraga: Champion for Radical Feminists and Queer Lives
Our third featured Foremother breaks our general convention by honoring someone who is still alive, but she's so significant to scholarship and LGBTQIA+ rights, I needed to include her. Cherríe Lawrence was born on September 25, 1952, in Whittier, California, to a Chicana mother and an Anglo father. It was during her graduate-school years at San Francisco State University, as she came out to herself, to her family, and to the small Bay Area lesbian-feminist writing world, that she took her mother's surname, Moraga, as her writing name and chosen inheritance.
In 1981, Moraga co-edited what is arguably the single most influential book in the development of women-of-color feminism in the United States: This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, co-edited with Gloria Anzaldúa. Moraga also wrote Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (1983), one of the first openly lesbian Chicana memoirs in English. At 73 as of this writing, she is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and co-founder of La Red Xicana Indígena.
"The danger lies in ranking the oppressions." — Cherríe Moraga, "La Güera," in This Bridge Called My Back
Reflection: Turned away by every major feminist press of the late 1970s, Bridge finally found a home only at a tiny lesbian-feminist press in Watertown, Massachusetts. What is something you swear by that has not been accepted by "mainstream" channels?
Reflection and Action
Talk about intersections! Pauli Murray was queer, gender-expansive, Black, Southern, a lawyer, and a priest. The country had no language for any of it at the time. What language are you still missing for the truth of your own life?
Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin is built on a question: what do we do with the inheritance? What is the inheritance—money, expectation, story, trauma, hope—that you are deciding what to do with?
Chérrie Moraga's anthology is largely about the refusal to rank oppressions. Where in your own thinking—or in the communities you encounter—does that ranking still happen?
Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White Friends
Visit or donate to the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice in Durham, North Carolina, housed in Pauli's childhood home.
Hansberry v. Lee (1940) is one of the foundational cases in the legal history of housing segregation. The Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley maintains maps of present-day racial covenant residues—find out whether the deed to your own house still contains a (now-unenforceable) racial covenant.
Learn about Audre Lorde, the Black lesbian feminist poet who inspired Chérrie Moraga's work.
What These Women Knew, and What We Must Remember
Pauli Murray drafted the argument that would later anchor Brown v. Board in a Howard Law thesis their senior classmates dismissed. Lorraine Hansberry signed her most theoretically advanced lesbian-feminist writing with initials, because the full name would have ended her career in 1957. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa carried their anthology from one tiny press to another until it found a home—and it became one of the most influential feminist tomes of the past sixty years. From these people, we can remember that you don't always have to wait to be welcomed to make a difference. Your stubborn, daily willingness to keep doing the work, under conditions designed to shut you up, is the heroism (she-roism).
Thanks for reading this edition of #SistoryLessons, a biweekly newsletter that uses the lessons from Foremothers who led the way as encouragement and guide for these times of resilience. The series is based on stories from my award-winning book, Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History, and other, ongoing research.