Bonus Essay . March 24, 2026

The room in Durham, North Carolina is small by most measures. A modest house on Carroll Street, now a center for history and social justice. My chorus — One Voice — visited it last month while preparing to perform a cantata about the person who once lived there.

I walked in expecting to learn something. I didn't expect to be undone.

Pauli Murray — born Anna Pauline Murray in 1910 — was a civil rights activist, legal scholar, poet, labor organizer, and Episcopal priest. The first African American woman ordained in the Episcopal Church. A co-founder of the National Organization for Women. A legal theorist whose writing became foundational to the arguments in Brown v. Board of Education, and whose work on gender discrimination Ruth Bader Ginsburg would later name as central to a landmark Supreme Court case.

You have likely never heard of her.

That's not an accident. And it's exactly what this essay is about.

There is a quote on the wall of Pauli Murray's home that stopped me cold.

"When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind."

Read that again.

Not despite being excluded. Not after winning. In direct response to exclusion — as a deliberate act of radical generosity — she chose to expand the circle.

I am a gay man. Belonging and inclusion have been woven into my professional practice for most of my career — through roles that didn't carry the title, through the work I did formally as a DEI executive, through the Pepperdine program that sharpened my ability to consult and lead in that space, and through the HR Risk and Associate Relations work I do today, where I embed that lens in everything I touch. Visibility for others — particularly those who came after me — has been one of the driving forces of my professional life. I know what exclusion feels like from the inside. I have spent decades working to dismantle it.

And I stood in that room in Durham and felt the distance between what Pauli practiced and what I manage to practice on my hardest days.

There are people in my world — people whose politics feel antithetical to everything I believe in, everything I have worked for — around whom I have quietly drawn a smaller circle. Not with malice. With the ordinary human instinct to protect yourself and the communities you love from people who seem determined to exclude them.

Pauli Murray was a Black, gender-nonconforming person in the mid-twentieth century American South. The forces drawing circles around her weren't abstract. They were legal, institutional, and at times physical. She existed at the intersection of identities that the world around her was actively working to erase — one by one and all at once.

And still she chose to expand.

I needed a minute.

The leaders we most often celebrate are the ones who were seen. Whose names appear on the decisions, the legislation, the headlines.

Pauli Murray's story is a lesson in a different kind of leadership — the kind that builds the floor others stand on, and never gets to stand on the stage.

Her 1944 law school paper challenged the legal basis of segregation in a way that would eventually become the intellectual architecture of Brown v. Board of Education. Thurgood Marshall called her book on segregation law the bible of the civil rights movement. Ruth Bader Ginsburg named her as a coauthor of a landmark ACLU brief years later.

But here is the detail that broke something open in me.

Pauli Murray didn't know her work had been used in Brown v. Board. Not when the decision came down. Not for years afterward. She'd written the paper as a law student, never kept a copy, and moved on — assuming it was coursework, not the seed of the most consequential civil rights ruling in American history.

She found out by chance. Years after the decision, she ran into a professor on the street. A man she had made a small bet with — that her legal argument would one day be upheld by the courts.

He told her he owed her ten dollars.

That is how she learned she had helped change America.

Think about what that means — not for Pauli Murray only. Think about who is sitting in your organization right now, doing foundational work that you are benefiting from, and whether they know it. Whether you've told them. Whether the system even has a mechanism for that kind of acknowledgment, or whether it simply absorbs the contribution and moves on.

Pauli's erasure wasn't a decision someone made. It was the water the whole system swam in. That's what makes it worth naming now — because it is still happening. In boardrooms and project teams and meetings where the wrong people are introduced as the experts. The invisibility of foundational work is not a relic of the 1950s. It is a present-tense leadership failure.

There was something else in that house that stayed with me.

Her typewriter.

An old manual model — hammer keys, ink ribbon — sitting exactly where she left it. Every word Pauli put to paper cost something. Physical effort. Time. The patience to correct mistakes that couldn't be fixed with a keystroke.

And yet she sat at that machine — between everything else she was fighting, surviving, and becoming — and she changed the world.

I thought about how frictionless it is to write now. How easily a half-formed thought can stay half-formed. The typewriter isn't an indictment of ease. It's a question about what we do with it.

One Voice is a queer chorus. And what happens inside it is more than music.

For some of our members, that rehearsal room is the first place they were ever fully out. For some, it is the only place they have ever felt entirely safe. For some, the stakes beyond those walls are not abstract — they are immediate and, at times, life-threateningly real. When we say that singing together is an act of resistance, we are not speaking in metaphors. We are speaking about survival. About the radical act of existing fully and without apology in a world that keeps drawing circles around you.

One Voice is not alone in this. Across the country and across art forms, there are communities of people who show up — with their voices, their bodies, their instruments, their canvases — and insist on being seen. Queer theater companies. Black dance ensembles. Indigenous poets. Disability arts collectives. The act of making beautiful things while the world debates your right to exist fully in it is its own form of argument. It always has been. The Harlem Renaissance was resistance. The AIDS quilt was resistance. Every performance, every gallery opening, every open mic in a community center where someone finally says what they have never been able to say out loud — resistance.

Pauli Murray understood that logic from the inside. Her education was an act of resistance. Her legal writing was an act of resistance. Her ordination was an act of resistance. Every time she showed up fully in a room that had been designed to exclude her — or hadn't been designed with her in mind at all — she was drawing the larger circle.

That is what One Voice does when we sing. That is what artists across every margin have always done. Not in a smaller register than Pauli's. In the same register. Across a century.

The cantata we are performing closes with a simple provocation: Whatcha gonna do?

Not rhetorical. An actual question.

Pauli Murray didn't have the language for who she was. She didn't have institutions that wanted her. She didn't have a system designed to preserve her contributions or protect her identity. She had a typewriter, a legal mind, an unresolved sense of self that the world around her had no framework for — and an extraordinary will to give of herself in service of people who would never know her name.

I have spent decades striving to build belonging as a practice and a calling. I have more language, more tools, more institutional support than Pauli Murray could have ever imagined. And I still struggle. The larger circle is not a destination you arrive at. It is a decision you make again and again — including toward people who seem determined to make it hard.

That's not an excuse. It's a confession. And an invitation.

If someone in your organization is building the floor others stand on — today is a good day to make sure they know it.

And if you find yourself drawing a smaller circle, you now know what Pauli Murray would have done with the same provocation.

She left us the answer. On a wall in Durham.

We just have to mean it.

Pauli Murray never got to hear the conversations she started. You can start one tonight, at dinner.