Before Rosa, and Claudette, there was Pauli.

Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in December of 1955.

Nine months before Parks’s act of defiance, Claudette Colvin (at just 15 years old) was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus.

And yet, FIFTEEN YEARS before Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin, 29-year-old Pauli Murray was arrested after ignoring a bus driver’s directions to move to the back of the bus. Murray self-described as a mixture of genders, in language most closely resembling modern non-binary or gender fluid identities.

Pauli Murray went on to become a lawyer, women’s rights activist, Episcopal priest, and author, and yet, has largely been left out of American history books.

Learn more about this trailblazing activist at the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice.