In linking the fate of the civil rights movement to Wallace’s speech, she reminds us that the Constitution makes for strange bedfellows. It applies to segregationists and integrationists, civil rights activists and self-proclaimed racists. All Americans can lay claim to its protections, but those, like Murray, who seek to change society and extend freedoms to the most marginalized may need it most.

By the time she arrived at Yale, Murray was an experienced activist and a disciple of nonviolent protest. Fifteen years before the Montgomery bus boycott, she and a friend refused to sit on broken seats in the Jim Crow section of a Virginia bus, landing them both in jail. As a law student at Howard University, she led some of the earliest sit-ins, successfully integrating whites-only eating establishments in Washington.

Unsurprisingly, then, Murray had every intention of protesting Wallace should his visit take place, but not his right to speak — and she would not prevent others from hearing him. “I would be among the first to picket such a meeting,” she assured Brewster. But she urged him not to “compromise the tradition of freedom of speech and academic inquiry” by barring Wallace from campus.

Brewster did not take Murray’s advice, and the invitation was withdrawn at his request. Some years later, he asked the eminent historian C. Vann Woodward to lead a committee to examine free expression at Yale. The committee endorsed many of the arguments Murray had made to Brewster — even though they never saw her letter — and its report continues to guide Yale’s policies on freedom of expression.

“The right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable,” as the Woodward Report states, is essential to fulfilling the university’s dual missions of education and research. As a scholar who spent much of her life as both student and teacher, Murray would surely have appreciated the inseparable relationship between free expression and intellectual discovery.

“I intend to destroy segregation by positive and embracing methods,” Murray wrote in the magazine Common Ground when she was 35 years old. “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.”