Born in Baltimore, Maryland

Anna Pauline Murray was born on November 20, 1910, in Baltimore, Maryland, to William Henry Murray, a schoolteacher, and Agnes Georgiana Fitzgerald Murray, a nurse. Pauli was the fourth of six children in a mixed-race family that embodied the complex racial history of the American South, with ancestors who were both enslaved and enslavers, as well as free people of color and immigrants from Ireland and England.

Following the death of her mother in 1914 and her father's subsequent illness, young Pauli was raised in Durham, North Carolina, by her aunt Pauline Fitzgerald Dame and her grandparents Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald. This upbringing in the Jim Crow South profoundly shaped Murray's early understanding of racial injustice and inequality, experiences that would later fuel a lifetime of activism, legal scholarship, and religious ministry.

Murray's birth in this era of entrenched segregation set the stage for a life that would challenge and ultimately help dismantle many of the racial and gender barriers of 20th-century America. Their intersectional identity as a Black, gender-nonconforming person navigating both civil rights and women's rights movements made Murray's contributions uniquely foundational to multiple liberation struggles.