Pauli Murray was a civil rights activist, a pioneering feminist, a labor organizer, a lawyer, an Episcopal priest, and a writer of nonfiction, memoir, and poetry. Born Anna Pauline Murray in Baltimore, she was raised by aunts and maternal grandparents. Her grandmother was born into slavery, the product of rape between her enslaved mother and her owner. Murray’s mother died when Murray was just three years old; her father, committed to an asylum “for the Negro insane” for his symptoms of long-term typhoid fever, also died during Murray’s childhood, beaten to death by a guard.

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