Dear Friends:
As a memory keeper, I take seriously my mission to uplift the life, work, and legacies of Black, 
Southern ancestors to offer liberatory pathways for us today. As chief steward of Pauli Murray’s 
childhood home and ancestral land, it has been the honor of a lifetime to open the home to the public, 
and to secure funding to purchase our land outright. Just a few years ago, these achievements felt 
out of reach. Now, I nurture the talents of a brilliant staff, and strategize alongside a passionate 
board, to uplift Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray’s legacy as a means to catalyze contemporary social justice 
work, within the home that seeded her activism. 
Today at the Center, we challenge people to consider the possibility that Murray was not a remarkable 
person, but rather an everyday person who did remarkable things. This reframing creates a bridge 
between us and Murray, and invites everyday people to activate contemporary social justice work 
by adopting Murray’s activist framework; which requires that we have a clear mission, concrete 
action steps to execute that mission, and a strong set of values to ground those action steps.
As we round out our first year as a publicly open Center, we celebrate that we have transformed 
into a space of resistance, reclamation, and respite, offering high-impact experiences that 
enliven Murray’s activist framework for thousands of individuals: like our Social Justice Teaching 
Fellowship, which supports educators in sharing stories like Pauli’s (which in some cases are legally 
censored in the state of NC) while retaining their jobs; or like our name and gender marker change 
clinics, which support LGBTQIA+ folks in claiming their identities in partnership with attorneys from 
across the state. We have also scaled the operations of the Center, growing our staff, maturing our 
organizational systems, and more than doubling our revenue. 
 
This work, despite censorship and disinvestment from the federal government, which argued in 
2025 that the work of the Pauli Murray Center  “no longer serves the interests of the United States”.
As we look towards the future, we remain courageous in the face of a treacherous socio-political 
climate. The spirit of Rev. Dr. Murray will not allow despair to swallow us whole. As such, I will 
continue to steward the work with care, as I guide the Pauli Murray Center through our next set of 
priorities:
1.	 Transforming our outdoor greenspace into a functional gathering and programming area, 
in partnership with our friends at Perkins+Will.
2.	 Guiding our team through a strategic plan, as we explore what it means to be a center 
for history and social justice, rooted in Murray’s distinct legacy, now...and into the future.
3.	 Sustaining our operations, and scaling our revenue towards $1 million. 
Our work continues because Murray, too, lived in a time when American democracy hung in the 
balance; when racial terror violence was a threat to Black lives; when it was dangerous to exist as 
a member of the LGBTQ community; when women’s rights were under attack; when the world bore 
witness to global conflict; when technology and the environment were rapidly transforming; when 
the political system failed to meet the needs of most. Let’s walk together in the “...endless march 
towards freedom...”
Onward,
                           Angela Thorpe Mason, Executive Director
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