Moses Fleetwood Walker was born in 1856 in Mount Pleasant, a working-class town in Eastern Ohio that had served as a sanctuary for runaway slaves since 1815. Its population included a large Quaker community and a unique collective of former Virginian slaves. Walker's parents, Moses W. Walker and Caroline O' Harra, were both mixed race. According to Walker's biographer David W. Zang, his father came to Ohio from Pennsylvania, likely a beneficiary of Quaker patronage, and married O'Harra, who was a native of the state, on June 11, 1843. When Walker was three years old, the family moved 20 miles northeast to Steubenville where Mr Walker senior became one of the first black physicians of Ohio, and later a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church. There, Walker's fifth or sixth sibling, his younger brother Weldy, was born the same year. Walker and Weldy attended Steubenville High School in the early 1870s, just as the community passed legislation for racial integration.