The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (10 page)

Unwilling to sanction DAR policy by keeping quiet, on February 26, the first lady wrote to President General
Mrs. Henry M. Robert Jr., “
I am in complete disagreement with the attitude taken in refusing Constitution Hall to a great artist. You have set an example which seems to me unfortunate, and I feel obliged to send in to you my resignation. You had an opportunity to lead in an enlightened way and it seems to me that your organization has failed.”

In her column the next day, ER discussed the deliberations that led her to resign. While she did not name the organization, press accounts of the Anderson concert controversy left no doubt about the target of the first lady’s disapproval.

I have been debating in my mind for some time, a question which I have had to debate with myself once or twice before in my life.… The question is, if you belong to an organization and disapprove of an action which is typical policy, should you resign or is it better to work for a changed point of view within the organization? In the past, when I was able to work actively in any organization to which I belonged, I have usually stayed until I had at least made a fight and had been defeated.

…But in this case, I belong to an organization in which I can do no active work. They have taken an action which has been widely talked about in the press. To remain as a member implies approval of that action, and therefore I am resigning.

The first lady’s advocacy for Anderson did not end with her resignation or the remarks in her column.
After a group known as the
Marian Anderson Citizens Committee, cochaired by former Howard University School of Law dean
Charles Hamilton Houston and Secretary of the Interior
Harold Ickes, arranged for Anderson to give a free concert on the steps of the
Lincoln Memorial, ER agreed to serve as honorary cosponsor.
Over a hundred politicians, religious and civil rights leaders, and artists joined her. In that distinguished group were Secretary of the Navy
Claude A. Swanson, Secretary of the Treasury Henry
Morgenthau Jr., Attorney General
Frank Murphy, Supreme Court Justices
Charles Hughes and
Hugo Black, orchestra conductor
Leopold Stokowski, and actor
Katharine Hepburn.

The Easter Sunday concert was a critical and political success. Its interracial audience, some seventy-five thousand strong, was the largest for a performance of this kind hosted at the Capitol. There were no incidents and no segregation among the platform guests or in the audience. Millions listened to the radio broadcast.

As Anderson, a caramel-skinned woman clad in a full-length fur coat, took her place behind a bank of microphones and sang,
“My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” a wave of emotion washed over the crowd. Many wept silently, moved by her rich deep voice, the patriotic song, and her prayerful bearing against the backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial. That this magnificent artist could sing in the best venues around the world but not in certain sections of her own country was a message about injustice the nation could not ignore. While Eleanor Roosevelt did not attend the concert, her support assured Anderson the national audience she deserved.

Within weeks of the first lady’s resignation, a survey conducted by the
American Institute of Public Opinion indicated that 67 percent of the public approved of her decision. Although the survey results were good news, ER had decided to follow her own mind no matter what. “
I have by now learned to care little or nothing for what other people may think,” she wrote in the May 23 issue of
Look
magazine. “I have a belief that one must hold to personal standards rather than wait for the judgment of others.”

ER’s personal standards allowed her to wear a comfortable gingham
dress and serve Nathan’s hot dogs with ham and smoked turkey to the queen and king of England and their entourage at a picnic on the Roosevelt estate. The first lady’s attire and the menu embarrassed many social elites, including her mother-in-law, Sara, and some White House staffers. The royals, on the other hand, had “
great fun.” King George liked his very first hot dog so much he asked for seconds.

Pauli Murray took note of
ER’s comments and actions. Still roiled by the UNC decision and her inability to challenge it in court, she aimed to see just how far the first lady was willing to go on the question of social justice.

5

“We…Are the Disinherited”

I
n August 1939, shortly before the government eliminated the Workers’
Education Project, for which Pauli Murray worked, she took the position of acting executive secretary for the
Negro People’s Committee for
Spanish Refugees. The NPC, an auxiliary of the
North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, was established to raise financial and moral support from African Americans for refugees who fled Spain after the dictator
Francisco Franco defeated the democratically elected government. Murray’s assignment was to raise an operating budget that included her own salary—a tall order for someone not yet thirty with no executive experience.
Compounding this challenge was internecine conflict among the organization’s leaders.

The NPC board and its sponsors were a contentious group of
political figures. Among the most influential were Democrats Mary McLeod
Bethune and Lester
Granger, Republican
Hubert T. Delaney,
Communists
Paul Robeson and
William L. Patterson, and socialist
A. Philip Randolph. Murray was
personally closest to Granger, her former supervisor at the
National Urban League. But she did not share his allegiance to the
Democratic Party. After voting for the
Socialist Party ticket in the 1932 presidential election and her brief association with the Communist Party (Opposition), she was politically independent.

Notwithstanding the gamesmanship, workload, and uncertain salary, Murray’s work put a face on the victims of war.
Photographs of grief-stricken refugees, many of whom were children, marched across her desk. These images, plus the updates she received from
Brookwood Labor College classmates who had joined the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the
military units of American volunteers fighting in support of the Spanish Republic against Franco, kept her going.

Murray’s job gave her reason to contact Eleanor Roosevelt, who was already engaged in refugee relief.
The first lady had sponsored
Lorenzo Murias, a twelve-year-old who had lost his family in the Spanish Civil War, and she denounced the “
propaganda of fear” and discrimination against émigrés. In “
My Day,” she praised the noted black artist
Richmond Barthé for donating “
his sculptured figures of two Spanish refugee children” to the NPC.

Looking to capitalize on
ER’s special interest in refugee children, Murray forwarded an information packet, a thank-you letter for the “
mention” of Barthé’s gift, and a news clipping featuring photos of four-year-old
Aguileo Sardo Alejo and ten-year-old
Rosa Marin Gonzalez, whom the NPC had adopted with the proceeds from the sale of the sculpture. Murray was also concerned about the growing number of
Ethiopian refugees displaced by Italy’s invasion of their homeland. Since the NPC had no resources to help them, she asked ER to bring the “
Ethiopian question” to the attention of the American public and the
Intergovernmental Commission on Refugees.

Although the first lady acknowledged receipt of Murray’s material, she did not explicitly refer to the NPC again in “My Day.” She did call, to Murray’s satisfaction, for greater coordination in war relief.

· · ·

DURING THE FIRST WEEK
of December, Murray wrote to the White House twice.
Her first communiqué, dated December 2, went to Franklin Roosevelt, who was considering a replacement for the recently deceased Associate
Supreme Court Justice
Pierce Butler. Murray’s goal was to persuade FDR to name “a qualified Negro” jurist to the high court. Having watched the president’s proposal to expand the number of justices go down in defeat, Murray sought to assuage the loss with a missive that bore no resemblance to her testy statement about his UNC speech. She waxed eloquent about the president’s charisma and the country’s affection for “the second Roosevelt.” She suggested, somewhat tactlessly, that there was an upside to Butler’s death: “It might be a miracle of history that what you could not gain through personal influence and intelligent persuasion has been achieved for you through what some would be prone to call ‘acts of God.’ ”

White House press secretary
Stephen T. Early promptly acknowledged
Murray’s letter, but her wish for a black Supreme Court justice was not to be. FDR nominated Attorney General Frank Murphy, and the Senate would confirm him in January.

Murray’s second letter, dated December 6, went to Eleanor Roosevelt, and it addressed a personal concern.
Murray had left the NPC after only three months. She found it nearly impossible to raise funds from blacks, and the effort was exhausting. And her disagreements with the
Communists associated with the NPC reached a breaking point when the
Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with
Nazi
Germany and then
Hitler invaded
Poland, as did the Soviet Union. Not only did Murray “
disapprove of the Soviet Union action,” she told a board member, she did not “believe in any form of totalitarian government be it nazi or communist,” and she had “absolutely no respect for the Communist Party and its tactics.”

The stress Murray felt over having to quit her job was exacerbated by the unexpected arrival of her aunt Sallie’s seventeen- and twenty-year-old sons, Joshua and James. Their father, the Reverend John Ethophilus Gratten Small, had died of a stroke, leaving the
family with no support. The boys were heartbroken, and their mother, awash in her own grief, sent them to Murray. Being unemployed again and unable to provide for her nephews and herself was devastating.

Murray described her
situation in an opinion that she sent to several newspapers. Attributing its authorship to a friend, she asked ER to read it “
with the hope that you can find some space in your
column, ‘My Day,’ to comment upon the reaction such a letter inspires.”

December 6, 1939

To the Editor:

…Our family of three has just been subjected to the degrading experience of re-application for relief after four years of WPA, odd jobs and whatever we could turn our hands to. The fact that we prefer to make our way on a combined income of $13.00 weekly from employment at lower wage standards than WPA, is irrelevant.

We say degrading experience, not because the techniques of administering relief have not improved in the last four years. The interviewers are more patient and more courteous, they make an all-too-obvious effort to take the sting out of the situation, there is more dignity in the interview and the effort to interpret a harsh welfare law is commendable.

The fact remains that while there are no longer mass demon strations of unemployed organizations against the unfairness and inadequacy of the relief system, the position of the applicant is none the less unbearable.

It is the sense of isolation, of being literally driven into these places by the whip of necessity, it is the inevitable loss of dignity, of self-assurance and personal identity when one has mustered the moral courage necessary to cross the threshold of a district office.

It is the surrender of personal pride and self-esteem sacred to the individual when he becomes a mere number on a yellow slip of paper. It is the waste of time and emotional energy that comes with waiting in a bare reception room, on ridiculous stiff-backed benches in an atmosphere of grimness and desolation which makes the applicant feel like a prisoner awaiting trial. The moral and economic responsibility for oneself and loved ones makes the imprisonment all the more real just because the bars are invisible and unfelt.

It is the undeniable fact that no preoccupation with newspapers, knitting, interesting books or a personal philosophy can offset the period of waiting in the relief office.…

Because they sit there mutely, inarticulate and helpless, like flies in a huge web of circumstances over which they have no control, they are no less members of the great human family and representatives of the highest creation of nature on this planet.

Looking at all these miserable, frustrated, unused people, we cannot help thinking that the difference between our plight and that of the European refugees is only one of degree.

We, who are the disinherited, who are forced to become public charges in spite of every effort on our parts, conclude that the long-time tragedies of peace may be more devastating, if allowed to continue, than those of war.

Whatever the cause for this state of being, until democratic society can find a dignified use for all the individuals who comprise it, there can be no peace.

Yours very truly,

[unsigned]

The emotional impact of unemployment Murray described, and her reference to the futility of knitting, one of ER’s favorite hobbies, got the first lady’s attention. “
The other day I was sent an extremely interesting letter from a woman who, after four years on WPA, with odd jobs of various kinds to fill in, finds that her family today is forced back on relief,” she wrote in “My Day.” While ER may not have seen through Murray’s subterfuge, the last three paragraphs stayed with her. After quoting them,
the first lady told readers, “I don’t think there is any way in which we can save people from relief registration, but I do think that letters of this kind should remind us of the necessity of continuing to solve our own economic problems.”

Elated, Murray wrote to
Malvina Thompson. “
Will you kindly extend my appreciation to Mrs. Roosevelt for her use of my enclosure in her column on December 14? Her comment was quite timely.” Now that Murray had the first lady’s attention, it was time to set up a file for correspondence with the White House.