The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (18 page)

Murray closed her six-page letter with a warning: “The time will come when a Negro life will not be sacrificed on the altar of reactionary and behind-the-scene politics. As all Americans remember
Pearl Harbor, Negro Americans will remember Odell Waller, and we solemnly pledge that he shall not have died in vain.”

· · ·

A WEEK LATER
, Randolph called on Murray again. This time he wanted her to organize a demonstration to protest Waller’s execution and the poll tax. Murray recruited five hundred marchers with the help of local
March on Washington Movement activists and Maida
Springer, a young Panamanian immigrant who was a rising star in the
International Ladies’
Garment Workers’ Union. On the afternoon of July 25, 1942, they walked to
New York City’s
Union Square, dressed in white with black armbands, placards in hand, in somber silence to the “
throb of muffled drums.” Murray and Springer held a “
banner that went almost across the street,” which read, “
We solemnly pledge that our dead shall not have died in vain.”

This protest gave Murray a desperately needed outlet for her emotions. She sent a clipping about the parade with a note to the
first lady that said, “
The significance of this demonstration lies in the fact that it was Negro-inspired, led and executed; non-communist and non-political. It marks an era of independent action on the part of American Negro citizens to see to it our country fulfills the obligations of a democracy at home.”

· · ·

POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS PRECLUDED ER
from expressing her frustration in open letters or demonstrations. Still, she spoke out where she could. She told twenty-three hundred students at
Columbia University that the nation had to do more than simply talk about the problems of minorities to eliminate discrimination. In an obvious reference to
Waller, she added, “
There should be no such thing as a
sharecropping system in this country.” To a correspondent who took issue with her sympathy for Waller, ER replied, “
Times without number Negro men have been lynched or gone to their death without due process of law. No one questions Waller’s guilt, but they question the system which led to it.”

Behind closed doors at the White House, ER was grieving. Her pain, like Murray’s, gave way to anger. “
If this were a white man,” she told Tommy, who knew how much the first lady cared, “he would have gotten a small sentence or life at most. It’s one more case of racial injustice.”

· · ·

THE WDL HAD RAISED
$32,399 for Waller’s appeal, and it was $2,844 in debt after his funeral. While the campaign had failed to save Waller’s life, it was an important marker in the battle against the
poll tax, which the
U.S. Supreme Court would rule unconstitutional in 1966. It also fostered an alliance between Pauli Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt that was a turning point in their budding
friendship.

PART III

MAKING FRIENDS WITH THE FIRST LADY,
1942–44

Pauli Murray, now a second-year law school student (third from left, with short hair), and fellow African American delegates at the International Student Assembly in Washington, D.C., September 1942, were photographed by future filmmaker Gordon Parks, who worked for the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information. Murray was one of eighty-two representatives from the United States, which had the largest delegation.
(Library of Congress Prints and Photograph Division
)

14

“The Race Problem Is a War Issue”

S
till smarting over
Odell Waller’s execution and the failure of Congress to pass
anti-lynching
legislation, Pauli Murray wrote a brash letter to
Franklin Roosevelt on July 23, 1942. In it, she mocked the “
rationalization” government officials offered as explanation for
Executive Order 9066, granting the military authority to remove American citizens and residents of
Japanese ancestry from the West Coast and intern them in detention centers. “
As President of a nation at war,” Murray asserted, “you have almost unlimited emergency powers.… If Japanese Americans can be evacuated to prevent violence being perpetrated upon them by our less disciplined American citizens, then certainly you have
the power to evacuate Negro citizens from
‘lynching’ areas in the South, and particularly in the poll tax states.”

Murray accused the president of using “vague and general” language to maintain friendly relations “with the Southern bloc.” In contrast, his
Republican rival
Wendell Willkie boldly compared “
race prejudice to imperialism.” “
You are very much the subject of discussion among Negroes, Mr. President,” Murray wrote, and “they feel their votes were among that large balance of power which swung you into office for two successive terms.”

Murray was not sure that her letter would reach the president’s desk or if it would move him. So she sent it to Eleanor Roosevelt with a cover note: “
Will you read this letter and pass it on to the President? I only made one copy and did not want this one to get lost in a maize [
sic
] of secretariats. If there ever were a Woman’s Revolution, I’m afraid you’d have to run for President.” As justification for the tone of her missive to FDR, Murray added, “If some of our statements are bitter these days, you must remember that truth is our only sword.”

Although Murray’s intent was to rouse the president, her proposal—that the government evacuate African Americans from the South as it had done on the West Coast with
Japanese Americans—angered ER.
The
first lady’s indignation was rooted in her opposition to internment and her inability to persuade the administration that the policy was unjust. “
If we can not meet the challenge of fairness to our citizens of every nationality…regardless of race, creed or color; if we can not keep in check anti-semitism, anti-racial feelings as well as anti-religious feelings,” she had argued, “we shall have removed from the world, the one real hope for the future on which all humanity must now rely.” As FDR and his advisers moved forward with the evacuation program, ER implored, “
These people are good Americans and have the right to live as anyone else.” Despite her entreaty, the president issued his directive on February 19, 1942.

While the first lady did not publicly criticize the internment program after the executive order was issued, knowing that there were “
children behind barbed wire looking out at a free world” pained her.
She worked diligently to prevent ill treatment in the camps, separation of families, discrimination, and disenfranchisement. In no mood for Murray’s sarcastic “
outburst,” ER penned her sharpest letter to date.

August 3, 1942

Dear Miss Murray:

I am giving your letter to the President, but on my own I want to answer some of the things which you say and which you imply.

How many of our colored people in the South would like to be evacuated and treated as though they were not as rightfully here as any other people? I am deeply concerned that we have had to do that to the Japanese who are American citizens, but we are at war with Japan and they have only been citizens for a very short time. We would feel a resentment if we had to do this for citizens who have been here as long as most of the white people have.

And now, as to what you say about the President’s not having been forthright and the interest with which you are watching Mr. Willkie:

I wonder if it ever occurred to you that Mr. Willkie has no responsibility whatsoever? He can say whatever he likes and do whatever he likes, and nothing very serious will happen. If he were elected President, on that day, he would have to begin not to just plan a program to meet the conditions in the country which he would like to see changed, but he would have to take into consideration the people who are heads of important committees in Congress, none of whom he has chosen but with whom he must work, and who are the people on whom he must depend to pass vital legislation for the nation as a whole. People elect the members of Congress, and they are there and have equal power. The only thing he could do would be to initiate legislation and of course they could refuse to pass it.

For one who must really have a knowledge of the workings of our kind of government, your letter seems to me one of the most thoughtless I have ever read. Of course I can say just how I feel, but I could not say it with as much sense of security unless the President were willing for me to do so. I have no responsibility; I am not elected and not running for office; I am responsible only to myself for what I do; I do not owe the same responsibility to the people as a whole. It is very easy for us as individuals to think of what we would do if we were in office, but we forget that with the election to the office of President go at the same time infinite restrictions and the kind of responsibility which is never ours as private citizens.

The appointment of the Fair Practices Committee in itself indicates where the President stands. That group may not achieve everything we would like to have them achieve, but that only means that we have to face realities and that we cannot move faster than the people wish us to move.

Very sincerely yours,

Eleanor Roosevelt

The first lady’s heated reply prompted a fiery epistle from Murray on race, war, and democracy.

August 9, 1942

Dear Mrs. Roosevelt:

Since a letter which I assumed would be handled in routine fashion has evoked a personal response from you, would you bear with me while I attempt to express my point of view on the great problem of race? …

You have been utterly frank with me, and I should like to be equally frank with you.…

I do not deny that my letter to President Roosevelt seems thoughtless, even reckless. Certainly, it was not intended to offer any fundamental solution to a major problem. It was written from a depth of desperation and disgust, such as every thinking Negro often experiences. Desperation—in that there must be some way of bringing home to the American people our utterly untenable position of fighting in democracy’s name for supremacy over the Axis powers, while 13,000,000 of our own citizens are victims of a racial theory as vicious as Hitler’s. Disgust—because our President has the power and the prestige to set in motion the wheels of public opinion for the support of legislation and other measures which are necessary to eliminate some of the very evils of which you and Mrs. [Pearl] Buck speak, and some of us cannot understand why he does not use this power more vigorously. Somehow, somebody has got to find a way to dramatize the fascist-like nature of lynching, segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and the comparable stupidities of racial supremacy. Somebody has got to make clear to the entire country that to pursue these policies further is suicidal.

At this moment no person can do this more effectively than Mr. Roosevelt.…

On the point of Mr. Willkie, surely you could not have thought me so politically immature as to be taken in by any statement or promise from the Republican Party. Neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party holds any promise for Negro Americans as I see it. Mr. Roosevelt’s party has in it a southern bloc which is perpetuated by the southern poll tax and the Northern Democrats and which is pledged to the Hitler theory of racial supremacy, whether we like to admit it or not. But many Negroes do not share my lack of faith in the possibilities of the Republican Party, and it was because of this that I raised the question.

The appointment of the Fair Employment Practices Committee was a step in the right direction but the President issued Executive Order No. 8802 out of which it grew mainly because the Government was faced with a march on Washington by Negroes throughout the country. If anything, it seems to indicate that the President will remain aloof from the Negro question until there is an organized resentment and pressure as to make it a national embarrassment if he does not act.

All that I am pleading for is that he take the initiative in these matters, and point out we cannot come into the world struggle for democracy with dirty hands. He must search out scathingly the denials of democracy to Negroes, Asiatics, Jews and other minorities at home, and abroad, as a war measure, that these be corrected immediately. He must, in some way, make Great Britain realize that her policy of arresting Indian Nationalist leaders is disastrous to the cause of democracy. If we really mean what we say, when we speak of the Four Freedoms, then give India her freedom and release the creative energies of Gandhi, Nehru and the Indian masses to work in our behalf. American Negroes cannot separate their struggle for equality from the Indian’s struggle for independence, and the silence of our government on this crucial question, will be construed to mean that we too can hope for no real stakes in the peace to follow this war.…