The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (26 page)

Murray cringed at the thought of all the letters she had “
fired at the First Lady since 1938.” She had wondered if ER was “too fragile” to withstand the vitriol of critics like Senator
Bilbo. But ER’s memoir revealed her to be as strong as “fine-tempered steel.” Moreover, Murray had learned “something as a writer” from the first lady—that “simplicity and directness” could be beautiful as well as effective.

“We’re a great people, Mrs. R.,” Murray noted. “If we can just straighten ourselves out, we’ll really live up to the faith other nations have placed in us.” “
Los Angeles is a confusing place at first but I think the people are gay and free,” ER wrote back. “I feel just as you do about the country as a whole. It is a wonderful place when you see it as you did.”

The trip also turned Murray’s thoughts to race relations in the postwar period. Although her previous proposal to evacuate blacks from the South for their protection had offended ER, the harmonious relations between blacks and whites in the sparsely populated Rocky Mountain region impressed Murray, and she returned to the issue of resettlement. “
You resisted this idea once, but won’t you reconsider the possibility of helping Negro families to resettle on vacant western lands—if they desire,” Murray asked. “If Negroes could spread out, become homesteaders, the prejudice of slums and cities would not be so great.… Please think it over again—there’ll be a need for some plan—many plans in the post-war era.”

White hostility toward black workers in crowded cities and the growing alienation among blacks worried Murray.
“Mrs. R., the Negro soldiers are so bitter,” she said. “And Negroes themselves are bitter. There are too few of us who feel American and too many of us who feel hyphenated.… I know that you cannot solve the world’s problems by yourself, (altho I sometimes write you as if I expected you to).”

Murray’s suggestion that blacks move voluntarily to small towns in the West appealed to ER. She had never “
opposed” the voluntary “scattering of Negro people in different parts of the country,” she wrote back. In fact, she “openly advocated” this and thought it “would be a great thing for the returning soldiers.”

· · ·

MURRAY FOLLOWED REPORTS OF
Franklin Roosevelt’s health closely.
Hoarseness, sinusitis, bronchitis, influenza, intestinal upset, and a cyst “
the size of a hen’s egg” removed from the back of his neck forced a cutback in his work schedule. Murray had no knowledge of the “
unsteadiness of his hand as he lit his cigarette” or his labored breathing. Even so, she was concerned about the dark circles underneath the president’s eyes and his emaciated appearance in newsreels and press photos.

Rumors that FDR was ill and would not seek another term were widespread.
Pronouncements about the president’s sound health from his personal physician, Vice Admiral
Ross T. McIntire, failed to silence gossip that he might not run. Finally, at a press conference on July 11, Franklin Roosevelt released a letter confirming that he would accept the nomination for an unprecedented fourth term “
if…so ordered by the Commander in Chief of us all—the sovereign people of the United States.” He yearned to return to his “
home on the Hudson River,” yet he would gladly serve if the American people so willed. The president’s skillful declaration not to “
run in the usual partisan, political sense” outmaneuvered his foes.

FDR’s announcement prompted a letter from Murray. “
You are to be commended particularly on your concept of a non-partisan candidacy and an acceptance only as a mandate of the people,” she wrote. “
There is no one of us who should not appreciate your longing to return to private life, and I do hope the issue will be decided in November in such a way that will bring hope, courage, strength and peace to you and your family, and to all of us.”

· · ·

MURRAY HAD ARRIVED
in California too late to take the bar exam. She and Mildred survived for the first month on money Pauli made
as a special correspondent for
PM
. Her poetry had been published in
South Today, The Crisis, Opportunity
, and the
Carolina Magazine
, and she was beginning to find an audience for her prose in African American newspapers and leftist periodicals.
Committed to presenting both the facts and the emotional truth, her writing foreshadowed the genre that would become known as literary journalism.

In addition to writing for
PM
, a newspaper based in New York City whose contributors included
I. F. Stone and
Ernest Hemingway, she landed a summer job reporting for the
Los Angeles Sentinel
, an influential black weekly whose goals were to expose discrimination and empower
black Los Angelenos. Among the issues
Murray would cover were the racially segregated blood banks at the
Red Cross and the
Los Angeles Railway’s refusal to hire African American conductors.

In August, two pieces of mail appeared in Murray’s mailbox. One was a reassuring note from ER that read, “
I am glad to know your sister is going to work at the
Veterans Hospital and delighted to have the news about
Harvard.” (The medical school faculty had voted to admit women students into the class of 1945, and Murray had passed this information along to the first lady.)
The other item was an eviction notice dated August 20, 1944, and addressed to “Mrs. Mildred M. Fearing and Pauli Murray.”

We the property owners of Crocker Street wish to inform you the flat you now occupy at 5871 S. Crocker Street is restricted to the white or caucasian race only.

We are quite sure that you did not know of this restriction or you would not have rented the flat.

We intend to uphold these restrictions, therefore we ask that you vacate the above mentioned flat, at the above address, within 7 days or we will turn the matter over to our attorney for action. Thank you.

Yours truly,

South Crocker Street Property Owners

Pauli and Mildred had rented this apartment from a black real estate agent in a shabby, multifamily building at the edge of a white neighborhood. They were grateful to have found this place, in spite of the fact that they had no hot water. There was a
housing crisis in Los Angeles, and it worsened as hundreds of thousands poured into the city to work in the
defense industry.
Restrictive covenants forbade the sale or rental of property to anyone other than whites in many parts of the city. At least seven thousand black defense industry workers were reportedly sleeping in cars, depots, the corridors of apartment buildings and condemned structures, ten or more to a room, and in “
hot beds,” where those getting up were immediately replaced by others.

The font in the unsigned notice looked so familiar that Murray wondered if someone had removed the key from under her doormat, entered the apartment, and used her
typewriter. She sent the notice with a cover letter to ER that said, “
I wish you could see this ‘restricted’ palace. Why,
Mrs. Roosevelt, you wouldn’t want to put
Fala in here. It looks like a barn, is one block from an industrial neighborhood and less than six blocks from Central Avenue district, the heart of Negro
Los Angeles.”

The lighthearted reference to FDR’s beloved Scottish terrier downplayed Murray’s fear and anger. But she and Mildred resolved not to move.
With police protection, the support of black property owners, and the
Sentinel
’s exposé on racially restrictive covenants, they faced down the South Crocker Street Property Owners.

The shortage of decent and affordable housing was an ongoing concern for ER, and she knew that the threatening notice Pauli and Mildred had received was an all-too-common experience for blacks. The first lady could hardly contain her anger. “
That rent notice made me boil!” she wrote back.

· · ·

FALL SEMESTER AT UC BERKELEY
was fast approaching when the letter from
Harvard
Law School acting dean
E. M. Morgan arrived, informing Murray that the admission committee had decided not to change its admissions policy until the war was over and the school “
returned to normal conditions.” Her friend Lloyd
Garrison had forewarned her of an “
indefinable male egoism” at Harvard. That egoism would keep the ban against women law students in place until 1950, and Harvard would not enroll its first African American woman law student,
Lila Fenwick, until 1953. Unable to admit that she had lost her appeal, Murray said in a postscript to ER, “
Definitely plan to enter U. of Cal. in October.”

23

“This Letter Is Confidential”

A
s the
1944 presidential
campaign heated up, so did
criticism of Eleanor Roosevelt. Sometimes rumors set off attacks against her, as did the rumor that she wanted to quarantine returning soldiers because she thought them unfit “
to associate with workers at home.” Of this allegation, she said, “
The story does me no harm. The people who spread it are evidently too stupid to realize that my only concern would be that such a story would hurt the men themselves.”

Sometimes what ER wrote stoked sentiment against her. A case in point was her advocacy for a peacetime national youth service program for men
and
women.
Such a program, she argued, would ensure the nation’s preparedness, encourage civic participation, and expose young people to one another early in life, thereby promoting ethnic tolerance. The
first lady’s stance on youth service proved to one reader that she had grown “
wilder in her attempts to force American youths to follow the pattern of life she wants to dictate to them.” That ER favored youth service was bad enough. That she wanted to include girls in the program was unconscionable.

The first lady was a campaign veteran, and she took most criticism in stride. To the reader incensed by the notion of a national youth service program that would send boys, as well as girls, away from home, ER replied, “
No one is more conscious than I am that many a girl, when she finishes high school, will not want to leave home, and that her family, as well, will not want her to go from under their direct supervision.” On the other hand, “some girls might feel they wanted to see something of their own country beyond their immediate surroundings.” No matter what the reader thought about youth service, “
the essential thing,” the
first lady maintained, was “to increase our participation in government.”

The attacks against ER concerned Pauli Murray, and she tried to deflect them. She told the first lady that she liked “
the idea of a year’s participation in government by young people. If the American people would only know and feel responsible for their government, it would make your job and that of the President so much easier.” Murray also tried to humor ER with stories
Mildred heard from wounded
veterans at the hospital. One joke the troops told one another went, “
You know, we could get this old war over with any day now, but we’re afraid that we might get Eleanor caught in the crossfire, so we have to take it easy.”

Murray came to the first lady’s defense publicly after a letter she sent to an Alabama woman sparked controversy. The woman had complained that ER lacked “
complete knowledge of the Negro situation in the South, particularly in the small towns where there are almost as many Negroes as whites.” ER had replied, “
Much that is said about my attitude on the Negro question is distorted and exaggerated by people who are opposed to my husband and me, and by those who have deep-rooted prejudices. I have never advocated social
equality.”
Social equality, she explained, was “what you have among
friends.” This was different from equality before the law, which ER advocated. Once the first lady’s letter was released to the
press, political enemies made hay of what sounded like an anti-integration statement by the nation’s most influential white liberal.

Murray published an editorial, “Social Equality Needs Definition,” in the
Los Angeles Sentinel
, hoping to clarify for African Americans what ER had meant. “
The Negro is not interested in” enacting laws that dictate “who selects him as a friend or invites him to a private home or develops an intimate relationship with him,” Murray opined. “Nobody wants legislation to regulate such personal and individual matters.” Legal equality—specifically, equal access to all public accommodations, fair
housing and employment, and freedom of movement and association without
discrimination—was the constitutional right for which blacks and ER were fighting.

The flap over her statement rattled the first lady, and she shared her frustration with Murray in a candid missive. This was the first time ER asked Murray to guard a letter.

October 3, 1944

Dear Pauli:

I will be glad when election is over and I can assure you that though I do think it would be better for the country if the President was to continue in office for the next few years, I shall be equally happy if he is out because as far as my personal feelings go, I would like nothing better than to be free to do as I choose during the next few years.

Social equality to me does not mean at all what it seems to mean to certain people. I do not think you can legislate about the people with whom you have friendly relations and those people are your social equals. I think it is all important that every citizen in the United States has an equal opportunity and that is why I have emphasized the four basic things we should fight for.

A number of people have been asking me to make a statement on segregation. I do not want to do it until we have achieved the four basic citizenship rights because I do not think it wise to add any antagonism that we do not have to have. Besides, I think if I made such a statement now it would be felt I was doing it purely for political reasons and I am much more interested in having good race relations than I am in the political situation.