The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (3 page)

· · ·

THE TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD
Murray, whose 1933
Hunter College yearbook
photograph appears on the jacket of this book, was not a
“fan” of the recently installed first lady, also pictured. Their relationship started as a confrontation in words, fueled by Murray’s desire for dramatic social change and the first lady’s obligation to the measured approach FDR’s administration took on the question of
civil rights.

They respectfully addressed their early letters to “Mrs. Roosevelt” and “Miss Murray.” By 1944, ER had adopted the use of “Pauli.” But Murray, who came to regard the
first lady as a maternal figure, could not bring herself to use “Eleanor” as invited. Because ER belonged to the same generation as Murray’s mother, the first lady would always be “Mrs. Roosevelt,” “Mrs. R.,” or occasionally “Mrs. Rovel,” a nickname Murray created by shortening the name Roosevelt. Their closings, like their salutations, evolved from the formal “Sincerely” and “Truly yours” to the personal “Affectionately” and “Fondly.”

They supplemented more than three hundred letters, notes, and birthday, get-well, sympathy, and holiday greeting cards with clippings, reports, manuscripts, photographs, flowers, and candy.
ER’s missives were concise and—except for an occasional postscript—typed, for which Murray must have been grateful, given the first lady’s hard-to-read
handwriting. Murray, who was at her best hashing out her thoughts and feelings on paper, invariably wrote longer letters. Sometimes she typed several drafts before mailing the final document, to which she periodically attached a gracious cover note to ER’s confidential secretary, Malvina Thompson. When time was of the essence or a
typewriter inconvenient, Murray wrote with a fountain pen in her favorite blue-green ink.

There were instances when the letters flowed with a sense of urgency, as was the case during the 1940–42 campaign to overturn the death sentence of the young black sharecropper
Odell Waller. There were also infrequent periods when they were out of touch for more than six months, such as 1960–61, when Murray taught at the law school in
Ghana.

Their first face-to-face discussions focused on
labor and
civil rights and took place over tea at the first lady’s
New York City apartment and the
White House. After FDR’s death, their conversations expanded to include an array of issues, including personal concerns. They met at ER’s New York City residences and her Hyde Park retreat
Val-Kill. While ER did visit
Bethune and White in their homes and would have surely welcomed an invitation to Murray’s place, I have found no evidence that this happened. This is, perhaps, understandable, given Murray’s limited resources. In contrast to Bethune and White, Murray moved frequently and was periodically unemployed or underemployed. She did not own a home in ER’s lifetime, and she often shared her living space with friends and relatives. Out of respect for ER’s time and commitment to others, Murray deferred to ER on when and where they would meet.

When one considers the disparate demands in the daily lives of Pauli Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt, it is remarkable that neither drifted away
from the relationship. On the contrary, they drew closer, grounded by the needs they satisfied in each other. Murray had a need to speak out and feel heard. ER had a need to respond and make a difference. Murray’s friend
Maida Springer-Kemp, a labor leader, who saw them together more than anyone other than Malvina Thompson, told me that Murray could be embarrassingly direct, which must have bothered ER; and it was
“a credit to Mrs. Roosevelt’s courage and awareness that this young woman…not be left crying in the wilderness.” In due course, ER came to rely upon the woman she dubbed
“a firebrand,” who dared say what she thought.

As I followed their heated exchange on such issues as the Roosevelt administration’s response, or lack thereof, to lynching or ER’s defense of
Adlai Stevenson’s tepid support of the
Brown
decision during
the 1956 presidential campaign, I found myself reflecting on the combatants in Murray’s
poem
“The Quarrel,” posted on the wall near my desk:

Two ants at bay

on curved stem of an apple

are insufficient cause

to fell the tree

Pauli Murray and ER reminded me of the ants in this poem tenaciously fixed to the apple stem. No disagreement weighed enough to upend the sturdy tree that was their friendship. Disagreement over politics and strategy sometimes left them disturbed and disappointed. But in time, their perspectives converged.

They helped each other see possibilities beyond their immediate vision, and this broadened
view reverberated in the causes they served. Murray, who had never voted for FDR or trusted the two-party system, became a registered voting Democrat. She would always find compromise, incremental change, and hierarchal institutions trying. Nonetheless, she would lean away from the radical left.

Eleanor Roosevelt, who once cautioned Murray against flouting
segregation statutes, moved
“further along the road in the
civil-rights struggle than she might otherwise have traveled” without Murray’s
influence, biographer
Blanche Wiesen Cook has written. ER indeed progressed from sharing Murray’s sentiments with her “My Day” readers, FDR, and other opinion makers to defying threats against her own life when she publicly aligned herself with
civil rights activists.

Pauli Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt were more than
political allies.
They developed an enduring friendship that came to be characterized by honesty, trust, affection, empathy, support, mutual respect, loyalty, acceptance, a commitment to hearing the other’s point of view, pleasure in each other’s company, and the ability to pick up where they’d left off, irrespective of the miles that had separated them or the time lapsed. ER did not live to see Murray complete her work with the
President’s Commission on the Status of Women, earn a doctorate of
juridical science, become a distinguished
professor, cofound the
National Organization for Women, help lead the fight to preserve
Title VII of the 1964
Civil Rights Act, or become an
Episcopal priest. However, Pauli Murray carried her memory of ER into each endeavor.

· · ·

SEVERAL YEARS AGO
, I discovered an unexpected gem tucked inside an autographed first edition of
Proud Shoes
I purchased online. That gem, Murray’s five-page, single-spaced
newsletter to friends, was dated July 5, 1970, and printed on what was once white paper in the fading purple ink of a mimeograph machine. In it, she recounts her delight in church work, teaching at
Brandeis University, the formation of a
“women’s caucus at the
ACLU biennial conference,” and the publication of her
poetry collection,
Dark Testament and Other Poems
. As she did in the letter that planted the seed for
The Firebrand and the First Lady
, Pauli Murray closed with a tribute and a challenge:
“Eleanor Roosevelt lighted the candle in the darkness, and left behind a noble tradition for women of my generation whose lives she personally touched. I can do no less than to try to follow in her massive footsteps and to ask my contemporaries to do the same.”

I believe that biography, as the British biographer
Richard Holmes has said,
“is a handshake across time” and “an act of friendship.” My hope is that this book honors Pauli Murray’s wish to share the story of her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, the path they lit for future generations, and the hand of friendship Pauli extended to me. This story and the challenge of telling it have changed my life, as I suspect Pauli knew it would.

PRELUDE

CAMP TERA,
1933–35

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, age forty-eight, and Jessie I. Mills, the Camp Tera business manager, exit a cabin eight days after the facility opened. “I like this place very much,” ER said to the staff and the press, “but I think the requirements too strict.” Bear Mountain, New York, June 18, 1933.
(Bettmann/CORBIS)

I sing of Youth, imperious, inglorious

Dissatisfied, unslaked, untaught, unkempt Youth
.

—
PAULI MURRAY
,
“Youth, 1933”

We can not pass over the fact that the world is a hard world for youth and that so far we have not really given their problems as much attention as we should.

—
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
,
“Facing the Problems of Youth,” 1935

P
auli Murray was sitting in the hallway outside the social hall at
Camp Tera when Eleanor Roosevelt drove up in a convertible coupe in late fall 1934. On the passenger side sat the first lady’s
private secretary, Malvina “Tommy”
Thompson. In back was a man Murray took to be a Secret Service agent. Gasps and cheers erupted as the first lady walked briskly around the premises. The ting of forks dropping echoed from the dining area as residents rushed to tidy their quarters. While some scurried to put their craftwork on display, others trailed their honored guest like chicks behind a mother hen. Such commotion on a quiet Sunday startled Murray, a newcomer and one of the few African American residents. Having no handiwork to lay out, she sneaked back to her cabin to wash up, brush her hair, and put on a fresh blouse.

Camp Tera, so named for the
Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, was the first government-sponsored residential facility for
unemployed women. It had been in operation for a year when Murray stepped off the boat that brought recruits up the Hudson River from New York City. Suffering from poor nutrition, respiratory problems, and exhaustion, she had quit her job as a representative for the
National Urban League magazine
Opportunity
and enrolled in the camp on the advice
of her physician, Dr.
May Chinn. Although Pauli was twenty-four, her “
slight figure and bobbed hair” gave her the appearance of “a small teenage boy.” She typified the needy women Eleanor had in mind when she’d proposed a camp to rehabilitate their
physical and emotional health.

· · ·

WHEN CAMP TERA OPENED
, on June 10, 1933, on a two-hundred-acre site in the
Bear Mountain area of upstate
New York, one in four Americans was unemployed. In New York City alone, over 250,000 were on relief. The economic depression and
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s
campaign pledge “
to put people to work and restore the American economy” persuaded voters to send him, instead of the Republican
Herbert Hoover, to the White House in the
1932 election.

True to his word, Roosevelt launched a series of economic initiatives hailed as the
New Deal.
One of the earliest and most popular programs was the
Civilian Conservation Corps. The goal of the CCC was to rebuild the health and morale of unemployed men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-eight with work, food, and shelter. CCC enrollees, trained by military personnel to work on roads, flood control, forestry, and beautification projects, wore uniforms, lived in camps, and got three meals a day. The pay was thirty dollars a month, twenty-five of which went directly to their families.
It was the first time
Harley Jolley, a white enrollee from North Carolina, got a toothbrush, a vaccination, and a daily bath.

By August 1935, there would be over 500,000 enrollees, 50,000 of whom were black.
The majority of the blacks lived in segregated camps, were limited to subordinate positions, and were supervised by white officers, even though the legislation that authorized the CCC forbade
discrimination on the basis of race, color, or creed. “
They never believed that we could work,” recalled
Houston Pritchett, a black enrollee from Detroit, “but once we’d get the chance, that’s what did it.”

The segregated and militaristic character of the CCC bothered the first lady. Yet she was encouraged by the reports of young men whose strength and optimism were renewed by the camp experience. She also believed that women would benefit from a comparable program that gave them a breather from the heartache of unemployment.

The idea of women living in camps away from family, doing any kind of manual labor, made some government officials uncomfortable. Even those who ran the CCC generally viewed camps for women, who could presumably turn to family for support, as an extravagance that would undercut relief for men. Some program directors maintained that women,
especially if unrelated, were too temperamental to live together. Others, influenced by
Sigmund Freud’s theories of the role of unconscious drives in human development, the belief that idleness encouraged immorality, and the fear that radicals were endangering the American way of life saw
women’s camps as a breeding ground for unacceptable behavior, such as homosexuality, and subversive ideas, such as
communism.

Undaunted by these objections, ER pushed the Roosevelt administration to create a pilot camp for women.
Fueling her determination were firsthand observations of the difficulties poor women and their families faced. As a nineteen-year-old volunteer, ER had investigated sweatshops in
New York City for the
National Consumers League and taught calisthenics and dance at the
College Settlement on Rivington Street for the
Junior League. These experiences exposed her to a world where immigrant families lived in unspeakable poverty and where children, who
labored alongside their parents, sometimes collapsed.