The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (45 page)

The day they arrived at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, the sun gave the medieval rose windows a “
special brilliance.” In London, they made a beeline to Grosvenor Square to see the bronze statue of Franklin Roosevelt, depicted standing with a cape draped over his shoulders. It was fitting that the architects had placed “
fountains and the benches” nearby, ER told her granddaughter, for the president “always liked to have people around him.”

Nina kept “
close watch” on her grandmother throughout their journey. Indeed, at times, she felt compelled to take control of the schedule. “
People forget that she’s 74,” Nina told a reporter. “They’d have her climbing any number of stairs or walking miles over cobblestones unless I put my foot down.” Nina’s concern was justified.
On more than one occasion, she had to stop ER from nodding off to sleep by tapping her on the foot. This was quite “
awkward” when they were in conversation with others or when ER was standing up.

Murray was always interested in ER’s foreign travel, and this trip, which included visits to historic and religious sites Murray longed to see, had special significance. She was also fond of Nina and her family. They were living next door to
Val-Kill in
Stone Cottage, when Murray met them over lunch.

Murray giggled when she read the news story about the baby camel Nina bought in Beersheba, Israel. Nina had planned to bring
Duchess back to Hyde Park. However, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture blocked the camel’s entry because it came from a region thought to be plagued by hoof-and-mouth disease. Disappointed, yet determined to make the best of circumstances, Nina donated Duchess to a poor Bedouin.

In Murray’s view, Nina had found the perfect solution. She had not only helped a needy person, she’d outmaneuvered the
Eisenhower
administration. “
It is not yet clear from the news stories,” Murray wrote tongue-in-cheek to ER, “whether it was the CAMEL which might be subject to hoof-and-mouth disease or the ADMINISTRATION! That granddaughter must be a chip off the venerable block.”

· · ·

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT INVITED MURRAY
to lunch at her
New York City apartment on May 15, 1959. Murray took Renee
Barlow, whom she had introduced earlier in a letter as “
a former YWCA gal and an
Episcopalian who adores you and would just like to sit and look at you while we chatter—or, on the other hand, she deeply needs your guidance as to what a sincere Anglo-American can do in this present crisis to be effective.”

It is not known if Murray said in words that she and Renee were partners, but ER may have sensed that they were more than coworkers for several reasons. First, Murray exuded an air of happiness
friends had not seen prior to her relationship with Renee. Second, in nearly twenty years of correspondence, Murray had not indicated a romantic interest in men. She had taken only female relatives and friends to private gatherings with ER, except for Maida
Springer’s son Eric and longtime friend
Morris Milgram, who was married. (Murray would later take her brother and nephews to
Val-Kill.)
Third, ER had close friends who were
lesbian, such as the former newspaper reporter
Lorena Hickok, and who lived in partnerships that resembled marriage, as did the progressive activists
Esther Lape and
Elizabeth Read. Furthermore, Murray had come to rely on
ER’s acceptance, and she must have believed that ER would embrace Renee as well.

One topic they discussed that day was the local
hospital workers strike.
A week earlier, more than three thousand cooks, housekeeping and laundry workers, nurses’ aides, orderlies, and porters had gone on strike against six private hospitals in New York City. These workers were not guaranteed minimum wage and were excluded from unemployment insurance coverage and disability benefits. Conditions were so bad, union officials charged, that many workers needed welfare assistance to survive. Although these employees were vital to the care of patients and the work of the technical, administrative, and medical staffs, management refused to consider their grievances or recognize Local 1199 of the
Retail Drug Employees Union.

Murray had been jailed twenty-five years earlier for picketing with workers who’d organized a chapter of the
American Newspaper Guild
at the
New York Amsterdam News
. She could not resist the invitation to join the
Citizens’ Committee for a Just Settlement of the Hospital Strike. Among its influential members were her old allies
A. Philip Randolph and
Bayard Rustin, along with the theologian
Reinhold Niebuhr, distinguished jurists
Grenville Clark and
Telford Taylor, Councilman
Stanley Isaacs, and
Gardner Taylor, pastor of the Concord Baptist Church. The committee urged union recognition, arbitration of “
all economic issues,” and that upon “union recognition, the union waive its right to strike.”

ER generally opposed unionization of workers in critical areas, such as hospital work, public safety, and publicly owned utilities. In this case, the conditions hospital workers faced and management’s rigidity persuaded her to side with the workers. “
It seems to me,” ER said in frustration, “that this whole situation has been very stupidly handled by the refusal of the heads of the hospital to meet with their employees from the very beginning.” The stalemate would last for forty-six days before management and the employees reached a settlement.

PART VIII

LIGHTING THE PATH FOR NEW ACTIVISTS,
1959–62

Left to right: President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana; African American scholars W. E. B. Du Bois and his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois; and an unidentified man at reception following Nkrumah’s inauguration, July 1, 1960, in Accra, Ghana. Pauli Murray had arrived five months earlier, brimming with hope for the newly independent nation-state.
(W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst)

53

“Nothing I Had Read or Heard Prepared Me”

L
ate in the fall of 1959, Pauli Murray accepted a three-year appointment as senior lecturer in the new
Ghana School of Law, in Accra. She had learned about the position from an advertisement Maida
Springer brought back from Africa. Murray had not taught since her days with the WPA Workers’ Education Project. She had hoped to teach after she finished the master of laws at the University of California, Berkeley, but no offers had come her way. Most law schools, except those that were all female or all
black, would not hire
women or black faculty.
Even
Howard University, which had no women faculty when Murray was a student in the early 1940s, currently had only one female instructor,
Cynthia Straker, who doubled as the law librarian.

Given the bleak prospects for a
career teaching law, Murray had gone
into private practice, running her own office, until Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison hired her as an associate attorney. Corporate law had paid well, yet the work left Murray unfulfilled. At forty-nine, she returned to teaching because it offered steady income and reconnected her with a family tradition that had begun with Grandfather
Robert. Unlike Murray’s job at the firm, where she felt like “
a desk lawyer in an assembly-line practice,” rarely interacting with clients, teaching engaged her directly with people.

Springer’s work as an international representative for the
AFL-CIO and her friendships with African leaders piqued Murray’s interest in Africa. Murray had met the Kenyan labor activist
Tom Mboya and the future president of Tanzania
Julius Nyerere at Springer’s home. The fact that Ghana was the first sub-Saharan African colony to achieve independence (from Great Britain, in 1957) gave Murray a sense of high purpose. As a teacher, she would both witness and be a partner to history in the making.

On February 3, 1960, Murray sailed out of New York City on the
SS
Tatra
. It was her first trip abroad.
In addition to her beloved Shetland sheepdog,
Smokey, she brought a donation of law books from the attorneys at the firm, a cache of Savarin coffee from the clerical staff, and a basket of fruit from Eleanor Roosevelt.

Before the
Tatra
reached Ghana, it docked in Monrovia,
Liberia. Eager to set foot on the continent, Murray disembarked. “
Nothing I had read or heard prepared me,” she recalled later, for

the flies and insects swarming over the smoked fish sold on the ground in the native markets; the naked children with protruding stomachs wading through cesspools of muck; a child with large tumors growing out of his neck begging in the street; the furnitureless mud shacks with dirt floors and roofs of straw pieced together with old tarpaulins or discarded fragments of rusty tin; the mangy, half-starved dogs creeping along the gutters…; and the half-comatose, scurvy-ridden old people dozing in the sun and looking like breathing corpses.

Murray found the poverty in Ghana just as staggering.
While the countryside was reminiscent of the American rural South, the language gap, the frustratingly slow pace of life, the shortage of basic supplies, and the isolation from family and friends made her homesick. Having to drive on the left side of crowded roads flanked by open ditches on
both sides made getting from one place to another an obstacle course. However, these problems paled in comparison to the physical challenges.

Murray suffered intermittent attacks of
malaria. The heat made her so uncomfortable that she sometimes showered “
three times a day.” Even
Smokey had problems acclimating. He developed pneumonia after Murray “
cut his hair short to relieve him from the heat and ticks.”

Murray’s adjustment was further complicated by an “
entrenched custom” that required foreign professionals to hire African male cook-stewards. Because she had grown up in the American South, where blacks were once enslaved and where many were still relegated to
domestic service in white homes, the thought of employing an African servant, and the subservience expected of them by their mostly foreign or white employers, offended her. But an endless procession of job applicants eventually convinced Murray to set her objections aside, and she hired Yaredi
Akare.

Yaro, as Akare asked to be called, was a twenty-eight-year-old Ghanaian with “
an angry-looking gash” on his left cheek, a tribal scar. He belonged to an ethnic group from one of the poorest regions in northern Ghana, referred to as the
Frafra people, who marked their babies with a cut on the cheek to distinguish them from other Ghanaians. The Frafra had low status in Ghanaian culture, and Yaro’s “
dignity and lack of obsequiousness,” despite the discrimination he faced, earned Murray’s respect and trust.

In her
journal and round-robins to family and friends, Murray chronicled her daily routine and included observations of political events, such as the ratification of Ghana’s constitution and the election of the nation’s first president,
Kwame Nkrumah. That the country had no functional bar underscored the significance of her job: to prepare the first generation of homegrown attorneys.

At the law school, Murray held the distinction of being the sole American, one of only two women, and the instructor of what her colleagues deemed the most “
politically controversial” course in the program: constitutional and administrative law. Her training differed from that of the other faculty, who included a former judge from the Republic of
Tanganyika, a former senator from the Union of
South Africa who’d opposed the apartheid government, a Ghanaian trained in England, and an Englishman who served as the school’s director. There were few library facilities and no curricular materials. Her students were all male. Most worked full-time and had no previous college training.

To introduce the core concepts of constitutional government, Murray
mimeographed lecture notes and case materials on legal-size paper that she fastened into packets “
with bright-blue covers.”
She adopted an American-style discussion method that required students to study the readings in advance, so they could talk about them in class. She changed the seating in the room to a rectangle, making it possible for students to see one another when they spoke. She also made a practice of bringing up hot-button issues near the end of each session.

Although Murray’s teaching strategy initially befuddled her students, they soon embraced it. They asked for additional time and readings to study landmark U.S.
civil rights cases. Their debates often became so animated that they “
switched from English to their own vernaculars.”

Joseph Musah, one of the youngest and brightest students, began the course skeptical of his American professor. He soon changed his mind. “
We used to accept without questioning whatever the lecturer told us,” he admitted to Murray. “Through your class we have now learned to inquire.” Musah’s experience with Murray would serve him well. He would later earn a master’s degree at Yale University, return to his homeland after
Nkrumah was ousted, and serve in the national government as an elected and appointed official.