The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (52 page)

Murray tried to analyze her career objectively. She had been a competent, though not an extraordinary, associate attorney at
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison. Sexism and the fact that her “
personality and talents were not geared to remain in that atmosphere” had complicated
her efforts. She had been a successful
law professor in
Ghana despite the political challenges; and at
Yale, she’d been a highly regarded doctoral student and junior faculty member. While her consultancy with the EEOC had not led to the coveted position of general counsel, by all accounts, she had done an outstanding job.

When
Cornell University had refused to hire Murray on the grounds that her political background put the school at risk, Eleanor Roosevelt had offered unconditional support. Once it became clear that the school officials could not be persuaded otherwise, ER had insisted that Murray move forward with her life. In keeping with that advice, in the spring of 1967, Murray accepted an appointment as vice president for educational development at
Benedict College, a historically black Baptist liberal arts school in Columbia, South Carolina. She prayed that this job would be a reprieve from “
civil rights, women, politics.”

Professor Pauli Murray, age fifty-nine, in her office at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, September 25, 1970. She was the university’s first full-time African American faculty member.
(Associated Press)

62

“Mrs. R. Seemed to Have Been Forgotten”

R
ace riots had already erupted in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, and Atlanta. Despair and unrest would reach a new level in 1968 after the assassinations of
Martin Luther King, on April 4, and Robert
Kennedy, on June 5. On February 8, in
Orangeburg, South Carolina, thirty-five miles from where Murray lived, the police fired into a crowd of youths who were protesting a segregated bowling alley. Many of the demonstrators were students at the predominantly black
South Carolina State College, and they had friends at
Benedict College.
In the wake of this incident, which came to be known as the Orangeburg Massacre, seventeen-year-old
Delano Herman Middleton
and eighteen-year-olds Samuel Hammond Jr. and Henry Ezekial Smith lay dead. More than two dozen were injured. Most were shot in the back.
Louise Kelly Cawley, a twenty-seven-year-old expectant mother who was beaten by the police, miscarried.

State officials blamed outside agitators for the confrontation, declared a curfew, and called in the
National Guard. Murray used the incident as an opportunity to teach students on her campus about the historical struggle against oppression.
Jean E. Friedman, a young white history professor, would never forget Murray’s commitment to nonviolent protest or her stirring recitation of the poem
“Dark Testament,” which moved the students to tears and beyond fear. At Murray’s urging, the students organized a dignified memorial service “
in the open air” on the college grounds.

· · ·

MURRAY HAD NOT LIVED
in the South for four decades, and her job did not bring the respite she craved. Adding to her worries about racial violence was the escalating hostility toward homosexuals that would lead to police confrontations, such as the 1969
Stonewall riots. Indeed, conflict seemed to be everywhere she turned, and the voice she longed to hear most was gone.
Seeking the solace of Eleanor Roosevelt’s spirit, Murray took her fourteen-year-old nephew,
Michael Kevin Murray, on a pilgrimage to the Roosevelt summer home on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, in August 1968.

The first thing they saw as they entered the reception center was
Douglas Chandor’s portrait of ER. This painting, a montage of sketches—the first lady “
holding her glasses…and
knitting”—took Pauli back to moments when she had seen “these familiar movements.” As she and Michael walked through the cottage, they marveled at “
the baskets of canes by the front entrance” and “the huge horn used to communicate with boats in the bay and to call everyone to meals.” Pauli basked in the warmth of the “
wood fire burning cheerfully in the big old-fashioned kitchen range.” She lingered at
ER’s “
writing table” and her bedroom.

Heartened by the ambience at Campobello, Pauli and Michael decided to stop at the Roosevelt burial site in
Hyde Park on the way home. She had not been to the Roosevelt estate since the
funeral. She had not cried during or since that service, and this visit brought buried emotions to the surface.

Pauli would acknowledge her feelings over dinner with ER’s former assistant. “
Dear Maureen,” Pauli later wrote,

I have been able to weep a little, which eases the ache, and am now able to think a little more clearly about some of the things I shared with you the other night.

First, over the past six years I have been shocked and amazed at how quickly Mrs. R. seemed to have been forgotten to the point of seldom hearing her name mentioned. Perhaps this has not been forgetfulness, but as if many people, like myself, locked their grief in their hearts and tried to carry on in circumstances so alien to the things for which she stood it would have been almost a desecration to mention her name.

The year ER died, Murray had asked
Ralph Bunche to nominate ER for the
Nobel Peace Prize. Murray raised the issue again, suggesting that Corr approach U.S. Supreme Court justice
Abraham Fortas for help. This prize, Murray said, would spark “
a kind of rebirth memorial” to ER, “reemphasizing her philosophy, her compassion, her embodiment of the principle that human rights are indivisible.”

Murray felt “
psychically close” to ER, and she believed “Mrs. R’s spirit” was “troubled by all of the things happening today.” Though ER “
would frown upon anything which smacks of an Eleanor cult,” Murray told Corr, “I do think the principles for which she stood must be kept alive and associated with her name. And since, above all things, she was the highest expression of womanhood I think
women must take the initiative here.” If the Roosevelt children were hesitant about carrying the banner of their mother’s work, those “
who loved her and whom she loved do have a responsibility here,” Murray insisted.

· · ·

CONVINCED THAT HER INTERESTS
and temperament were better suited to teaching than administration, Murray resigned from
Benedict College and accepted a faculty appointment in 1968 in the American Civilization program at
Brandeis University. The academic reputation of Brandeis, ER’s longtime association with the school, and its proximity to the culturally rich city of
Boston and her adopted home of
New York City enhanced its appeal in Murray’s eyes. The five years she would spend there were “
exciting, tormenting, satisfying, embattled, frustrated, and at times triumphant.”

At Brandeis, Murray introduced courses on legal studies, women, and civil rights. She worked closely with Professor
Lawrence H. Fuchs, who had cotaught a course on international relations and the law with ER. Murray helped lay the groundwork for the
Afro-American Studies
program.
She also challenged school policies that discriminated against women students, faculty, or staff.

Murray’s relationships with “
impatient young Black Militants” on campus were difficult, for they seemed to her to have “little, if any, sense of history.” She had spent decades fighting for racial integration, and their demands for “
separate dormitories and cultural centers” and black studies programs staffed exclusively by black professors offended her. That Murray’s office and personal files were housed on the second floor of Ford Hall, the building students occupied and threatened to raze during a ten-day demonstration, deepened her alienation. No less trying were the “
white liberal colleagues” who “retreated in confusion and uncertainty.”

Human rights remained the focus of Murray’s academic and creative writing. She took great pride in the
publication of her
poetry collection
, Dark Testament and Other Poems
. This collection, which was dedicated “
to the memory of Eleanor Roosevelt,” contained
“Mr. Roosevelt Regrets,” “The Passing of F.D.R.,” and a selection of poems inspired by political, spiritual, and personal issues.

Notwithstanding the breadth and impact of Murray’s writings, an all-white tenure review committee at Brandeis questioned the “
brilliance and conceptual power” of her scholarship, she wrote to her agent,
Marie Rodell. After a battle, she was awarded tenure as a full professor. She became the first holder of the
Louis Stulberg Chair in Law and Politics. Murray’s brilliance and conceptual power had been and would continue to be hallmarks of her work.

It was certainly an honor to be appointed to a professorship endowed in the name of the
president of the
International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Then again, it was not a professorship at an American law school, which was the goal Murray and her mentors at
Howard University Law School had set decades earlier.
She was disappointed that Yale had not offered her a faculty appointment in the law school. She satisfied her goal by teaching part-time at the
Boston University School of Law.

In 1978, twenty-two years after the publication of the hardcover of
Proud Shoes
,
Harper & Row released a paperback edition that included an introduction and
family photographs. Reissued on the heels of
Alex Haley’s
Roots: The Saga of an American Family
, a historical novel that told the story of his African
ancestors,
Proud Shoes
received a new reception.
This time, readers went beyond a preoccupation with interracial sex and marriage and found the
Fitzgerald women, especially Murray, fascinating.

Nearly every review of
Proud Shoes
compared it with
Roots
. The
Nation
’s
Jack Hicks wrote that
Roots
“
dwells…on African continuations,” whereas “
Proud Shoes
traps the beast of slavery.”
Larry Swindell of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
said that
Proud Shoes
was “
not a spinoff on
Roots
but a splendid forerunner.”

Murray was happy about the commercial success of Haley’s novel and the television miniseries it spawned.
With adequate marketing, she had no doubt that her book would find a wide audience and that
Katharine Hepburn would be perfectly cast as Grandmother Cornelia in a film adaptation.

· · ·

MURRAY CONTINUED TO RAISE
the issue of sex discrimination in her writings and presentations to academic and civic groups.
On June 19, 1970, at a hearing held by the U.S. House
Committee on Education and Labor, she described the multilayered discrimination black women faced, using an impressive array of charts to compare
salary and unemployment rates by race, sex, and age to supplement her testimony. From her days as a restaurant worker in college to her career as an attorney and educator, she had been paid less than, and denied the respect accorded to, her male peers. She had spent the first half of her life fighting for equal rights as an African American, only to discover that she would have to spend the second half fighting for equal rights as a woman. “
If anyone should ask a Negro woman what is her greatest achievement, her honest answer would be,” Murray told the committee, her voice laden with emotion, “ ‘I survived.’ ”
Three months later, she would testify before the
New York City Commission on Human Rights, headed by fellow
Yale Law School alumna
Eleanor Holmes Norton. Unable to hold back the tears, Murray openly wept as she recounted the opportunities she had been denied.

Of her peers in the legal community, Murray perhaps most admired
Thurgood Marshall. The feeling was mutual.
For years, Marshall had informally solicited Murray’s legal advice. Good-humored, he liked to open their dialogue with the refrain “
I know what the law says, Pauli, but tell me something different.” After Marshall was appointed to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, he thanked Murray for her good wishes and said he hoped his “
work on the Bench” would meet her “expectations.”

Murray was emboldened by Marshall’s subsequent appointments to the Office of Solicitor General, in 1965, and the
U.S. Supreme Court, in 1967.
Now an old hand at lobbying the White House, she wrote to President
Richard M. Nixon in 1971 to say that she was ready and available to serve on the high court should he wish to nominate a woman. Murray knew she was an unlikely appointee. Still, she wanted to be considered.
She believed that her nomination, whether successful or not, would at least raise the issue of women’s representation on the court. Murray would never be nominated, and she would wait a decade to see the first woman Supreme Court justice,
Sandra Day O’Connor, confirmed, on September 21, 1981.