The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (19 page)

There is no question about your soundness on this problem, Mrs. Roosevelt, but officially we seem to lack the imagination and the courage to take the hard road but the straight road. Some of us cannot compromise with this “race supremacy” any longer, for to do that would be to give up the last shred of integrity we have left. We must speak out, appealingly, caustically, bitterly, as long as we are able that Americans may not forget for one moment this race problem is a war issue, and that fundamental approaches must be made to eliminate it, now, not after the war is over.

I do not speak from the generation of Negro leaders whom you know and respect. I do not even speak from the point of view of Pauline Redmond whom you know as a splendid representative of trained Negro youth. I speak out of the hearts of the declassed and degraded young Negroes who had never had much chance and yet must bear the responsibilities which fall from the present generation. Trained as an American, my loyalties are divided between race and country. I look at the American south, I look at our failure to understand the legitimate demands of the Indian people, I look at our Oriental exclusion acts, I listen to white Americans speak of the Japanese as “yellow niggers,” thus carrying over their contempt for the American Negro into their estimate of the people of whom we are at war. Above all, I have been exposed to the agony of spirit of my fellow law students as they face Selective Service and are drafted to fight for a country which even in the face of death, maintains the official stamp of segregation and inequality in the Armed Forces.

Viewing these stupidities, I wonder whether the white man has the courage or the imagination to save himself and civilization from utter ruin. Three hundred years of oppression have given us patience to bear hardship, but I doubt whether it has given us patience to bear with the instruments of hardship. Though the issue may be freedom and not race, as you say, nevertheless Hitler is taking advantage of our inability to handle our minority question intelligently and still counts up victories while we “muddle along.”

With deep appreciation for your patience, and the hope I may someday meet you and discuss these matters more in detail, I am

Very sincerely yours,

Pauli Murray

Murray’s letter so disturbed ER that she proposed they meet on August 27 in her
New York City apartment. She thought it might be “
easier to talk these things over than it is to discuss them through correspondence.” The idea of a candid conversation appealed to Murray. However, she was reluctant to go alone, “
for fear” of being “mesmerized” by
ER’s
personality. For this reason, she took
Anna Arnold Hedgeman, an older activist accustomed to dealing with political figures, as backup.

Pauli Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt had not seen each other since the first lady hosted the
National
Sharecroppers Week Committee in January 1940. When Murray and Hedgeman arrived, ER opened the door, startling Murray with “
an affectionate hug” and the lament “Oh, that was a terrible night, wasn’t it?” ER’s embrace, as well as her reference to the vigil before Odell Waller’s execution, signaled that Waller’s death and the “
wounds of interracial conflict” weighed heavily on her conscience.

ER’s compassion disarmed Murray. She had come to spar over
civil rights and found her “
militant” armor “replaced by unreserved affection.” She left the
meeting with permission to address ER as “
Mrs. R.,” the
nickname the first lady encouraged her young
friends to use. “
I cannot tell you how much personal reassurance I found in the interview yesterday,” Murray said in her next letter. “There is no need for any apology to our generation. I only hope we can keep alive the flame of human compassion and freedom as you are doing.”

· · ·

TWO WEEKS LATER
, in September 1942, Murray and ER found themselves on opposing sides at the
International Student Assembly. The ISA
was a four-day conference of three hundred youth leaders from nearly fifty nations. Conference activities took place in the auditorium at the U.S. Department of
Labor, on the campus of
American University, and at the White House. In her dual role as an ISA board member and
first lady, ER served as host.

The presence of uniformed delegates from the allied nations of
Great Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, and the
Soviet Union gave the discussions practical urgency.
Soviet delegate Lieutenant
Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a twenty-six-year-old woman sniper who had killed 309 Germans in battle, quickly became a media darling. Several medals, including the
Order of Lenin, embellished the dark green uniform she wore with her tall black boots.

President Roosevelt topped the list of speakers who addressed the assembly.
In a speech broadcast to the nation and the troops, he called upon youths everywhere to help win the war and lay the framework for peace. His pledge to provide for those whose lives were interrupted by
military service turned Murray’s thoughts to the sixty-five men from
Howard who had just marched off campus en masse to active duty.

ER, hoping to preserve an atmosphere of goodwill and unity, watched the deliberations closely.
She showered the delegates from the Allied nations with attention, taking them to historical sites, such as the
Lincoln Memorial, and inviting them to dine and stay overnight at the White House. She soon discovered, to her dismay, that Murray was “
a ringleader” in a group of activists backing three controversial resolutions.
These resolutions called for the British colonial government to free
India, Gandhi, and the imprisoned Indian nationalist leaders; the end to Russian occupation of
Lithuania; and the elimination of minority oppression in the United States. Concerned that the debate over these issues would fracture the conference, ER cornered Murray at a picnic for the delegates on the White House lawn and said, “
Pauli, I want to talk to you later.”

Murray sensed what ER wanted to discuss from the look in her “
searching blue eyes.” Unable to avoid this tête-à-tête, Murray listened to the first lady argue that the resolutions would undermine the assembly by creating conflict between the United States and her allies. Murray wrestled with the dilemma of going against her beliefs or acceding to ER and U.S. policy. In the end, Murray backed the resolutions.

The delegates passed a compromise that called for renewed negotiations between the British government and the Indian people. They rejected the resolution condemning the Russian occupation, and they
unanimously affirmed the principle of human rights and condemned racial discrimination. Though Murray had lobbied fiercely for the original resolutions, she was relieved that the
assembly remained intact.

At the close of the conference, ER wrote in her
column, “
The declaration…drafted by the young people and their determination to keep a committee together to work in peace as well as in war, with all the various countries represented, shows a faith and hope in the future which only youth can have.” The first lady’s effort to preserve harmony within the assembly was a rehearsal for the roadblocks she would confront in the United Nations. Compromise for the sake of holding together a vital coalition was a lesson neither she nor Murray would forget.

Pauli Murray’s mentors at Howard University: Caroline Farrar Ware (top left) taught history, 1941. (
Library of Congress Prints and Photograph Division
) Howard Thurman (top right) taught religion; William H. Hastie (bottom left) and Leon A. Ransom (bottom right) taught law, circa 1940s. (
Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Smithsonian Institution
)

15

“He Really Didn’t Know Why Women Came to Law School”

L
ife
in Washington, D.C., was complicated for blacks. Few public accommodations in the nation’s capital were integrated, and Pauli Murray, accustomed to “
the comparative freedom” of
New York City, was repulsed by the segregated restaurants, movie theaters, and playhouses. Campus life, on the other hand, was a scintillating amalgam of people and ideas. Among the faculty were talented refugees from Europe, as well as prominent black artists and activists.
The College
of Liberal Arts faculty boasted such luminaries as the philosopher and writer
Alain Locke, who was the first African American Rhodes scholar; the political scientist and diplomat
Ralph Bunche, who would become the first person of color to win the Nobel Peace Prize; and the celebrated poet
Sterling
Brown, who would teach the future Nobel laureate novelist
Toni Morrison, actor
Ossie Davis, and writer LeRoi
Jones, who would later take the name Amiri Baraka.

Murray was drawn to and embraced by the social historian Caroline
Ware, the theologian
Howard Thurman, and jurists
Leon Ransom and William
Hastie. Ware, a
New Englander from a prominent white family of Harvard graduates, had come to Washington when her economist husband,
Gardiner Means, joined the
New Deal as an adviser to Agriculture Secretary
Henry A. Wallace. In spite of Ware’s first-rate credentials—she was Phi Beta Kappa, held a doctorate from Radcliffe College, and had several critically acclaimed publications to her credit—no history department at a research university would appoint her to a full-time tenure-track position because she was a
woman. So she took a job in the federal government with the Consumer Division of the
Office of Price Administration. Ware joined the Howard University faculty in 1942. Shortly thereafter, she met Murray when Murray audited her American constitutional history course.

Ware, whom Murray dubbed “Skipper” because of the way she
“whizzed around blind corners and up and down narrow roller-coaster roads” in her convertible, became Murray’s closest friend on the faculty. It was to Ware and Means’s seventy-acre farm in Vienna, Virginia, that Murray retreated on weekends and school breaks.
The Farm, as it came to be known, was a
“sanctuary for city-weary students…and leaders of various humanitarian causes.” Murray loved to gather around the fireplace in the common room of the Ware-Means home for spirited conversation just as much as she enjoyed cuddling up in a corner with a mystery novel.

Ware’s upbringing as a
Unitarian with abolitionist roots and the
discrimination she suffered as a
female historian in the academy fostered her lifelong commitment to social justice. Long before
NAACP
attorneys argued in the
Brown
case that
segregation was detrimental to the psyche of black children, Ware asserted that “
segregation laws,” which “compelled her to sit in a separate car,” robbed her of the “enriching experience” of her friends. A talented woman denied the distinguished history professorship she deserved, Ware encouraged Murray’s exploration of the
“parallels between racism and sexism.”
They would examine
the intersection of sex and race inequality for the next forty years, eventually serving together with Eleanor Roosevelt on
President
John F. Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women and as cofounders of the
National Organization for Women.

Murray’s relationships with
Howard Thurman,
Leon Ransom, and William
Hastie lacked the social intimacy of her friendship with Ware, yet each was vital to Murray’s development. Thurman, a professor in the School of Religion and dean of Rankin Chapel, was one of the nation’s most influential theologians. A charismatic
Baptist minister, he had led the first African American delegation to visit Mahatma
Gandhi in India. Thurman taught a captivating blend of social ethics, Christian mysticism, and Gandhian philosophy.
Murray would seek his counsel as she wrestled with the responsibilities of
student leadership during her law school career.

Ransom and Hastie were Murray’s favorite law professors. Ransom was warm and easygoing outside of class, but inside he drilled his pupils “
unmercifully.” Hastie, “
cool and detached,” unnerved opponents with his brilliance. Both men pushed Murray to excel.

Howard had a downside, despite its cultural richness and academic excellence.
University policy constrained women’s behavior and opportunities. On weekdays, women who lived in the dorms had a seven o’clock evening curfew, unless they got permission to go to the library—in which case, the deadline was eleven o’clock. Those who ventured into courses where the students were predominantly male faced ridicule from professors and classmates.

Aileen Clarke, a self-confident New Yorker, was the only woman in an international relations class taught by Professor
Eric E. Williams, who would become the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago in 1962. An Oxford-educated scholar, Williams announced on the first day, “
This is Political Science 183.… It is a course which has a great deal of work in it. There will be all kinds of papers, and I expect everyone…to be a dedicated student.… And if there is anybody in this class that is not prepared to do this, I would suggest that they leave now and sign up for home economics.” Furious, Clarke not only kept her seat, she changed her major to political science.
It was the first step in a pathbreaking career that would include stints as a labor organizer, the first female member of the
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the first and only (as of 2015) African American president of the National Organization for Women.