The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (24 page)

Determined not to spoil the festive mood, Murray did not mention Harvard. The group had tea, toast strips, and a pleasant conversation in the presence of six guards “
posted around the room watching every move.” Even with this phalanx, “
Ruth came out with a piece of toast” and some “crumbs” that “she shared with the girls in the dorm.” Murray took home
ER’s autograph and “
a bronze-colored [paper] clip found on the doorsill of the White House.”

· · ·

JUNE
2, 1944, was a red-letter day for Murray and the 149 graduates, seven of whom were law
students, receiving degrees and certificates at Howard’s commencement.
Philip Murray, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and
Charlotte Hawkins Brown, founding president of the Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Institute, received honorary doctorates as well. No law student was more decorated than Murray. The Rosenwald fellowship and a citation from the student council recognizing the successful boycott campaign she had co-organized crowned her list of honors—until the arrival of a bouquet of posies and an accompanying card from Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. The first lady was out of town, but she had remembered Murray’s graduation.

Eager to share her pride in this day, Murray dashed off a thank-you
note and several mementos annotated with messages addressed to “Mrs. R.”
She inscribed a name card,

Pauli Murray

School of Law ’44

A sharecropper was lost
—

I hope a “statesman” has been gained
.

It is the ideal
.

On another card, she jotted,

With deep appreciation

And hope for all of us who love humanity
.

Pauli

Next to her name in the commencement program, Murray scribbled, “
With the wish that this career may be dedicated to making the life of the ‘common man’ a greater realization of the human
personality at its best.” On the back of the program, she wrote, “
The flowers brought your spirit to the graduation platform and made the whole ceremony a thing of beauty for the 149 of us. Afterward they were placed in Frazier Hall to grace the dinner for Dr.
Charlotte Hawkins Brown and
Philip Murray. We all love you Mrs. R.”

Murray also enclosed an
open letter to the class of 1944 that was part peace offering to HU president
Mordecai Johnson and part personal testimony. She characterized the two-page, single-spaced statement typed on legal-size paper as a “
reaction of one of the candidates” to Johnson’s baccalaureate address. Murray acknowledged at the outset that she’d gone to the ceremony “
prepared to be skeptical about any ‘militant’ pronouncements” he made. Yet he “
put his finger on the conflict…in her soul” when he urged graduates to go into poor southern communities to work for justice, forgoing lucrative opportunities in regions where they could live relatively free of racial
discrimination. Johnson’s plea went to the crux of a dilemma Murray felt deeply: whether to go home to the South, where her legal skills were badly needed and where she could care for her elderly aunts—as an unmarried daughter was expected to do—or to go where “
the air is freest.”

Johnson’s language, especially his repeated use of the word “love,” moved Murray. He spoke of the “
necessity for the North to love the South as it did not do in 1865,” for northerners to cast away “the stigmas”
they placed on southerners, and for blacks “to try to love, understand and learn to work with the disinherited, misunderstood, and poverty-crushed white people in the South, who had never owned slaves even though they might act now as if they did.” After citing the alarmingly low number of black professionals in the South, Johnson issued what every Howardite knew to be his “
pet thesis”: “Why don’t you put your degree in your back pocket or hand it to your Mother and go down into Brasses Bottom, Mississippi, where you are needed most. If men like
Bilbo and [Mississippi congressman
John E.] Rankin refuse to see the needs of our beloved Southland because of their blindspot on race and the artificial barrier called ‘race supremacy’ why don’t you go down there and become the true spokesman of those people?”

Johnson’s battle cry for “Brasses Bottom, Mississippi,” a phrase he’d coined to describe small rural towns in the Deep South, seemed different on this occasion to Murray. He looked tired, and “
his face grew almost purple with the intensity of his feeling.” She believed he was speaking from the heart, and she responded in kind with a series of pointed questions in her open letter to her fellow graduates.

Shall we move into the relatively freer areas where we may have a little breathing space for ourselves and our children, or shall we go back down into “Egypt,” so to speak, and rescue our people both white and black? Shall we go to Chicago or Harlem to come back Congressmen from black districts, or shall we go down into Mississippi and come back Congressmen and Senators in Bilbo’s and Rankin’s places?

Shall we leave the South to those who have demonstrated they do not know how to save it, or shall we return to our native land or the land of our grandparents and win it over for democracy inch by inch, with books and ballots, and tolerance and understanding, and love and generosity in place of bullets and the instruments of violent conflict? Can we attract trained young white graduates from the great Universities to come down and join forces with us across the great void, so that together we can demonstrate to a hungry and yearning world a delayed post-war reconstruction and rehabilitation program which would bind up the wounds that have festered for eighty years?

Murray had no answers, and she would not tell others to do what she would not do herself. She would fight prejudice and discrimination until her last breath, but she could not endure the “
dank and suffocating
malaria of racial intolerance and oppression” in the South. The
Petersburg
bus and
Odell Waller cases were still on her mind when she sent Virginia governor Colgate
Darden notice of her graduation. “
A live lawyer was far more danger to his system,” she recalled she told him, “than a dead
sharecropper.”

· · ·

HAVING READ THAT
the president was not well and that the first lady was being pummeled with letters from angry white housewives who had lost their black maids, Murray composed a humorous report for ER about the White House bouquet and the people it serendipitously touched. Murray had “
shouted ‘Oh My God!’ and run in the opposite direction” when she’d seen the flowers in the law school’s main office. Once she’d recovered from the surprise, she decided to share them “
with all the graduates, by putting them on the graduation platform.” Murray told the first lady that she had “
removed the identification card” because she was “too self-conscious to let the public” know that the Roosevelts had sent them to her.
In truth, she loved the attention the bouquet sparked on campus and in the black
press.

Murray lent the flowers to school officials for “
the honorary dinner for Mrs.
Charlotte Hawkins Brown and
Philip Murray.” A faculty member who did not know that the flowers belonged to Murray tried to give them to Brown before she left. Brown marveled at the lovely bouquet, took a handful of sprigs, and inquired about the card identifying the sender.

Murray heard about the mix-up the next day and “
hot-footed it back to campus” to pick up the remaining flowers, which she divided into small bunches for family, friends, the
Episcopal
Church of the Atonement, at which she worshipped, and a local hospital. She kept the bright purple ribbon that adorned the basket for herself.

As Murray had hoped, her report on the bouquet made ER smile. “
I was much amused by your letter and enjoyed the details of what I thought a very simple act on my part!” the first lady replied. For Murray, ER’s “simple act” was a graduation-day gift “
more powerful than an army of liberation.”

Franklin Roosevelt delivers a radio address the day after he asked Congress for $70 billion, most of which would support the war effort, Washington, D.C., January 11, 1944. He was a few weeks shy of his sixty-second birthday, but his appearance fueled reports that he was suffering from heart disease and cancer.
(Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)

20

“So at Last We Have Come to D-Day”

A
fter commencement,
Pauli Murray turned her attention to a question that held the attention of the nation: Would
Franklin Roosevelt run for a fourth term? Murray’s first consideration was the president’s health.
Photographs of his sallow face and press accounts of the ailments that sapped his strength made her uneasy. Even Eleanor Roosevelt’s explanation of his bronchitis as “
the weariness that assails everyone who grasps the full meaning of war” was not reassuring.

Like many activists who cut their teeth with groups such as the
Workers Defense League, the
March on Washington Movement, and the
Fellowship of Reconciliation, Murray had become a
socialist. She had never
voted for FDR; yet she thought she might if he ran again—and if she did not have “
to vote the Democratic ticket.” While she could not abide the
conservative Democrats who controlled Congress, she felt an affinity for the Roosevelts and the New Deal.

Murray labored over a draft of her opinion on the fourth-term issue before sending it to the White House. Setting aside her difficulties with the Democratic Party, she made the case for FDR’s reelection. “
I believe your great success as incumbents of the White House has been because, not a single man guided the country, as in
Lincoln’s time, but a whole family,” she wrote in a letter addressed to the president and
first lady. “Many people who normally would not vote for the Democratic party, have cast their votes for you, Mr. President, because they wanted to keep
both
you and Mrs. Roosevelt in the White House.” This sentiment—that the Roosevelts were a team—was especially strong among African Americans. The black White House staff, observed seamstress and maid
Lillian Rogers Parks, privately referred to ER as “
the unofficial Vice-President.”

Murray also proposed a form of government that would allow voters to split their ticket and give proportional representation to minority interest groups, such as blacks, labor, and socialists. Under such an arrangement, she could vote for Roosevelt for president and socialist candidates for other offices.

· · ·

HAVING STATED HER OPINION
on the fourth-term issue, Murray returned to the question of what to do about
Harvard. No matter how hard she tried to hide it, the school’s decision pricked a wound that was still tender. She had been rejected once again because of an accident of birth. Rather than race, which was the justification used by the University of North Carolina, the issue was now sex.

Determined to go to graduate school and unwilling to give up on Harvard, Murray decided on a two-pronged strategy: she would appeal Harvard’s rejection
and
apply to the
Boalt Hall of Law at the University of
California, Berkeley. She reasoned that she could start school at Berkeley and transfer to Harvard after it lifted the ban on women students.

The law school at Berkeley interested Murray for a number of reasons. It had a distinguished reputation; it had a full complement of faculty, unlike several schools of comparable stature whose professors were on leave in war-related assignments; and it was located in a politically liberal city known for its teeming diversity, spawned in part by the influx of people who’d come to work in defense industry jobs.

For the next month, Murray prepared to move to California, organized
her appeal to Harvard, and worked on a long, stirring
poem that chronicled the black experience from Africa to present-day America. She entitled this ambitious piece
“Dark Testament.” One of her favorite verses spoke to the power of faith.

Hope is a crushed stalk

Between clenched fingers.

Hope is a bird’s wing

Broken by a stone.

Hope is a word in a tuneless ditty—

A word whispered with the wind,

A dream of forty acres and a mule,

A cabin of one’s own and rest days often,

A name and place for one’s children

And children’s children at least

Hope is a song in a weary throat.