The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (28 page)

Pauli Murray, graduate law student (third from the left), with the International House Panel, University of California, Berkeley, 1945. Murray recalled years later that each “had suffered from exclusion and rejection” because their African, Asian, Hispanic, Jewish, or immigrant ancestry assigned them to “an unpopular or despised group.”
(The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University and the Estate of Pauli Murray)

25

“I Shall Shout for the Rights of All Mankind”

I
n October 1944, Pauli Murray started classes at the
Boalt Hall of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Because the pool of male students had evaporated with the war and few women were pursuing advanced law degrees, she was the sole graduate student. Berkeley was a college town, and race relations there, compared to Los Angeles, were relatively calm. The rolling hills and mild temperature of the Bay Area were a welcome change from the hurried life and cold winters in New York City and Washington, D.C., where she’d spent the last three years. The students, especially the residents of
International House, where Murray
lived, were a rainbow of ethnic groups and nationalities. Daily life resonated with a chorus of languages.

International House was a complex of four residences located at the edge of campus, and it was there that Murray forged close
friendships with five students in
House Number Three. Her roommates were
Mijeyko Takita, a second-generation
Japanese
American who had been interned for three years at a relocation camp in Arizona, and
Eva Schiff, a Jewish refugee from Germany whose extended family died in the Holocaust. Murray’s other new friends were
Jane Garcia, a fifth-generation Mexican American whose dark skin sparked confusion and hostile reactions from whites;
Lillian Li, a naturalized Chinese American who was treated like a new immigrant even though she had lived half her life in the States; and
Genevieve Tutell, a white American raised in China and ostracized by the Chinese because she was different.

Over the requisite “
coffee and cigarettes,” Murray and her friends had thought-provoking, “
heart-to-heart” discussions about the similarities and differences in their “minority status.” These talks, which became as important as the degrees for which they were studying, inspired them to organize a panel to share with campus groups what they had learned. They were convinced that “
friendship and peace can exist among individuals from different countries.” “
The real crux,” Murray wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, “is how to make our personal experience that of nations.”

Murray’s friendships at International House spawned an eloquent essay, “American Credo,” which appeared in
Common Ground
, a literary quarterly that promoted cultural understanding. Encouraged by
Howard Thurman’s and
Bayard Rustin’s efforts to adapt
Gandhian principles to the U.S.
civil rights struggle, Murray pledged, in her piece, to fight
segregation not with force but with “
persuasion” and “spiritual resistance.” “
When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them,” she wrote. “When they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind.” This moving essay found a broad and receptive audience that included a black soldier stationed
“somewhere in the Marianas Islands” and ER, who “
liked it very much.”

Living on the West Coast brought immediacy to the Allied victories in the Pacific and the impending meeting of the United Nations charter conference in San Francisco. Being “
released from the ‘racial struggle’ temporarily” and allowed to shift her focus to international relations gave Murray new energy.
In addition to the required coursework and the
International House panel, she took a seminar with the eminent jurist
Hans Kelsen on the
Dumbarton Oaks Conference, at which the plans were formulated for the organization that would be named, as FDR had suggested, the United Nations. She also co-organized a speaker series on the San Francisco conference, whose purpose was to draft a charter that outlined the goals, membership, and governance structure of the new agency.

Like Murray, ER was studying the Dumbarton Oaks proceedings and the plans for the San Francisco meeting. She envisioned the U.N. as a “
place where anything which troubles the world can be brought out and aired.”

Eleanor Roosevelt’s daughter, Anna Boettiger (far left); the first lady (center, in long black veil); and her son Brigadier General Elliott Roosevelt (partially hidden at right, in military cap) at Franklin Roosevelt’s burial service at the Rose Garden, Hyde Park, New York, on April 15, 1945. Pauli Murray stayed close to the radio, following the funeral rites in her “mind’s eye.”
(Bettmann/CORBIS)

26

“I Pray for Your Strength and Fortitude”

F
or Pauli Murray, April 1945 brought disappointment and shock. First, there was
Eleanor Roosevelt’s April 5 letter declining the invitation to visit
International House. “
I will be in San Francisco for just one day,” wrote the first lady, “and I know from past experience that when I am with the President it is too difficult to make separate engagements.” Then came the news of
Franklin Roosevelt’s death on April 12.

Murray had been apprehensive about the president’s health for more than a year. Her suspicions were confirmed when he began his March 1 address to Congress after the
Yalta Conference with a surprising reference to his physical disability. “
I hope that you will pardon me for the unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say,” he began, “but I know that you will realize it makes it a lot easier for me in not having to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the
bottom of my legs and also because of the fact that I have just completed a 14,000-mile trip.” FDR was well “
the entire time,” he insisted, and he had come home from the meeting with
Winston Churchill and
Joseph Stalin “refreshed and inspired.” He even brought the House to laughter with a quip: “
The Roosevelts are not, as you may suspect, averse to travel; we seem to thrive on it.” Nonetheless, the president’s sagging body and the occasional slur in speech overshadowed his genial façade.

Grief blanketed the nation as word of his death spread. Men and women wept openly on the streets. FDR’s allies and rivals issued statements of sympathy. When word of his death reached the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Winston Churchill said, “
It is not fitting that we should continue our work this day but that we adjourn to the memory of this
great departed statesman.” Governor Thomas
Dewey, the former Republican candidate for president, said, “
Every American of every shade of opinion will mourn the loss of
Franklin Roosevelt as a human being of warm human qualities and great capacities.”

Newspaper editors from coast to coast recounted the president’s steady stewardship through the Depression, the war, and preparations for the U.N. conference. The
New York Times
said, “
Men will thank God on their knees a hundred years from now that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House, in a position to give leadership to the thought of the American people and to give direction to the activities of their Government in that dark hour when a powerful and ruthless barbarism threatened to overrun the civilization of the Western world and to destroy the world of centuries of progress.”

African Americans were devastated. “
Negroes cried publicly without embarrassment and these tears came from tenant farmers in Mississippi as well as penthouse dwellers in
Harlem,” reported the
Pittsburgh Courier
. Howard University president
Mordecai Johnson spoke for millions when he declared,
“Since
Abraham Lincoln, no man has so laid hold upon the hearts of the people, and no man’s death has so greatly grieved them.”
Mary McCleod Bethune, one of four blacks among some two hundred guests invited to the president’s White House
funeral, lamented, “
Little people, the common people, will miss him as no other group is capable. He has been the unyielding champion of minorities for a fair chance in the race of life. His works will live forever.”

The president’s death was a double loss for African Americans, for it also meant, as the
Courier
explained, “
the removal of Mrs. Roosevelt from the social life of the Nation.” Unlike FDR, who was “
necessarily restrained”
by
political considerations, ER spoke “for the rights and privileges of Negroes,” even when the president’s advisers viewed her remarks as unwise.
Maethelda Morris wrote in the
Washington Afro-American
that an era had closed for a “
noted champion” of
democracy.
The
Philadelphia Afro-American
published a twelve-page extra edition, featuring photo tributes and stories about Franklin
and
Eleanor Roosevelt. The front page appropriately bore two headlines: “America Loses Greatest First Lady” and “World Mourns FDR.”

Although Murray had visited ER in
New York City and the White House, she had never met the president. Murray had lived her “
entire adult life…under the Roosevelt Administration,” and it was hard for her to imagine the executive government without FDR. She had come close to
voting for him for the first time in
1944, but the designation of Harry
Truman as his vice presidential running mate instead of Henry
Wallace, whose “
tough western idealism” she admired, had held her back.

Despite Murray’s differences with FDR, she felt a sense of loyalty to him, which she poured into a letter the day he died.

April 12, 1945

Dear Mrs. Roosevelt:

We have just heard. There is not one I’ve seen who has not expressed a physical illness over the disaster which has befallen each individual American today.

We are still unwilling to believe it although it has been verified for us. At this crucial period just before the Conference the President gave his life to bring about, we know what his leaving us means.

But because he would be the last person to have a people give in to despair, I’ve been trying hard to find some purpose and meaning in his going at this particular time. I believe this calamity had to come to us. We have escaped the national sorrow under which the people in the rest of the world have labored—invasion, bombing out, suffering. While death has touched the homes of individual Americans, this thing touches all of us in a personal way. The President’s going will unite the American people in an equality of sorrow which will cleanse and purify us, I believe.

It is now up to us, each one of us, to carry on, to do each small task with greater dedication, simply because we have been robbed of our symbol and Top Man. The greatest tribute we can pay to him will be to make real the things he died for—because he is no less a war casualty than the boy in the foxhole.

I know that these are empty words today, but I can’t help believing that the hearts of the American people and the people of the world will be shaken from their moorings over this thing, and that as Americans the only way we can repay the debt we owe to him and to you, or to ease your loss, is to take individual responsibility for giving our best to our country and to mankind.

I only hope that we will be given a kind of collective vision and insight, and that an entire people through a sorrow which is not unlike that of losing the firstborn son, will rise to meet the test which is upon us.

For a long time, we have known that no other man could quite fill the requirements of leadership. Now God—or death—has removed that man. History will not be able to record that Roosevelt lost the peace. If we lose it this time, it will be lost by the American people. This is the task we face—this is the dedication we must make.

I pray for your strength and fortitude, because we all need you more than ever now.

Am I presumptious [
sic
] to believe that the President would have preferred to go as he did—in harness.

Just

Pauli

Murray’s missive was among the thousands of condolences the first lady received and that Tommy gathered in clothes baskets for safekeeping until they could be answered. It would be two months before Murray heard back. In short order, ER had to fly to Georgia, accompany the president’s body to the Capitol by train, plan the
funeral, and move out of the White House.
Her grief, unbeknownst to the public, was compounded by the revelation that FDR’s old flame
Lucy Page Mercer Rutherfurd was with him when he died, and that ER’s daughter, Anna, had helped her father keep the rekindled
affair secret. Notwithstanding her private troubles, the first lady cast a reassuring image to the nation in her black shoulder-length widow’s veil.