The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (29 page)

Just as the hearse bearing Franklin Roosevelt’s coffin left
Warm Springs, Graham W.
Jackson Sr., the black bandleader who had been preparing to perform for the president the day he died, stepped forward with his accordion.
With tears streaming down his face, he played
“Goin’ Home,” a Negro spiritual often sung at funerals. Millions lined the railroad tracks from Georgia to New York to wave farewell to the president’s flag-draped casket. A mournful hymn sung by the
Rowan County
Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Choir was heard as the train passed through nearby Salisbury, North Carolina, and in Washington, D.C., a unit of black soldiers
marched in the funeral procession. FDR was laid to rest in the Rose Garden of his Hyde Park estate on April 15.

Jackson and the black Baptist choir had paid their final respects in song. Murray paid hers with the
poem “The Passing of F.D.R.,” which she sent to ER. “
We wish the great love and concern we have felt for you this week-end could spread over the earth and become man’s universal concern for his brother,” Murray wrote in a cover note. “If [Stephen Vincent] Benét were here, he could say what needs to be said. Since he isn’t here, this is what I have been thinking about the
President these past two days.”

“
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT IS DEAD
”

New York Times
, dateline April 12, 1945

A lone man stood on the glory road,

Peered through the shadows,

Made sure he was alone—at last,

Then drank a new-found solitude,

Drank long and deep of the vast

Breath of lilacs and honeysuckle.

He stumbled a pace,

Groped about in the April twilight

As one who feels his legs beneath him

For the first time,

Tests them on solid earth

And finds them worthy of a good sprint.

The man laughed, a golden laughter,

Rich and deep as a Georgia sunset,

Lifted a foot and kicked a pebble,

Shouted and sang, danced up and down,

As do all free things

Finding themselves free.

His shoulders spread like an eagle’s wing

Freed from some killing weight, and so

Putting one foot down before the other

He strode with a whistling gait.

And then his face, miracle of light,

Gay and soft as a child’s

Retrieving a beloved toy,

Turned toward the going sun,

Turned to the hills and the long road upward.

It is such a common thing to see

A man walking a road in Georgia twilight,

But if you had been watching

Or held your ear to the ground long enough,

You would have known this man

Walked as few had done before him.

There was the sound of marching in his step—

A world marching,

There was the patter of children’s feet,

There was earth music, a million-voiced hymn,

And a great prayer thrust up in many tongues,

A small dog’s barking, a small lad’s tears,

And the silence of a world aged with grief.

Oh, bare your breast to the grindstone, brothers,

Let the heart’s filings fill this crack in time,

For a lone man walks on the glory road,

Waits for the final gun,

The last exploding cannon,

When a man can walk in Georgia twilight,

Shouting as all free things do

Finding themselves free.

27

“The Problem Now Is How to Carry On”

A
fter Franklin
Roosevelt’s
funeral, Eleanor Roosevelt packed to move out of the White House. Although she had come to Washington reluctantly, she had grown confident in her role as first lady. For twelve years, she had been the president’s emissary, assiduously reporting what she observed, lobbying fiercely for causes close to her heart.

She had also learned to take pleasure in life in the White House.
When the weather permitted, she dined on the sun porch near the flowers. On her last night in the Executive Mansion, as she stared through her bedroom window at the “
little red light” atop the Washington Monument, she told herself, “If Washington could be steadfast through Valley Forge, we could be steadfast today in spite of anxiety and sorrow.”
The next morning, ER, accompanied by sons James and Elliott, daughter Anna, and Tommy, said good-bye to the White House staff. She left, without looking back.

ER resumed “My Day” on April 17, 1945, five days after FDR passed. “
Perhaps, in His wisdom, the Almighty is trying to show us that a leader may chart the way, may point out the road to lasting peace, but that many leaders and many peoples must do the building,” she wrote. “It cannot be the work of one man, nor can the responsibility be laid upon his shoulders, and so when the time comes for peoples to assume the burden more fully, he is given rest.”

Despite her husband’s death, ER would discover an upside to being alone. No longer the president’s wife, she could say and do as she pleased. And she intended to do just that as a private citizen and a journalist. Having
written “My Day” for a decade, she felt she had earned her stripes. Finally free to write without constraints, she wanted her work judged “
on its own merits.”

· · ·

FOR PAULI MURRAY
, a political landscape without the Roosevelts in the White House was a somber reality made even more unsettling by her reservations about the new president. Harry
Truman was a senator from Missouri when he replaced Henry
Wallace as
Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president on the
1944 Democratic ticket. While many Americans were hopeful about Truman, his reputation for congeniality and plain speaking did not ease suspicions about him among African Americans. Indeed, his friendly relations with Senate conservatives, and his native connection to a state whose admission into the Union was part of a compromise that permitted slavery within its borders, made Murray leery. She was not alone in her misgivings.

Demps Whipper Powell, a ninety-four-year-old black
Civil War veteran said to have marched with General William Tecumseh
Sherman through Georgia, was so upset about Truman’s ascendance to the presidency that “
he refused to complete his dinner” when he heard the news.
J. Mercer Burrell, a black attorney who had served in the New Jersey state legislature, said he feared that “
the delicate balance in international affairs” and domestic “race relations” were at risk “with
Harry S. Truman of Missouri becoming President.”

The
Courier
, which had endorsed FDR’s rivals in the
1940 and 1944 presidential elections, had warned Roosevelt’s supporters to pray for his health after Truman joined the Democratic ticket. That warning proved prophetic. Truman took the oath of office eighty-three days after Roosevelt’s fourth inauguration.

Murray’s uneasiness about Truman extended to his wife, Elizabeth “Bess” Truman.
In contrast to Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Truman shunned the public glare and made no plans to hold frequent press conferences. Murray was desperate to keep the lines of communication open between the White House and blacks, and she raised the issue with ER.
“Negroes, as with
Labor, will have to get used to the idea that two friends over long years, and a confidence built out of a growth of understanding their problems, are not to be in the White House,” Murray wrote. “Your long years of liaison work helped over many a tense point, and you not only grew in your own understanding of our problems, but you and Mr. Roosevelt taught people like me to grow.… The problem now,” Murray
continued, “is how to carry on, to build a working relationship with the
Truman administration.” Toward this end, she encouraged ER to host a meeting between Bess Truman and a “
small group of our leading Negro women.”

· · ·

GIVEN THE CRITICISM ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
had endured as first lady, she was not about to impose her views upon her successor. She did, however, enter the fray over the
Fair Employment
Practices Committee, the existence of which was due to expire on June 30, 1945. The House Rules Committee had blocked the bill that authorized funds and gave the FEPC permanent status, and Senate conservatives promised a filibuster.

ER was unwilling to let the committee die, and she told readers, “
This bill would give us a permanent group in the government whose function it would be to see that, as far as employment goes throughout this country, there is complete equality of opportunity and treatment for all.” The consequences would be grave should Congress not act affirmatively, she insisted. “If we do not see that equal opportunity, equal justice and equal treatment are meted out to every citizen, the very basis on which this country can hope to survive with liberty and justice for all will be wiped away.”

ER’s remarks pressured President Truman into publicly releasing his June 5 letter to House Rules Committee chairman
Adolph J. Sabath, urging a floor vote on the bill. At a news conference, Truman echoed ER’s sentiment when he said, “
Discrimination in the matter of employment against properly qualified persons because of their race, creed or color, is not only un-American in nature, but will lead eventually to industrial strife and unrest.”

After the president’s conference, Murray told ER, “
I feel you are as much responsible for that statement as any other single human being.”
Democratic Party leaders apparently agreed, and they tried to persuade ER to run for public office or to accept a political appointment, such as U.S. secretary of labor or U.S. delegate to the San Francisco U.N. Conference.
She rebuffed the idea of a public office for the time being. What she wanted and intended to do was pursue her
writing and settle her husband’s estate.

· · ·

BY MAY
8, 1945,
Victory in Europe Day, the day after
Germany’s unconditional surrender, Murray faced a series of personal challenges. She was
suffering from chronic appendicitis. Her money was running out. She had neither finished her master’s thesis nor taken the
bar exam. And
Aunt Pauline wanted her to come home.

Adding to
Murray’s concerns over the summer was news of a secret weapon. On August 6, 1945, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, the
Enola Gay
, dropped a nuclear bomb on
Hiroshima, Japan. Over seventy-five thousand people died instantaneously, and hundreds of thousands were injured and would eventually die. U.S. forces dropped a second atomic bomb on
Nagasaki on August 9. Japan surrendered on August 15. Murray prayed for the families of American service personnel wounded and killed, and for the civilians, among whom were the grandparents of
Mijeyko Takita, one of her roommates.

The use of a nuclear weapon prompted Murray to make a proposal. “
Have you ever considered the idea of a
Department of Peace as a part of the Cabinet, with a Secretary of Peace to do a job of intercultural interpretation on the international scene?” she asked ER in a letter. “The Departments of War and
State are primarily concerned with military and political arrangements, but you and I know that peace is composed of human understanding as well as power and politics.… I have often thought of you as our first woman President (Please don’t protest—I’m not alone in this thought), or our first Secretary of Peace,” Murray went on, waxing enthusiastic. “You are fitted by training and experience for either.”

Murray’s ideas seemed impractical to ER. “
I have never considered the idea of a Department of Peace as part of a Cabinet,” she replied, “as I do not believe in augmenting the existing departments, but I wish the State Department could be made to do more along these lines.” On the question of holding
public office, she told Murray, “
You are sweet to feel as you do about me, but nothing would induce me to run for any office, or to accept an appointment to any office. Aside from my own personal feelings about public life, I feel that
women have not yet succeeded in establishing themselves well enough to have a large public following and without that, no one could do a good job.”