The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (34 page)

33

“I Could Write in Privacy Without Interruption”

U
nable to challenge the rejection from
Cornell and the “
shadowy inference” its officials raised about her background, Pauli Murray turned to a project in the fall of 1952 that gave her a chance to say who she really was. That project was a
memoir of the
Fitzgeralds, her fiercely devout and patriotic maternal ancestors, who were the “
earliest and most enduring” of all her “past associations.” The idea of
writing a family memoir had been incubating since her college days.
Stephen Vincent Benét, with whom Murray had shared sketches a decade earlier, had recognized her work as “
the germ from which a remarkable novel or a remarkable story might come.” He had insisted that she
“do some more” and that she tell her story “from the inside and with sensitiveness and truth.”

Despite Benét’s encouragement, Murray put the book on hold to go to law school and start a
legal career. Not until the difficulties with
Cornell did the desire to write overtake her. One day, she “
rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter” and pecked out a sentence that began a four-year journey of research and writing.

Pressed for time and money, Murray suspended her
law practice and took a job with the
New York City Welfare Department
as a caseworker. She wrote before and after work and on weekends. Once she’d completed an outline and several chapters, literary agent
Marie F. Rodell and
Harper & Brothers editor
Elizabeth Lawrence Kalashnikoff helped Murray secure a book contract and a residential fellowship at The
MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire. Of her time there, Murray would say with delight, “
I could write in privacy without interruption.”

The MacDowell was the oldest residential retreat for writers, composers, and visual artists in the United States. Joining Murray in the 1954 fellows class was writer
James Baldwin. Fourteen years younger than Murray, Baldwin was a native New Yorker with large, arresting eyes. He was “
dedicated to becoming a great artist,” and he regularly missed the socially expected communal dinner. Murray, who often took supper to Baldwin in his cottage, usually found him tearing “himself to pieces over his typewriter.”
Together, they would occasionally venture into town to see a movie or have a beer.

Baldwin had already published his first novel,
Go Tell It on the Mountain
, a semiautobiographical account of his boyhood in
Harlem. He was working on
Notes of a Native Son
, which was a collection of personal essays about race, and
Giovanni’s Room
, a novel whose main character, a young white man, wrestles with his homosexuality, an experience Baldwin knew firsthand.

Murray’s writing, like Baldwin’s, drew on life experience, but she would not explicitly raise issues of sexual orientation beyond references to her childhood tomboyishness. Multiple factors influenced her reticence. In contrast to Baldwin, who in 1948 had moved to
France, where he found a measure of social and artistic acceptance, Murray lived in a milieu where politicians and religious leaders denounced homosexuals as criminally prone degenerates.
The
reputations and careers of people she knew and admired, such as
Bayard Rustin, had been tarnished by revelations of homosexual relations. And she knew that lesbians, like gay men, had no protection against harassment and baseless
charges of disloyalty.

The political climate was not the sole reason Murray wrote or spoke only with trusted friends and family members about her sexuality. She
had been studying the medical literature for years, and she had yet to find an explanation for homosexuality she could accept. She was attracted to women and she considered herself normal. If, according to science, being homosexual meant one had a psychological disorder and was, therefore, not normal, then she would reject this categorization.

Murray’s
family background also played a role in her decision to be circumspect about her sexuality. She was a devout
Episcopalian reared by elderly kin with Victorian values. Whereas
Aunts Pauline and Sallie had accepted Murray’s relationships with women, some relatives and friends did not. Moreover, the thought of adding to the rumors about her parents’ deaths, which had marked the Murrays as
mentally unstable, was something Pauli could not bear.

· · ·

WHILE MURRAY RETREATED
at the colony, Eleanor
Roosevelt was coming home from the U.N. assembly meeting in
Paris “
the long way.” She started in the
Middle East, stopping in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and
Israel, visiting historic and religious sites, humanitarian projects, and a cross-section of people. From Israel, she flew to
Pakistan, where she toured a maternity ward sponsored by the
All-Pakistan Women’s Association. From Pakistan, she went to
India, where Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru and his sister
Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who headed the Indian delegation to the U.N., welcomed her.

In India, ER addressed parliament, met with women’s groups, and visited a school Mahatma
Gandhi had established for the untouchables, who, in accordance with the caste system, were excluded from society. She met with students at the
University of Bombay against the advice of officials, who feared protesters would insult her. She fielded questions about discrimination, attitudes toward
communism, and censorship in American universities with confidence and ease.

Because ER’s father, Elliott, had promised they would see India together, this leg of the trip held special significance. ER yearned for him when she reached the famous
Khyber Pass, connecting northern Pakistan with Afghanistan. She was only ten when he died. Still, she remembered his stories of “
going through this pass on Indian hunting trips.” She also went to the
Taj Mahal, his favorite site, three times. Each time, she “
hated to leave.”

Despite the blurriness, Pauli Murray adored this snapshot she took of her “three” aunts—(left to right) Sallie F. Small, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Pauline F. Dame—in the yard at Val-Kill, Hyde Park, New York, on August 15, 1952. ER was “happy to have the picture” as well.
(The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, and the Estate of Pauli Murray)

34

“We Consider You a Member of the Family”

O
n August 15, 1952,
Eleanor Roosevelt treated Murray and her
aunts Pauline and Sallie to lunch at
Val-Kill and a tour of Franklin Roosevelt’s birthplace. Dining with them at umbrella-shaded tables in front of a “
beautiful blue pool” were Tommy;
Ruth, the wife of ER’s grandson
Curtis Roosevelt; Anne Roosevelt, the pregnant wife of ER’s son John; and three Roosevelt grandchildren. ER and Tommy heaped generous helpings of fish, corn on the cob, salad, buttered bread,
peaches, and cake on plates, which the children carried to the adults. The dinnerware was a practical combination of silver serving dishes and paper plates and cups.

Aunt Pauline and Tommy chatted about teaching. Aunt Sallie and
Anne Roosevelt discussed “
raising and training” children. Murray and ER “
talked politics.” ER thought the
Republican candidate for president, former five-star general and commander of Allied forces Dwight David
Eisenhower, unbeatable. Just the same, she was convinced that Illinois governor Adlai E.
Stevenson II was the best man for the job. His intelligence and “
liberal civil rights record” impressed Murray, too, and she would soon join
New York Volunteers for Stevenson.

After lunch, ER drove Murray and her aunts to the entrance of the library and museum, where a guide took them on a tour. They admired FDR’s collection of model ships and stuffed birds; the Dresden china, chandelier, and mantelpiece in the
Dresden Room, the cozy room where his mother, Sara, read and wrote her letters; and the family library, from whose window the president had addressed his neighbors on the eve of his elections.

All of the furnishings, including his spartan boyhood room, with its small brass bed and school diplomas, had been restored. Near the bathtub was his wheelchair. Hanging in a clothes chest was the
presidential cape. His felt hats rested on an upper shelf.
Fala’s blanket, collar, and leash lay on a chair.

Murray and her aunts exited the house and crossed the lawn to the Rose Garden, where a “
white plain marble monument, eight feet long, four feet wide and three feet high,” marked the president’s
grave. Its inscription read:

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT
1882–1945

ANNA ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
1884–19

Fala’s resting place, behind the monument near a sundial, was covered by a “
flat marker level with the ground.”

Their final stop was the Presidential Library. There they saw Franklin’s and Eleanor’s christening gowns, the “
little kiltie Scottish plaid suit” the president “wore when he was six,” and a collection of photographs that documented his life from childhood to Yalta. Murray was an avid diarist,
and she was fascinated by the January 30, 1882, entry Franklin Roosevelt’s father, James, made in his diary: “
My Sallie gave birth to a bouncing baby boy today—he weighed 10 pounds at birth.”

Upon returning home, Murray and her aunts composed a letter for family and
friends, capturing the high points of their visit. The most emotional moment for Murray was when she took a
photograph of ER flanked by Aunts Pauline and Sallie in their Sunday best on the lawn. Of that snapshot, Murray wrote to ER, “
It’s not the best picture because I was so nervous taking it, my camera shook, but it rests on our mantelpiece with other numerous pictures of the family, and in our spiritual way, we consider you a member of the family.”

35

“I Was Deeply Moved That You Counted Me
Among Your Close Friends”

O
n November 4,
1952,
Dwight Eisenhower became the thirty-fourth president of the United States.
Although he pledged to strengthen the United Nations in his inaugural address, he did not reappoint Eleanor Roosevelt to the U.S. delegation. His decision worried her supporters, many of whom saw her as the agency’s most influential advocate and voice of goodwill.

ER’s departure compounded Pauli Murray’s disappointment over
Adlai Stevenson’s defeat.
He had carried the
black vote nationwide; and in
Harlem, where Murray canvassed, he garnered 83 percent of the vote.
That the new president was a war general who seemed unwilling to call Senator
McCarthy on his red-baiting tactics disheartened Murray even more.

The day after Eisenhower’s inauguration, Murray was thumbing through the February 1953 issue of
Ebony
magazine when she discovered ER’s essay
“Some of My Best Friends Are Negro.” The cover featured a
photograph of ER and Mary
McLeod Bethune seated together.
Inside, Murray was mentioned and pictured alongside
Walter White, Bethune, musician
Josh White, U.N. delegates Channing
Tobias and
Edith Sampson, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Ralph Bunche.

ER admitted in this candid piece that she had had no significant contact with African Americans or any awareness of
racial discrimination until she was in her mid-teens. Not until adulthood did she develop genuine friendships with blacks and relate to them as
“social
equals.” “
One of my finest young friends,” she boasted, “is a
charming woman lawyer—
Pauli Murray, who has been quite a firebrand at times but of whom I am very fond. She is a lovely person who has struggled and come through very well.” Of Murray’s growth in the fourteen years they had been friends, ER wrote, “
I think there were times when she might have done foolish things. But now I think she is well ready to be of real use. My relationship with Pauli is very satisfying.”

ER’s upbringing made it difficult for her to address people by their given names, and her status made friends reluctant to call her Eleanor, she told readers. To bridge the social gap, she encouraged young and “
really close friends” to call her “Mrs. R.,” and she pushed herself to use their first names. ER probably did not know that Murray’s first name was actually Anna, and so called her Pauli, as she preferred.

That ER spoke so honestly about their friendship in
Ebony
, a glossy, photo-rich African American–interest magazine with more than five hundred thousand subscribers, pleased and amused Murray. “
I howled when I read that line about the ‘firebrand,’ ” she wrote to ER. “
I had always thought of myself as a ‘spearhead’ but never a firebrand. Anyway, I was deeply moved that you counted me among your close friends and delighted that you thought of me as Pauli—as naturally as it should be.”

· · ·

WHEN MURRAY
’
S LETTER ARRIVED
, ER was in the midst of packing and saying good-bye to her colleagues at the U.N. “
I am glad you liked the appellation,” she replied. “Of course I count you among my close friends.” Leaving the U.N., where she had friends and work of tremendous import, made ER sad. The days had been arduous, the victories hard to come by, but cherish them she would.