The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (37 page)

Since the publication of the 1950 Senate report
Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government
and President Eisenhower’s 1953
Executive Order 10450 on security requirements for government employment, loyalty boards had charged thousands of government workers and military personnel with engaging in “
behavior, activities, or associations” that made them security risks. “
Sexual perversion,” one of the behaviors for which one could be dismissed, included homosexuality.
Thus, homosexuals and those accused of having homosexual tendencies were said to be morally prone toward criminality and communism, and could be dismissed summarily without the right to appeal, even when the allegations came from anonymous sources.

Because the executive order permitted review boards to investigate an employee’s “
illness, including any mental condition,” sexuality, and political background, it locked the door to federal employment against
Murray. Not only was she a committed liberal activist, she was a lesbian with a record of hospitalizations precipitated by thyroid disease, bouts of malnutrition and exhaustion, and the stress of an unrelenting battle against discrimination on multiple fronts. Still, her conscience demanded that she try to help Morrow.

· · ·

WHILE MURRAY ALTERNATED BETWEEN
resting and working on Morrow’s appeal, ER went to the fiftieth reunion of the
Harvard College class of 1904. She addressed the group on “
women’s achievements” as a leader in her own right, as well as the wife of the most famous class member. Following her talk, ER joined Franklin Roosevelt’s classmates at a baseball game and then for dinner at the
Fogg Art Museum. It was a delightful weekend, and she “
wished so much” that her husband “could have been there.”

39

“What I Have to Say Now Is Entirely Personal”

P
auli Murray was so preoccupied with her health and a gravely ill relative that she did not know Eleanor Roosevelt had postponed her trip to the
Soviet Union. The visa for the journalist
Look
magazine assigned to accompany ER had been delayed. With a month to do as she pleased, ER decided to go see Murray at
Freedmen’s
Hospital. When ER walked into her room at four o’clock in the afternoon on June 30, 1954, Murray grinned liked the Cheshire cat.

Word of
ER’s presence spread like wildfire, kindling excitement among the hospital staff members and patients. Doctors and nurses who had never reviewed Murray’s medical chart suddenly decided she required immediate attention. As soon as her doctor,
Arthur F. Burton, got out of surgery, he came to her doorway in his green uniform and stared at the famous visitor, who placed her arms around Murray’s shoulders as Murray pranced up the hall “
like a little happy elf.” ER’s visit was an expression of her affection for Murray, and it was the perfect curative for low spirits.

Adding to Murray’s delight was a fortuitous meeting between ER and Corienne
Morrow. Morrow’s father was also a patient at the hospital, and she had come to take him home. When Morrow stopped to look in on Murray, she bumped into ER. Murray introduced them.

On Independence Day, four days after ER’s visit, Murray penned a four-page letter with the words “
PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL” capitalized and underlined at the top of the first page. In her missive, Murray spoke of “the deep residuum of love” people had for the former first lady and the late
president and her belief that ER was destined
for the presidency. With an “army of trained
New Deal–Fair Deal babies who have now come to maturity—as I believe I have done”—and a bright, young running mate like
Adlai Stevenson,
Murray wrote, “you could toss off the problems of State in the same way that your ‘school-teacher’ soul tossed off the Russians in the Commission on Human Rights.”

Halfway through her letter, Murray described a
family secret known to only a handful of friends, such as
Ruth Powell, who had accompanied Murray to
Saint Elizabeths
Hospital to visit her brother
William. It had taken Murray sixteen years to share this story with ER. “
What I have to say now is
entirely personal
,” Murray began.

My reasons for behaving as I have done over the years, of being an unreconstructed rebel, of searching in many places for the answers to my life, is due in large part to the double tragedy of my parents—whose ages and the ages of whose children largely correspond to those of the Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt family. My mother (whose picture you saw) died in 1914 when I was just over three, from what was diagnosed as a cerebral accident. However, a rumor arose at the same time that she committed suicide because she was in her seventh pregnancy, my father was hopelessly mentally ill (he had had typhoid and brain fever several years earlier) and…under these conditions she could not face bringing an additional child into the world. Three years later my father was hospitalized in Crownsville, and six years later he was murdered by a guard there. Two of my own siblings have been hospitalized in mental institutions, and the fear of insanity has hung over all six of us, despite evidence of stamina and intellect. This double tragedy has cast a shadow over a very fine, potentially creative family, and we have not known how to handle it. We have been afraid that the tragedy of our own lives would be handed on to our descendants, and the trauma of this has caused each of us in turn to trim our souls (what a slip, I mean our sails) and never hope for any recognition in accordance with our respective abilities.

Living under this cloud, I never dared to apply for a government job—and of course, you saw what happened to my Cornell application in 1952. Since then, I have been systematically trying to find answers to my family’s medical problem which has kept us all so unhappy and held down our potential.

Now that I have found a partial answer to the emotional thyroid storms which have tipped me over at every important step in my life—and somehow you have been aware of them—I want to see if I can do something further to straighten out our lives and leave us free to do good work in the world. We are now all 40 or over, we are all in good physical health…, we have been blessed with a heritage of long-livers and good minds over a period of several generations, and we do have a contribution to make to our country and to the world. I am said to have my father’s brilliant mind, and I have often thought that had he lived in my generation when medical science and psychiatry had advanced further than it had now, and when he might have had more consideration based upon merit rather than racial status, we all might have avoided the near-tragedies which constantly beset us.

Murray’s postscript—“Do not try to answer this except to acknowledge receipt of it, so that I know you got it”—discouraged a response. Thus, it is difficult to know what ER thought.
What is known is that she had a personal connection to the issues Murray raised. ER had lost her mother and then her father before she became a teenager. ER knew the strain of a relative’s illness, as her father,
Elliott; brother
Gracie Hall; and paternal uncles
Valentine and Edward Hall had suffered from alcoholism, a disease shrouded in shame the way mental illness was. ER had seen and lobbied against the deplorable conditions under which shell-shocked
World War I veterans were housed at
Saint Elizabeths Hospital, the same facility where Murray’s brother William was now institutionalized. And while ER might not have fully understood how a thyroid disorder affected Murray’s functioning, she had periodically experienced what she referred to as “
Griselda moods,” and her symptoms—emotional withdrawal, weight loss, inability to concentrate—resembled depression.

ER followed Murray’s request to reflect “
prayerfully” without comment on her personal history. But she felt compelled to squash Murray’s speculation about the presidency. “
You have one idea which you must get out of your head,” ER wrote back, “namely that I should run for political office. I am much too old for that and in any case the American people are not yet ready to have a woman as President or Vice-President. I am glad they are not because I would feel very inadequate to fill the role at the present time.”

It was inconceivable to Murray that ER was too old or not prepared to run for office. At seventy, she averaged no less than forty lectures a year, and she was well versed in world affairs. She continued to write a daily
column, plus numerous articles, and books. And her influence as a spokesperson for progressive causes was undeniable.

Murray agreed not to raise the presidency issue again.

Nevertheless, she refused to stop pushing the
NAACP to change its selection criteria for the
Spingarn Medal. She thought it philosophically inconsistent and morally wrong for the nation’s premier
civil rights organization to deny Eleanor Roosevelt or
Lillian Smith consideration for its most prestigious award. The association “
can now well afford to make its highest honor to…any citizen regardless of race, color or sex,” Murray wrote to NAACP board chairman Channing
Tobias, “so long as the merit is one of contribution to
human rights.” Despite Murray’s appeal and the board’s high regard for ER and Smith, it refused to change the eligibility requirements for the Spingarn award.

Eleanor Roosevelt with granddaughter Sara “Sally” Roosevelt (left), whom Pauli Murray and her niece Bonnie Fearing met at Val-Kill the weekend a category 4 hurricane struck New York State, October 15–17, 1954. ER’s “indomitable courage” in the face of this ferocious storm was an “example” that would inspire Murray for years to come.
(Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)

40

“What a Wonderful Weekend It Was”

P
auli Murray had hoped for a measure of emotional calm after
thyroid surgery. What she experienced instead were vision problems and a “
laugh-and-cry-loss-of-memory-mean-pick-a-fight-with-everyone stage” that lasted through the summer of 1954. The side effects of the operation and her medications, along with a relative’s death, increased her anxiety. Too disoriented to write, Murray longed to get away to a quiet
place in the mountains. “
If it would not be too much trouble,” she asked Eleanor Roosevelt, “may I hibernate up there for a few days? The idea is to look at nature and not at the
typewriter.”

ER welcomed Murray’s request for respite at her country cottage. She also told Murray that she could bring her twenty-one-year-old niece, Bonnie. Bonnie, who had just graduated from
Catholic University, had always wanted to meet ER, and Pauli decided to make the weekend trip a graduation gift.

On Friday, October 15, 1954, at five o’clock in the afternoon, Pauli and Bonnie met ER at her New York apartment for the drive up to Hyde Park.
The first reports of
Hurricane Hazel had come the day before from Haiti, where a curtain of wind and rain had killed hundreds. From there, Hazel made her way up the Atlantic seaboard of the United States, uprooting trees, toppling houses, breaking power lines, and blowing debris along transportation routes.

Thousands in the Carolinas were left homeless and exposed to contaminated water and broken sewer lines. In Virginia, a battleship washed ashore in the James River. In the District of Columbia, the Potomac overflowed, and at Mount Vernon,
George Washington’s estate, a century-old pecan tree was destroyed. In Delaware, a woman was hurled to her death in front of a trolley car. By the time Hazel reached New York, her wind gusts were averaging one hundred miles per hour. A Brooklyn couple “
stepped on a live wire” and perished. A nineteen-year-old girl riding the Staten Island Ferry vanished after a wave “
swept over its front lower deck.”

ER seemed unconcerned about Hazel’s havoc and the
U.S. Weather Bureau’s warning of hazardous conditions. She napped in the front seat, while her driver,
William White, “
sped along the parkways, trying to outrun the storm.” Murray and Bonnie crouched together in the backseat, terrified.

When they reached Val-Kill, there was no electricity or water. Unruffled by this inconvenience, ER guided her guests to their upstairs bedroom by candlelight. Before Pauli and Bonnie could unpack, ER called out, “
Hurry up, girls, put your things down. We have an engagement at
Bard College and we don’t want to keep them waiting.” ER had promised the students she would read to them from her favorite works. Bard was over an hour away under normal conditions, yet she fully intended to keep her commitment.

ER and her guests took off, with White navigating the car through small streams and around fallen branches. At times, the wind and rain
made it difficult for them to see more than a few feet ahead. At the college, they found an upended tree blocking the entrance, so they abandoned the car and trudged to the meeting hall by foot.

The students, having assumed that ER would not come in such a storm, were surprised when she and her party arrived. She quickly took a spot on the floor in front of the burning fireplace, with the students and her guests around her.
She read excerpts from
Winnie-the-Pooh
,
T. S. Eliot, and
James Stephens. Her calm manner gave no hint of the danger she and her companions had braved to get there. Her reading so dazzled Murray that she concluded that the tortuous journey had been worth this moment.