The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (50 page)

Pauli Murray, tutor of law and doctoral student at Yale University, circa 1962. Despite her lifelong commitment to the NAACP and her groundbreaking work as an activist, lawyer, and writer, she was relegated to the sidelines by male civil rights leaders and never received the coveted Spingarn Award.
(Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)

60

“Mrs. Roosevelt’s Spirit Marches On”

P
auli Murray was among the 250,000 demonstrators who poured into the U.S. capital for the historic
March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. It was the centennial year of the Emancipation Proclamation, and Murray savored the moment by marching twice. The first time, she marched with her niece
Bonnie Fearing Alexis and
Patricia Roberts Harris, a fellow veteran of the 1943–44 Howard University student boycotts. After they reached the
Lincoln Memorial, Murray turned around and went back to the starting point. This time she “
fell in line” with the delegation from
St. Mark’s
Church-in-the-Bowery, where she and Renee
Barlow worshipped in New York City.

Like everyone who heard
Martin Luther King’s
“I Have a Dream” speech that day, Murray was moved. Yet the treatment of the
women activists who’d helped plan, raise funds, and organize MOW made her steam.
A week before the demonstration,
Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the only woman on MOW’s administrative committee, had appealed to its all-male decision-making body in writing and in person for fair and visible representation of women. No women were slated to give major addresses during the rally at the Lincoln Memorial or to join the delegation scheduled to meet afterward in the White House with President Kennedy.

“
The men seemed to feel that women were digressing and pulling the discussion off the main track,”
National Council of Negro Women president Dorothy I.
Height recalled. March leaders justified their actions with the argument that they had more than enough speakers, that the program was already too long, and that women, by virtue of their participation in the sponsoring organizations, were represented. When told that
Mahalia Jackson was on the program, the women had replied, “
She’s not speaking on behalf of women, or on behalf of civil rights. She’s singing.”

MOW national director
A. Philip Randolph’s decision to speak at the
National Press Club forty-eight hours before the march made matters worse.
Women reporters, barred from membership and from sitting alongside male reporters when they covered speakers at the club, demanded a change of venue.

Murray was unwilling to accept the argument that public criticism would undermine MOW, and she blasted Randolph in a letter that was printed in the
Washington Post and Times Herald
. She was outraged that Randolph had agreed to speak at the club and that several members of the march committee, including Reverend King, would be on the platform with him. “
As one who has been a victim of both
Jim Crow and
Jane Crow,” she wrote,

I can give expert testimony that discrimination solely because of race and discrimination solely because of sex are equally insulting and do violence to the human spirit. It is as humiliating for a woman reporter assigned to cover Mr. Randolph’s speech to be sent to the balcony as it would be for Mr. Randolph to be sent to the back of the bus.…

At this crucial moment in our struggle, Mr. Randolph’s acceptance to speak before a professional organization which ignores and excludes half of the population (including half of the Negro population) can only be construed as a sign that Mr. Randolph and Company are concerned with the rights of Negro men only and not the rights of all people.

Ever mindful of the example set by activists in the nineteenth century,
Murray asserted,

It seems appropriate to call attention to the fact that in 1840 William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Remond, the latter a Negro, refused to be seated as delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London when they learned that the women members of the American delegation would be excluded and could sit only in the balcony. Certainly we have a right to expect nothing less from men like A. Philip Randolph who act as spokesmen for human rights in the 20th century.

Although MOW’s leaders refused to move to another site, they made a number of conciliatory gestures. They issued a statement affirming their commitment to women’s equality and “
the utilization of their abilities and talents in the building of a free and democratic American society.” They decried “the fact that in the year of 1963 there could exist in the United States any institution that would discriminate against women.”
They added
Dorothy Height to the White House delegation, invited the wives of civil rights leaders to march to the platform in a group behind the men, and asked Daisy
Bates to give a short address. Bates,
Marian Anderson, and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson were the only black women who would be part of the planned program. Entertainers
Lena Horne and
Josephine Baker, an expatriate who flew in from France, would make unscheduled remarks.

Randolph honored a handful of women during the rally by calling their names. Murray was not among them.
Some of the women hid their discomfort behind forced smiles at one another. Murray, on the other hand, was too angry to mask her feelings. She had answered Randolph’s first call for a
march on Washington in 1941, raised black women’s concerns at the 1942 Detroit policy conference, and battled sexism within the civil rights movement for decades. “
What you may not know,” Murray told
Mary Ransom Hunter, daughter of her late beloved law school professor
Leon Ransom, “is that Mr. Randolph, while a great leader of the Negro cause, is medieval in his thinking about
women.”

· · ·

TWO MONTHS AFTER
MOW, Murray gave a
speech entitled
“The Negro Woman in the Quest for Equality” at a conference in Washington, D.C., called by the
NCNW to consider women’s role in the civil rights movement. “
It was bitterly humiliating for Negro women on Aug. 28 to see themselves accorded little more than token recognition in the historic March on Washington,” she told the audience. Just as troubling for Murray was the number of
black women recently pushed out of leadership positions in local civil rights organizations and assigned to “
secondary, ornamental roles.”

The assertion by civil rights leaders, such as
James Meredith, that women and children should not be placed in roles that put them at risk held no water for Murray. Decades before Meredith’s enrollment at the
University of Mississippi provoked violent outrage, prompting President
Kennedy to order U.S. marshals and federal troops to the scene, Murray had been jailed for defying a
Virginia statute requiring segregated
buses and had co-organized two boycotts of segregated eateries in Washington, D.C. In neither case was law enforcement called in to protect her. Murray was not about to see women shunted aside or their contributions ignored under the premise that conditions were unsafe. “
All Negroes,” she maintained, “are born involved in the civil rights fight and exposed to its dangers.”

Many of the women at the meeting shared Murray’s sentiment. That male leaders had shown “
no sign of remorse” or awareness of injustice made the women “
take a hard look” at their treatment during the march and in the civil rights movement. Even so, Murray’s public attack against Randolph had a chilling effect on her relationships with her allies and friends. In a smoldering missive, she told MOW deputy director
Bayard Rustin that it might be easier for him to see “
that women’s rights were and
are
an integral part of the civil-human
rights revolution” if he would get off his “lofty masculine heights and become a brother for a few minutes.”
Her indignation at the exclusion of women from visible, policy-making roles in the movement would lead her to resign from the executive board of the
A. Philip Randolph Institute, for which Rustin served as executive director.

Pauli Murray and her close friend Maida
Springer had words after Springer said she cared deeply about women’s issues but
“never in this
life” would she oppose Randolph, whom she affectionately referred to as “St. Philip.”
This disagreement resulted in a long period of silence between them. Nonetheless,
Murray would carry on, insisting “
that human rights are indivisible and that it is shortsighted to assume that the issue of discrimination because of sex must await resolution of the issue of discrimination because of race.”

· · ·

ON SEPTEMBER 15, 1963
, seventeen days after MOW,
Robert Edward Chambliss, also known as Dynamite Bob, placed a bundle of explosives underneath the steps of
Birmingham’s
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The bomb killed eleven-year-old
Carol Denise McNair and fourteen-year-olds
Addie Mae Collins,
Carole Robertson, and
Cynthia Wesley. NAACP field secretary
Medgar Evers had been gunned down outside his
Jackson, Mississippi, home, on June 12, and
President
Kennedy would be assassinated in Dallas on November 22.

Murray had lobbied the new president, Lyndon Baines
Johnson, about the need for strong
civil rights enforcement measures when he was
Senate majority leader. She deemed it a positive sign that Johnson had urged
Congress to move swiftly on the civil rights bill Kennedy introduced before his death.
House conservatives tried to block the bill by stalling, and opponents in the Senate
filibustered until a compromise garnered enough support to end debate.

Before the final vote, Virginia congressman
Howard W. Smith, a Democrat and an avowed segregationist, introduced an amendment that added sex as a protected class in
Title VII of the bill. Because Smith had used his power as chair of the House
Rules Committee to prevent civil rights legislation from coming to the floor for a vote, liberals viewed his support for women’s rights with cynicism. Smith’s real motive, some believed, was to induce his fellow representatives to vote against the legislation by pandering to male chauvinism.

In any case, Murray was ecstatic about the inclusion of sex as a category in the bill, as were many of the activists with whom she had worked on the
President’s Commission on the Status of Women. The sex provision ensured that millions of employed women, irrespective of race or class, would be covered by the legislation.

At the last minute, Senate minority leader
Everett Dirksen threatened to amend Title VII by eliminating sex as a category. In doing so, he mobilized a national network that included women in Congress, the federal civil service, and professional and social service organizations. Murray
drafted a document titled “Memorandum in Support of Retaining the Amendment to H.R. 7152 (Equal Employment Opportunity) to Prohibit Discrimination in Employment Because of Sex,” which was duplicated and dashed off to Dirksen, congressional leaders, and Attorney General
Robert F. Kennedy.

Murray argued in the memorandum that “
there were few, if any, jobs for which an employee’s sex could be considered relevant” and that the sex amendment would strengthen the proposed civil rights bill, as well as the recently passed
Equal Pay Act. “
Title VII without the ‘sex’ amendment,” she pointed out, “would benefit Negro males primarily and thus offer genuine equality of opportunity to only half of the potential Negro work force.” “
If it is true that slavery and all that followed has denied the Negro male his manhood,” Murray said in irritation to a reporter for the
Washington Post and Times Herald
, “isn’t it equally true that the
view of a Negro woman as a sex object or a body to be employed in domestic labor has denied her her due respect?”

Murray also sent her document to
Lady Bird Johnson, urging the first lady “
to discuss the matter with the President.” Murray was on edge until she received word from Lady Bird Johnson’s social secretary that she had “
checked this matter out” and “that as far as the Administration is concerned, its position is that the Bill should be enacted in its present form.”

On July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed the historic Civil Rights Act into law at a ceremony in the White House. The president acknowledged the contributions of Reverend King, who was present as a guest, by giving him the first pen used to sign the bill. For Murray, there would be no souvenir pen or White House invitation, but she would forever cherish a note of appreciation from
Marguerite Rawalt just the same. Rawalt, who had helped disseminate Murray’s document, wrote, “
To you comes a real measure of credit for the ultimate successful passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Bill with the protection for women in employment.… Your memorandum and your thinking was [
sic
] really fine.”

Murray summarized her behind-the-scenes work in a letter to
Lloyd Garrison, who shared his great-grandfather’s commitment to women’s rights. “
You’ll be amused to know that I take a little credit for the retention of ‘sex’ in the fepc [
Federal Employment Practice Committee] section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” she told her old friend. “When it was endangered by the Dirksen maneuvers, some of us organized a quiet little campaign; I wrote a brief and got it into the White House, the AG’s [attorney general’s] office and a few other places. Mrs. Roosevelt’s spirit
marches on. Wouldn’t she be pleased to know that one of the major areas of discrimination against women has been dealt with by Congress?”

Eleanor Roosevelt would have been pleased about the legislation. She would have also been delighted that Murray was finally a “
registered but independent Democrat.” Murray had come a long way from voting for
socialist
Norman Thomas in the
1932 presidential election, running for the
New York City Council on the
Liberal Party ticket in 1949, and campaigning for Democrats Harry
Truman and
Adlai Stevenson in the
1950s, to embracing the southern Democrat Lyndon
Johnson in
1964.