The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (2 page)

T
he letter that carried these words launched a twenty-year odyssey that gave birth to
The Firebrand and the First Lady
. It was Pauli Murray’s second response to my invitation to serve as a consulting editor to
SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women
, of which I was co–founding editor. She sprinkled her missive with encouragement and what I self-consciously took as an overstatement, hailing the journal as “a formidable undertaking” with the potential to transform “the mainstream of American scholarship.” That this groundbreaking activist, lawyer, writer, and priest had high expectations for my work filled me with excitement and apprehension—lest I fall short.

Prior commitments prevented Murray from contributing to the inaugural issue of
SAGE
, but she would share reminiscences of people and events that became guideposts along my way. She mentioned the
President’s Commission on the Status of Women, for which she served as a subcommittee member and to which
John F. Kennedy appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as commission chair. Murray praised the women activists who had taken the lessons learned in the labor and civil rights movements and applied them to the women’s movement. She also boasted that she was “finally…free to do the creative writing” she had longed to do “since 1939.” Her top priority, she quipped, was a
“dratted autobiography.”

Although I dashed off an appreciative reply, I never got the chance to ask Murray about the veterans on whose shoulders I stood. Her
death,
eighteen months later at age seventy-four from pancreatic cancer, caught me off guard. Having no knowledge of her illness, I had respected her wish to write undisturbed
“until late in 1984.” I kept a list of topics I hoped to discuss when she had a breathing spell. That moment never came.

Pauli Murray had been dead for nine years when I decided to write about her
friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. My interest, piqued by a reference to ER in what proved to be Murray’s last letter to me, intensified when I read her autobiography,
Song in a Weary Throat
, published two years after her death. Upon examining the letters in the
Pauli Murray Papers Collection at the Schlesinger Library at
Harvard University and in the
Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Collection at the
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Presidential Library, I immediately recognized that their relationship deserved attention beyond its mention by previous
biographers and historians.

Unlike Eleanor Roosevelt’s friendships with the black civil
rights leaders
Mary McCleod Bethune and Walter
White, which have been duly noted,
ER’s friendship with Pauli Murray has not been fully examined. Bethune and White were
powerful political figures; a relationship with the first lady was beneficial to them, the organizations they represented, and the Roosevelt administration. Bethune and White were also
“veterans who knew when to advance and when to retreat, how to swallow a humiliation with a smile and how to bide their time,” observed ER’s friend and biographer
Joseph P. Lash.

Murray, on the other hand, was of a younger generation, determined to challenge authority and inequality head-on. She filed her first
discrimination complaint with her adoptive mother when she was barely six years old.
“How come you give Grandfather
three
pancakes,” Murray asked, “and me only one?” A self-described individualist, she was most comfortable working alone and setting her own course outside bureaucratic institutions. Because she did not speak for an established group, Murray could not deliver votes—nor did she want to. What she offered instead was the honest and often brash opinion of an independent thinker who could not be still in the face of injustice.

Murray’s politics, temperament, and resolve to be herself frequently frustrated her family, her friends, and people in organizations to which she was devoted, such as the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Episcopal Church. Her
personal
writings suggest that she believed that these difficulties set her apart from her better-known male and conventional female peers.
And I believe that
these difficulties also contributed to her marginalization, until recently, in the historical record.

· · ·

I WAS FOUR YEARS INTO
the research for this book and writing the foreword to a new edition of Murray’s family memoir
Proud Shoes
when I came across the August 19, 1971, letter to her friend
Caroline F. Ware, a historian. In it, Murray spoke of the notes she was making for a future
biographer whose work would probably not be published in her lifetime. I felt a haunting presence, as if Murray were hovering near my writing desk, when I read that she had envisioned a biography that began with her battle to enroll at the
University of North Carolina and the
“friendship with Mrs. R.” That I had responded to a wish Murray made long before I imagined this book confirmed my instinct that her letter to me was more than coincidence. I would sense Murray’s presence again during conversations with her friends and on pilgrimages to
Bear Mountain,
Howard University,
Val-Kill, and other sites that were the backdrop of important moments in her relationship with ER.

In the beginning, I concentrated on the period between December 6, 1938—when Pauli Murray introduced herself in a protest letter to Franklin and
Eleanor Roosevelt—and November 7, 1962, the day ER died. Further research led me to expand the scope from Murray’s first glimpse of ER in 1934 to Murray’s
death on July 1, 1985. Because I wanted these women to speak for themselves, I initially constructed this book as a collection of letters linked together by explanatory text. But the story felt fragmented and incomplete. It lacked the complexity and depth of their friendship, which had bridged generational, racial, class, and political differences.

I put the manuscript aside and determined to write a narrative with two views. One would be a close-up that followed the evolving friendship of two human rights activists. The other would use a wider-angle lens to place their relationship in context on the historical stage during the
Great Depression,
World War II,
McCarthyism and the
Cold War, and the civil and women’s rights movements of the twentieth century. Such a narrative required that I consider not only the letters they wrote to each other but what they said about the friendship, and how it influenced their thinking and actions.

Having settled on the parameters and architecture of my work, I began anew with these questions: What drew Pauli Murray, the granddaughter of a mulatto
slave, and Eleanor Roosevelt, whose ancestry entitled her to
membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, together in
friendship? What was the nature of their friendship, and how did they sustain it over time? What needs did they satisfy in each other, and how were they changed by the relationship? And what significance did their friendship have for the cause of social justice?

Despite the difference in
family origin and the fact that
Pauli Murray was twenty-six years junior to Eleanor Roosevelt, they had several things in common. They shared the given name Anna, which neither preferred or used. Both lost their parents as children and were raised by elderly kin. Highly sensitive, they had an abiding compassion for the helpless that stemmed in part from their childhoods as orphans, their experience with
chronically ill relatives, and their need for acceptance, which was compounded in Murray’s case by
discrimination on multiple fronts. They were both baptized as
Episcopalians and—except for a brief period when Murray left the church—remained lifelong congregants.

They had inquiring minds. They were voracious readers. They loved poetry, and they loved to write. They were unpretentious, and they conveyed a seriousness of purpose that made them seem humorless, which was not the case. Both endured ridicule—Murray for her boyish physique, ER for her protruding teeth. They had presence and phenomenal energy. They rarely slept more than five or six hours a night.
ER’s
daily schedule left those around her breathless, and Murray’s intensity exhausted even her most patient friends.

Yet they were not immune to low spirits or anxiety. Pauli Murray experienced sporadic mood swings until diagnosed, at age forty-three, with a
thyroid disorder. Eleanor Roosevelt manifested depression-like symptoms when she felt unappreciated by those whose opinions she valued and when she thought she had failed. Both fought a tendency toward shyness and learned to be resolute and outspoken in the face of opposition. Their well-being required meaningful work,
physical activity, and the company of cherished friends, including their
dogs. ER favored Scottish terriers. Murray had a soft spot for large breeds and strays.

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