The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (22 page)

The other matter had to do with conversations she had with African Americans who had relatives in the
military. One mother with “
four sons in the Army” had told Murray, “My oldest son was born in the last war. And they no more than grew up when this
war has taken them.” It was a lament Murray heard many times over—“sorrow, despair, praying for peace.”

Up until now, Murray’s appeals to the first lady had been about
labor and civil
rights. This time the issue was peace. “I’m almost praying for an internal collapse of the
Axis powers, so we can stop all this bloodshed,” Murray wrote. “The civilian casualties—heart failure, nervous strain, utter weariness and heartaches—women and men—are mounting.… We cannot build a new world out of bullets and blood.… Forgive my brutal frankness, but you’ve always been able to count on my search for truth.… I must speak out against war.”

Eleanor Roosevelt shared Murray’s loathing for war, and she had close ties to
Carrie Chapman Catt and
Jane Addams, cofounders of the
Woman’s Peace Party.
But the first lady did not share Murray’s unqualified commitment to pacifism. “
It was very sad to have this accident happen to our grandson and I hope it will not upset him too much,” ER said of the shooting. “I do not think his having a gun is tied up with the war. He belongs to a family which goes hunting and has been taught to shoot as a sport.” ER differed with Murray on the war as well. “I do not feel quite as you do,” the first lady asserted. “I shall be happy and deeply relieved when peace comes, but I do feel we can build a better world on the ashes of war if we are intelligent enough and do not allow any people to be so low in morale that they are willing to accept a gangster like
Hitler.”

· · ·

RACIAL HOSTILITIES REACHED
the boiling point in the summer of 1943. The reports of the indignities black troops
suffered—segregated accommodations, inadequate provisions, and abuse by whites on and off military bases—were hard for Murray to bear.
She had thirteen male relatives and a number of Howard University classmates in the armed forces.
Some of her female friends—for example,
Ruth Powell and
Dovey Johnson—would be among the first African Americans to serve in the
Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Their safety, the harassment of black
defense industry workers, and the unofficial hate strikes orchestrated by whites opposed to integrating lunch and restroom facilities kept her on edge.

Animosity toward blacks turned violent.
In
Mobile, Alabama, whites armed with bricks and makeshift bats attacked black workers at a shipyard.
Clashes between blacks and whites in
Detroit, where migrants from the South had come in record numbers for defense industry jobs, led to the deployment of six thousand federal troops. Seven hundred civilians and police officers were injured; nearly three dozen died. White mobs attacked black passengers in cars, then set the vehicles on fire. Blacks retaliated by looting white businesses. Property damage estimates were in the millions. Troops would remain in Detroit for six months.

In
Los Angeles, after
Hispanics attacked a sailor, the story spread that
Mexican Americans were plotting a war
against the
military. For four nights, sailors and soldiers hunted down, stripped, and beat Mexican Americans and anyone else dressed in suits with broad-shouldered jackets and baggy pants that tapered around the ankles.
Time
magazine described the
zoot-suit riots as “
the ugliest brand of mob action since the coolie
race riot of the 1870’s.” ER perceptively attributed the riots to a “
question” that “goes deeper than just suits. It is a racial protest,” she told the press, “with roots going a long way back.”

Tempers also flared in
Durham,
North Carolina, where a white police officer struck a sixteen-year-old black girl for refusing to give her seat to a white passenger on a public bus.
Authorities in
Beaumont, Texas, declared
martial law after whites, armed with hammers, axes, and guns, ransacked the black section of town. The accusation that a black man had raped a young white mother whose husband was at work set off the rampage. Dozens were injured, hundreds arrested, and two men—one black, one white—died.

Few public officials acknowledged that racial prejudice, competition for jobs and
housing, and overcrowding had triggered the violence. Some blamed the
NAACP, Mexican American gangs, drug use, and the
Axis powers for instigating unrest. FDR’s opponents blamed the first lady. Not only had she supported
Odell Waller’s appeal, the
Tuskegee Airmen, and the recently established
Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, she’d lobbied the administration to integrate federal housing for defense industry workers. After African Americans moved into the
Sojourner Truth housing development in Detroit and riots ensued, a Mississippi newspaper, the
Jackson Daily News
, published an editorial titled “Blood on Your Hands” that indicted ER for “
personally proclaiming and practising social equality at the White House and wherever she went.”

FDR’s reluctance to denounce racial violence, the rumor that his administration had established a “
white cabinet” on Negro affairs,
and a hostile encounter with a white physician prompted Murray to send
Marvin H. McIntyre, the president’s appointments secretary, a no-holds-barred statement on the racial crisis. She copied the first lady.

The racial problem, Murray told McIntyre, was the result of two competing forces: “
a determination on the part of Negroes not to continue acceptance of second-class citizenship, and…an equally determined feeling on the part of a minority of whites…that the Negro must stay in an inferior social and
economic position despite whatever sacrifices or contributions he may be making to the war effort.” This would inevitably lead to more violence, Murray warned, adding, “Only yesterday, here in
Durham, a member of my family was refused treatment by the head of the Medical Department,
Duke University clinic after having been referred to him by our family physician. The reason given was ‘You’re in the wrong pew; I’m not going to have anything to do with
Eleanor Roosevelt movements.’ ”

Murray gave McIntyre an earful to share with the president. She wanted the administration to protect blacks living in
“lynch-mob
areas,” to convene an interracial conference on the Negro problem, and to authorize a “thorough and complete study” of
race relations. She saw no hope in the two-party system, and she called for “the formation of a new liberal party” that embraced minorities, labor groups, and socialists.

Murray did not reveal that it was she whom the doctor had denied medical treatment or that her nondeferential demeanor and her association with the first lady were the likely reasons he’d implied that she belonged to an Eleanor Club. These alleged clubs encouraged African American women to retaliate against whites, leave
domestic work, and demand social equality. Their motto was said to be “
a white woman in every kitchen.”
The FBI found no evidence to substantiate the existence of
Eleanor Clubs, yet stories about them were widespread. These stories appeared to be rooted in white hostility toward ER’s support for
civil rights, her friendships with blacks, the unconventional way she defined her role as the president’s wife, and the exodus of black women from low-paying jobs in domestic service to lucrative employment in the defense industry.

On August 2, 1943, the false rumor that a white police officer had killed a black soldier in
Harlem sparked a rampage that ended in the deaths of six people, hundreds of arrests, countless injuries, and untold property damage. Black Harlemites hurled bricks and bottles at the police and shattered the windows of white-owned stores, bars, and restaurants, looting all manner of merchandise.

The day after the riot, Murray, having come to
New York, “
tramped” through the rubble and glass-strewn streets, surveying the damage. She watched the police scatter
crowds and gather up black soldiers for detention at the armory, “
ostensibly for their protection.” She stopped to talk with black and white shopkeepers, police officers, community leaders, young men in zoot suits, soldiers, and even looters. As she approached a butcher shop, she saw “
a woman carry…a whole leg of meat and a man hugging a ham under his arm” as they ran away.

What Murray saw disturbed her. Her concern deepened when she saw that the looting was selective. Black-owned businesses were untouched and the shelves of white-owned establishments wiped clean. Her frustration spilled out in the
poem
“
Harlem Riot, 1943” and the essay
“And The Riots Came…”

Murray’s irritation with the president’s “
mealy-mouthed” comment on the
Detroit riot a month after it happened spawned another poem,
“
Mr. Roosevelt Regrets.” She mailed it to ER shortly before its
publication in the August 1943 issue of
The Crisis
.

MR. ROOSEVELT REGRETS

(Detroit Riot, 1943)

Upon reading
PM
newspaper’s account of Mr. Roosevelt’s statement on the recent race clashes:
“I share your feeling that the recent outbreaks of violence in widely spread parts of the country endanger our national unity and comfort our enemies. I am sure that every true American regrets this.”

What’d you get, black boy,

When they knocked you down in the gutter,

And they kicked your teeth out,

And they broke your skull with clubs

And they bashed your stomach in?

What’d you get when the police shot you in the back,

And they chained you to the beds

While they wiped the blood off?

What’d you get when you cried out to the Top Man?

When you called on the man next to God, so you thought,

And you asked him to speak out to save you?

What’d the Top Man say, black boy?

“Mr. Roosevelt regrets.……”

· · ·

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT ARRIVED
in New York City by train the day after the Harlem riot. She had come to visit a naval training station for women in the Bronx. Her “
heart sank” when she learned about the disturbance that threatened the fabric of her beloved city. She pleaded with New Yorkers not to “
be stampeded,” or “believe everything that people tell us without proof.”

While upset, ER was not surprised. She knew that whites were fighting “
unwelcome change” and that blacks were increasingly unwilling to accept the status quo. When she read “Mr. Roosevelt Regrets,” her pithy response to Murray was “
I have your poem dated July 21st. I am sorry but I understand.”

Ruth Powell, student activist (second from left), Eleanor Roosevelt (third from left), and two unidentified students participate in a panel entitled “What Can the Negro Do to Better Race Prejudice in America?” at Cook Hall, Howard University, Washington, D.C., January 14, 1944. Powell and Pauli Murray would seek ER’s counsel after school officials directed students to call off the boycott of a local eatery that had refused to serve blacks.
(Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Bulletin, and Howard University Archives
)

18

“I Count You a Real Friend”

B
y midsummer in 1943, the racial situation had become a powder keg. Franklin Roosevelt’s advisers thought it best to extricate the outspoken
first lady from the domestic scene. Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to visit the troops, and the administration swiftly approved a request she’d made months earlier. She went on two
goodwill tours during Pauli Murray’s last year of law school. The first of these began in August with stops in Australia, New Zealand, and nearly two dozen Pacific Islands. The second trip took her to Aruba, Brazil, British Guiana, Cuba, Guatemala, Jamaica, Panama, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Venezuela, and the Virgin Islands in March 1944. She saw hundreds of thousands of armed
service members, and she made a point to visit the black troops.

ER’s days started at a six o’clock breakfast with the enlisted men, followed by visits to service personnel at
Red Cross facilities, military bases, hospitals, and social halls. Hundreds of the wounded awakened to find the first lady, clad in a crisp Red Cross uniform, leaning over their beds, offering solace like a relative. She shocked
Calvin Johnson, a nineteen-year-old African American soldier stationed in Brisbane, when she walked up to him in the canteen and asked if she could taste his ice cream. While Johnson stood there staring with his “
mouth hanging open, not knowing what to do,” ER “gently” took his cone, bit it, and gave it back. Her friendliness eased his loneliness and blunted the animosity of white soldiers. “
Mrs. Roosevelt made me feel like a man again,” Johnson recalled decades later. “I will never forget her.”