The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (33 page)

Dorothy Kenyon, lawyer, testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee in response to Joseph McCarthy’s charge that she was an instrument of communism, Washington, D.C., 1950. A lifelong champion of human rights and civil liberties, Kenyon and Pauli Murray would collaborate on briefs for the NAACP and ACLU.
(Associated Press and Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

32

“I Have to Stand or Fall with the People Who Know Me”

I
n March 1952, Pauli Murray applied for a research assistant position with the
Codification of
Laws of
Liberia Project at the
Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. The goal of this three-year project was to provide technical support to the Republic of Liberia. The prospect of joining a community of experienced scholars, gaining expertise in
international law, and earning a steady
salary excited
Murray. Her academic credentials and prior experience with
States’ Laws on Race and Color
made her uniquely qualified for this job—or so she thought.

Instead of being offered the position, however, Murray was engulfed by the suspicion that tainted
liberal activists as tensions escalated between the United States and her former ally the
Soviet Union. These tensions—or the
Cold War, as it came to be known—set off a crusade against
communism that cast doubt on the loyalty of many Americans. And no one did more to fan the hysteria than Wisconsin senator
Joseph R. McCarthy.

According to McCarthy, a broad spectrum of individuals and groups were knowingly and unknowingly supporters of the Communist front. Many of these alleged subversives were in the
U.S. State Department, and countless others were fomenting insurrection in other government agencies, the movie industry, academia, and the labor, civil rights, and peace movements.

One of the first individuals McCarthy targeted was
Dorothy Kenyon. A New Yorker from a white upper-class family, Kenyon had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Smith College, from which she’d graduated in 1908, and she had earned a law degree at New York University in 1917. Devoted to liberal and anti-fascist causes, Kenyon had served as a municipal court judge, deputy
commissioner of licenses, and U.S. delegate to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. She also “
had a penchant for wearing large floppy hats and colorful dresses,” Murray recalled.

Kenyon’s public-service career came to a halt in 1950, after McCarthy accused her of being “
affiliated with twenty-eight Communist-front organizations.” At her own insistence, Kenyon testified before the
Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, denying under oath that she was a Communist. She had worked for “
little people and civil liberties,” she asserted, and she might have joined or lent her name to some organizations now under suspicion. However, she had not “
knowingly identified with any organization, or persons, holding subversive views.” Kenyon was eventually cleared of the charge, but she would receive no further political appointments.

The attack on Kenyon was an omen for Murray, for whom Kenyon was an icon. Though they came from different backgrounds, they had a good deal in common. They were intellectually gifted liberal activists. They had chosen a profession dominated by men. And they could be combative when challenged (Kenyon had called McCarthy “
an unmitigated liar”). In 1946, when Murray had found the doors of New York
City law firms closed to her, Kenyon had urged her “
to stick it out.” When
States’ Laws on Race and Color
was released, Kenyon had come to the book party.

Another harbinger of the political climate was the rising number of attacks on liberal faculty members.
In the state of Washington, where the legislature set up its own
Un-American Activities Committee, the
University of Washington dismissed three professors for refusing to answer questions about their political affiliations.
These attacks would extend to high school teachers and staff members suspected of
Communist ties.

Because the Liberian project was funded through a contract with the
State Department, which McCarthy had already attacked, Cornell officials wanted to avoid the controversy that had befallen liberals like Kenyon and the schools in Washington State.
Martin P. Catherwood, the dean of the school, and
Milton R. Konvitz, the project director, asked Murray “
if there was anything” about her background “which might be open to question, with reference to the issue of
loyalty.”

Murray said she was “
an outspoken critic of the American government on the issue of civil
rights,” that she was not and had never been a member of the Communist Party USA, and that she had not “
knowingly joined” any group that was a Communist front. She did indicate that from 1936 to 1938 she had belonged to a group opposed to the Communist Party USA, known as the Communist Party (Opposition), that she had renounced the CPO, and that whenever Communists “
infiltrated or were attempting to dominate” groups in which she worked, she “actively” opposed them.

Murray’s background frightened Catherwood, and he asked her to submit a document “
for the record, should some question arise” about her loyalty. Since he provided no guidelines about the kind of information he wanted or needed, she tried to guess which issues to discuss. She drafted a brief description of her published writings and the organizations with which she had been associated. She submitted a copy of her application for admission to the
New York bar, which included a detailed background check.

After reviewing Murray’s file, Konvitz informed her that Dean Catherwood thought “
a recommendation from someone…more conservative” than her current references would be beneficial to her candidacy. Taken aback by this request, Murray replied “
that as a person of limited means and minority status,” she had few opportunities “to come into intimate association with the kind of” people he wanted. Rather than “produce a
casual reference who would satisfy the requirement of ‘conservative’ persuasion,” she said, “I have to stand or fall with the people who know me.”

Murray had been an activist for nearly two decades, and the
House Un-American Activities Committee now considered several groups with which she had been associated to be part of the
Communist front. HUAC defined the Communist front as a network of people and organizations whose goal was to advance the cause of communism. Because this network allegedly camouflaged its agenda by hiding behind appeals to humanitarian causes, such as peace and human rights, HUAC published the
Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications
to expose them.

The May 14, 1951, edition of the
Guide
was a 161-page inventory that listed the
Southern Conference for Human Welfare, which Eleanor Roosevelt cofounded, and the CPO, to which Murray briefly belonged, alongside the Communist Party USA. Similarly cited were the
Negro People’s Committee for
Spanish Refugees, from which Murray had resigned, in protest over the efforts of Communists to influence policy, and the
China Aid Council, for which FDR’s mother,
Sara, had once been honorary cochair.

When Murray learned that school officials were uneasy about her background, she volunteered to undergo a loyalty review. They declined on the ground that she was not a employee of the school. Neither Murray’s impeccable
qualifications nor her impressive references, among whom were ER,
Lloyd Garrison, William
Hastie,
Thurgood Marshall, and
A. Philip Randolph, outweighed the concern Cornell officials had about her affiliations. Even a separate statement from ER, indicating that she had known Murray and of her work for “
several years” and that Murray was “devoted to the cause of
democracy,” fell on deaf ears.

In May, Konvitz informed Murray that neither he nor any of his fellow administrators doubted her “qualifications” or her loyalty. All the same, “
they felt they ought not to take any chances by inviting the possibility of bad public relations, which might arise out of embarrassing questions” about her past. Of his dilemma, Konvitz told ER, “
I share with you a very favorable impression of Miss Murray’s character and her devotion to American democracy. I have shown your letter to Dean Catherwood of our School of Industrial and Labor Relations but it is not at all certain that we will be in a position to proceed with her appointment as I had hoped.”

Murray viewed Konvitz as “
the unhappy go-between,” for he had been Thurgood Marshall’s assistant general counsel at the
NAACP and per
sonally knew most of her references. While Konvitz made no mention of political considerations, ER sensed that fear and guilt by association were at the heart of the school’s decision. Indeed, Murray’s experience confirmed
ER’s belief that HUAC and the loyalty review program did more harm than good.

The freedom to “
think and to differ” was more important to the “survival of demo
cracy than banning or punishing those who espoused unpopular views within the bounds of the law,” ER said at an
Americans for Democratic Action conference. “
The day I’m afraid to sit down with people I do not know—because five years from now someone will say: ‘You sat in the room and five people were communists, you are a communist’—that will be a bad day,” she warned. Of
Kenyon’s integrity and the allegations
McCarthy made against her, ER wrote in “My Day,” “
If all of the Honorable Senator’s ‘subversives’ are as subversive as Miss Kenyon, I think the
State Department is entirely safe and the nation will continue on an even keel.”

· · ·

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT INVITED MURRAY
to lunch at the U.N. on May 8, 1952, to lift her spirits. This time Murray brought along Maida
Springer’s twenty-two-year-old son, Eric, a second-year law student at New York University. ER was “
absolutely furious” about the Cornell situation, Murray reported later to Caroline
Ware. ER had insisted that Murray not give up: “
One has to go on with one’s life, one cannot stop, no matter what.”

ER was also concerned about another friend embroiled in controversy.
Edith Sampson, an attorney who was the first black delegate to the U.N., had purportedly told an audience in Copenhagen that the reports of racial violence in the U.S. were “
exaggerated stories, spread only by the ‘enemies of America.’ ”
William Worthy, a CORE activist who had risked his life as a
bus rider with
Bayard Rustin, was in the audience. That Sampson had dismissed the “
race riots, physical aggression against Negroes, or the pall of fear under which millions of Negroes in the South are obliged to live” made him angry. Worthy characterized Sampson’s speech as “
dishonest” and “revolting” propaganda in a provocative essay entitled
“In Cloud-Cuckoo Land” that appeared in
The Crisis
.

Given Murray’s support of CORE and the bus riders, her knowledge of racial violence in the South, her loyalty to ER, and her professional friendship with Sampson, who belonged to a small circle of black
women with advanced law degrees (Sampson held a master of laws from Loyola
University Chicago School of Law), it must have been hard for her to take sides. Perhaps, for this reason, the usually outspoken Murray attached a copy of Worthy’s essay without comment to a thank-you note to ER that read, “
It was wonderful to have lunch with you and Eric is ‘tickled as a dog with two tails.’ ”

PART VI

DRAWING CLOSER AS FRIENDS,
1952–55

Pauli Murray (front row, sixth from the right, in black-and-white top) and James Baldwin (back row, second from the left) were the first African American writers admitted as fellows to The MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire, in August 1954. Other literary artists pictured are: Sol Stein (back row, far left) and, in the front row, Virginia Sorensen (second from left), Peter Viereck (fifth from left), Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant (fifth from the right), Gordon Reevey (third from right) and Sara Henderson Hay (second from right).
(Milford Historical Society)