The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (36 page)

Hughes was not the only influential African American Murray knew and admired whose loyalty was questioned. The
New Jersey Anti-Communist League had accused Democratic Party stalwart
Mary McLeod Bethune of subversive affiliations the year before.
Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, a physician who had treated Murray at the
Howard University infirmary and had succeeded Bethune as president of the
National Council of Negro Women, was summoned by McCarthy’s committee. And Nobel laureate
Ralph Bunche would be interrogated for twelve hours by the
International Organizations Employees Loyalty Board. Murray shuddered at the thought of what could happen to her if the loyalty and reputations of people as well liked as Hughes, and as politically connected as Bethune, Ferebee, and Bunche, could be impugned.
That Caroline
Ware, Murray’s friend and mentor, was denied permission to travel to
Chile by the International Organizations review board intensified her fear.

“
Most of these investigations seemed to do more harm than good,” Eleanor Roosevelt said of the government’s loyalty reviews. “
If we continue the Congressional investigations…, we are going to find ourselves living in an atmosphere akin to that of Communist countries, for we are using the very weapons which those countries use.” Of the accusations about her old friend, ER insisted, “Mary McLeod Bethune would meet the Devil and confront him with Christ and I feel quite sure that she and Christ would triumph.” Of Bunche, with whom she had worked closely at the U.N., ER asserted that his extraordinary service to the nation left “
no question” about his loyalty.

ER was opposed to
communism, as well as such measures as the
McCarran Internal Security Act. This bill, passed by Congress over President Truman’s veto, stripped away the rights of
free speech and freedom
of assembly for persons suspected of being Communist or fascist sympathizers.
The fear fostered by this legislation and by governmental bodies, such as the House Un-American Activities Committee, troubled ER. “
I have always thought,” she said in her column, “that a strong democracy should stand by its fundamental beliefs and that a citizen of the United States should be considered innocent until he is proved guilty.”

· · ·

FOR MURRAY
, the McCarthy hearings were “
like garbage thrown upon the shining surface of the
Supreme Court decision.” That the questions witnesses faced were often based on misinformation, outright inaccuracies, and “
derogatory material” unnerved her. “
As a serum against fear,” Murray committed herself to writing “one letter of
personal faith each day to some
friend or person.”
One of her first letters went to
Ralph Bunche, for whom she prayed as if he were a relative.

Murray had long believed that she was under
surveillance. Her suspicions were confirmed when a librarian at Howard University told her that “
operatives” of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation had come to campus “looking for pictures” of her and her friend
Pauline Redmond Coggs, who now lived with her family in Milwaukee. Furious at being investigated “
behind one’s back,” Murray made a “bold” decision. She sent
J. Edgar Hoover a brief “
personal history” and a recent photograph to avoid “misidentification.” Murray informed the director that a
background dossier was available from the appellate division of the
New York State Supreme Court and that her fingerprints were already on file with the bureau. Her knees nearly buckled at the post office the day she mailed the registered letter, return receipt requested.

Despite Murray’s assertive stance with the FBI, she was experiencing intense anxiety. She knew that her activism, writings, and sexuality made her a likely target for McCarthy’s subcommittee. She was worried about her
health and about her brother William, who was a patient at
St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. He had had
“an experimental
lobotomy several years ago and it left him balanced but without any initiative.”

“
I cannot live with fear and the doctor has just told me I have a nervous heart,” Murray wrote to Pauline Coggs, whose personal and professional experience gave her a profound understanding of Murray’s emotional struggle.
Murray and Coggs had made a pact a decade earlier to talk each other through the mood swings from which they both suffered and which Coggs referred to as manic depression. “
I call it a frightened heart,” Murray
continued. “It has been frightened all of my life because of race. Now it is frightened because of something deeper than race—the atmosphere which threatens one’s integrity—an atmosphere of fear.”

The day after Murray wrote to Hoover and Coggs, she reached out to ER. That day, June 6, 1954, was the tenth anniversary of
D-Day.
“Since the
Supreme Court decision and the McCarthy hearings I have felt the need to be in close personal touch with dear
friends who have my kind of faith in America and who are unwilling to turn our country over to the apostles of fear,” Murray said. “So reflecting, I wrote to Pauline Coggs and I thought you might like to read my letter. It seems to me that we should now make this day F-Day, or Faith-Day. I’m hoping this letter to Pauline may in some small personal way start a chain reaction.”

By sharing the Coggs letter with ER, Murray did something she had not done before. She lifted the veil that covered a bold persona, admitting that she was under a doctor’s care for anxiety and that her brother
William had been
lobotomized.

Frank Horne (left) and Corienne Robinson Morrow (right), veteran staffers in the Race Relations Division of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, circa 1950. After they were accused of being security risks and fired, Pauli Murray wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, “There appears to be not one person in the United States who is
not
suspected of being a disloyal, indiscreet, security-risk American!”
(Amistad Research Center, Tulane University)

38

“Some Fear-Mongers May Feel That Even President Eisenhower Might Be a Security Risk”

P
auli Murray tried to keep her focus on the victory of the
Brown
decision. Yet it was difficult for her to hold the fear of an FBI investigation at bay. At times, she felt as if the “
flesh was literally shaking off” her bones. By June 1954, she was anemic and fifteen pounds below normal weight. She suffered from heart palpitations,
insomnia, and a persistent dry cough. She had
smoked a pack and a half of cigarettes a day for twenty-five years, and her anxiety intensified the addiction.

Murray’s longtime physician, Dr.
May Chinn, diagnosed
“an over-active
thyroid” and recommended surgery to remove a nodule. This diag
nosis was a breakthrough, for now Murray had a medical explanation for her nervous energy, mood swings, persistent
weight loss, and irregular heartbeat. She canceled a much-anticipated luncheon with Eleanor Roosevelt and confessed that she was “
‘a panty-waist’ about operations.” But it would be “
a blessing,” Murray believed, if the procedure relieved the “disturbances” that had periodically disrupted her life.

The day before the surgery, Murray lay in her hospital bed reading
Lillian Smith’s latest book,
The Journey
. Smith had finished it while recovering from breast cancer surgery.
The Journey
was an autobiographical reflection on the South, in which Smith revealed a vulnerable side of herself that Murray had not seen. Struck by Smith’s openness, Murray lingered over the passage that read, “
But how hard it is, when we are struggling with fears, to think beyond ourselves and the present moment. Even the most responsible of us is not in a learning mood on those days, days which sometimes stretch into years, years when the quiet voice of reason is drowned out by the cries of the terrorized child within us.”

Murray put her reading aside when flowers and a get-well note from ER arrived. ER was preparing for her
first trip to the
Soviet Union, and she hoped to find Murray “
well and strong” upon her return. Murray scribbled a letter, explaining the procedure she was about to have. She also asked ER to come see her at
Freedmen’s Hospital and to write to Lillian Smith, as she had “
lost a great deal of tissue.”

ER promised to “
drop in” on Murray “if at all possible” and to make contact with Smith. ER admired Smith and considered her a friend. ER had lobbied
Franklin Roosevelt to lift the
U.S. Postal Service ban on
Strange Fruit
, Smith’s 1944 debut novel about an
interracial romance.
Like Murray, ER found the psychological insights in
The Journey
fascinating. In fact, she was reading it aloud to her friend the Broadway producer
John Golden, who was almost blind.

· · ·

WHILE MURRAY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL
, she received a letter signed by
J. Edgar Hoover’s
secretary,
Helen Gandy. The letter stated that no record in
FBI files indicated that a representative of the agency had inquired about Murray at
Howard University and that “
such a request might well have been made by a representative of some other Government agency.”

Whether the bureau was currently investigating Murray or had previously sent an agent to Howard is difficult to ascertain. The FBI records on her contained reports of uneven accuracy from informants dating back to the early 1940s of her affiliation with groups that either the U.S.
attorney general or the House Un-American Activities Committee cited as subversive.
According to an internal office memorandum, informants said Murray was an active member of the
Socialist Party, the
National Lawyers Guild, and the national committee of the
Civil Rights Defense Committee; that she was involved in the
Workers Defense League; that she subscribed to the
Socialist Workers Party weekly, the
Militant
, in 1943; and that she was a delegate to the January 1944
National Council for a Permanent
Fair Employment Practices Committee conference in Washington, D.C.

There is little doubt that Murray’s activism, political
writings, and friendships with liberal activists, including
Lillian Smith and ER, both of whom the bureau surveilled, attracted
FBI attention.
Hoover intensely disliked ER, and the thirty-five-thousand-page file the bureau created on her at his direction would become the largest assembled for an individual prior to the 1960s.

Eager to push her fear aside, Murray took the bureau’s disclaimer at face value. After the surgery, she propped herself up in her hospital bed and typed a four-page, single-spaced appeal to ER on behalf of an old friend,
Corienne Robinson Morrow. Morrow, an administrative staff member in the Race Relations Division of the Federal Department of
Housing, had been suspended in March without pay by a loyalty review board, despite two decades of meritorious service. The basis stated for the suspension was the charge that she had been a member of the
Young Workers League and a probationary member of the
Communist Party in Chicago in 1925–26. As part of its investigation, the board also raised questions about the loyalty of Morrow’s husband, Captain
Edward Morrow. An army review board had accused him of belonging to subversive groups, Murray wrote.

As far as she was concerned, Corienne Morrow was an unheralded civil rights hero upon whom many “
front men” relied “to negotiate with difficult and uneducated officials on race relations.” (Among these unnamed front men were Morrow’s supervisors,
Robert C. Weaver, an economist, and Frank
Horne, both of whom had been members of FDR’s unofficial
Negro Cabinet.) Because of Morrow’s status as a female assistant, her male superiors customarily took credit for her behind-the-scenes work. Fair housing advocates regularly bolstered legal arguments against
restrictive covenants with Morrow’s research, which showed that blacks “
received less housing value for the housing dollar they spend than other groups.”

Almost fifty and suddenly unemployed, Morrow and her husband
lost their home. Unlike
Mary McLeod Bethune and
Ralph Bunche, who were defended by powerful friends when they were accused of Communist affiliation, Morrow had no one except Murray, who took the matter to ER.

The charge that Morrow was a Communist was “
ridiculous,” Murray told ER. Morrow was “a violent anti-Communist” and a member of the
Americans for Democratic Action, the liberal anti-Communist organization ER had cofounded. Frustrated, Murray said, “I would not doubt that some fear-mongers may feel that even President
Eisenhower might be a security risk.”

What Murray did not write was that she thought Morrow’s suspension was about more than alleged Communist affiliation or her advocacy for desegregated housing.
Murray believed, she confided to
Pauline Redmond Coggs, that the board suspected that Morrow’s marriage was a deception and that both she and her husband were homosexual. Coggs, who lived in Washington, D.C., and worked in the federal government, had possibly met Corienne in a social or professional setting. The circle of blacks at the administrative level in the federal government was small and tight-knit. It is unclear if Coggs had met Edward Morrow, about whom not much is known. He was a native of Huron, South Dakota, who had graduated from Yale University in 1931, the only black student in his class. He had worked as a journalist in Harlem. It is clear that Coggs knew of Corienne as a friend of Murray’s, and the worry Murray expressed about her own vulnerability as a
lesbian and the possibility of an investigation by the FBI gave Coggs the impression that Corienne was lesbian as well.