The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (4 page)

What ER saw and learned from working with women in the
labor movement and FDR’s administration influenced her decision to host three White House conferences on the needs of women. These meetings were vital, she told conferees at the first gathering, for “
women had been neglected in comparison with others, and throughout this depression have had the hardest time of all.” Among the proposals put forth at the second conference was a program of camps for unemployed women.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s desire to establish these camps was, to be sure, an expression of her compassion, her fierce desire to see the
New Deal help women, and her commitment to progressive politics. Her tenacity, coupled with the support of Secretary of Labor
Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet;
Harry Hopkins, the director of the
Federal Emergency Relief Administration;
Ellen Woodward, the director of the FERA women’s division; and
Hilda Worthington Smith, the director of the FERA Workers’ Education Project, gave birth to Camp Tera. Skeptics sarcastically dubbed Camp Tera and subsequent facilities set up for women as
“
She-She-She Camps,” playing on the abbreviation CCC for the men’s camps.

Eight days after the first residents arrived at Camp Tera, the first lady made the scenic drive, approximately forty-five miles south of her Hyde Park residence, to check things out for herself.
She was disappointed to find just thirty women. She had hoped to see close to the three hundred called for in the plans. She stayed for three hours, talking with the residents and staff. And what she discovered made her angry.

To be eligible, women had to be single, divorced, or widowed residents
of
New York State between eighteen and thirty-five years of age. They could have no resources, and none of their close relatives could be employed. More than one thousand had applied. Delays and a stringent screening process had turned most away. That
Camp Tera offered no pay and the rumor that residents did hard labor and wore uniforms in return for little to eat further discouraged prospective enrollees.

Stirred by estimates of 250,000 jobless
women who reportedly scavenged for food, rode all night on subways, and slept in jails, boxcars, and abandoned buildings, ER vowed to cut through the red tape. “
There must be two hundred girls in New York City who need to get back their health and spirits in a place like this,” she told the press. “You can’t make me believe there aren’t.”

Within a month of her visit, the registration bureau streamlined the screening process, raised the age limit to forty, and admitted women whose fathers worked part-time.
Native and immigrant, they soon numbered one hundred. They varied from those with little formal education to those with college degrees, like Murray. Among their ranks were former maids, entertainers, factory workers, secretaries, store clerks, and women who had never worked outside the home.

The first lady was not content with the reports from agency officials. She returned periodically to the camp with her secretary and her Scottish terrier
Meggie. They usually stayed all day, inspecting the facility, conferring with residents and staff, joining them at meals. In addition to Tommy and Meggie, ER often brought along friends, such as
Elinor F.
Morgenthau, wife of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr.; Democratic Party activists, such as
Nancy Cook,
Marion Dickerman, and
Caroline O’Day; and newspaperwomen, such as
Genevieve Forbes Herrick of the
Chicago Tribune
.

Camp Tera had twenty-six log cabins plus a dining and recreation hall.
Whatever residents and staff needed—winterized facilities, blankets, sports equipment, art supplies, books, holiday treats, or funds for field trips—ER lobbied officials for or donated money she earned from her radio broadcasts and publications to provide it. Her commitment to the camp inspired others to give money, supplies, and their time.
Kate Smith, the popular singer known as the “Songbird of the South,” donated a shiny floor-console radio.

Making sure the camp was adequately staffed and equipped was no less important to the first lady than that it be open to women irrespective of
racial background.
This sensitivity to discrimination, a consciousness she did not have in her youth, was due in part to her close friendships
with Mary McLeod Bethune and Walter Francis
White. Bethune, whom the first lady met in 1927 at a conference of women club leaders, was one of seventeen children born in Mayesville, South Carolina, to
Samuel and Patsy McLeod, both former
slaves. Bethune was educated at Scotia Seminary in North Carolina and the Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago. Her childhood dream was to do missionary work in Africa.

Charismatic and very dark-skinned, Bethune rose from abject poverty to found
Bethune-Cookman College for blacks. From her post as an influential educator, she expanded her reach and became president of the
National Association of Colored Women, founding president of the
National Council of
Negro Women, and special adviser to FDR. In 1936, with the first lady’s backing, she was named head of the
National Youth Administration Office of Minority Affairs, which aided unemployed youths through grants, work-study, and job training. Bethune was also the only female member of the
Federal Council of Negro Affairs, an informal group of black advisers to the president that came to be known as the Negro Cabinet.

Eleanor Roosevelt regarded Bethune as one of her closest friends in her age group. Whenever Bethune came to the White House, the first lady “
always went running down the driveway to meet her, and they would walk arm in arm into the mansion” to talk for hours about the needs of African Americans. “
Few heads of State received such a welcome,” observed White House usher
J. B. West.

Unlike Bethune, who fought her way past deprivation, discrimination, and disparaging remarks about her complexion, the blue-eyed, fair-skinned White grew up in a middle-class family in Atlanta, Georgia. He was one of seven children born to
George W. White, a postal worker, and Madeline Harrison, a teacher. In 1918, two years after graduating from Atlanta University, Walter White joined the NAACP headquarters staff. He became national executive secretary in 1931.

Using his ability to pass for white, he gathered data about racial violence in the South that he hoped would convince
Franklin Roosevelt to back a federal
anti-lynching bill. But the president, eager to avoid a fight with southern legislators whose support he needed in Congress, would not grant White an audience.
White found an ally in Eleanor Roosevelt. Not only did she meet with him privately in the White House, she ultimately secured an hour-long meeting for him with her husband.
Their efforts to convince FDR to speak out in support of anti-lynching legislation failed, yet White and ER refused to give up, forging a friendship in the process.

What ER learned about racial discrimination from
Bethune,
White, and African Americans she met or who wrote to her encouraged her to examine her own behavior and be ever watchful for problems at Camp Tera. She promptly contacted
William H. Matthews, director of the
Emergency Work Bureau, which handled registration for the camp, after she heard a complaint in August 1933. “
One of the colored girls told me that when she registered for Camp Tera she was told that they did not want colored girls,” the first lady wrote. “However, there are several there, and I thought you would like to know that this question has been brought up.”

Matthews read ER’s letter as a directive. The first lady wanted black residents admitted to the camp, and she wanted them to feel welcomed. He promised to investigate. By the end of the month, Matthews reported, the situation had “
changed.” There were now “ten colored girls in the camp.”

· · ·

BEING A RESIDENT
at Camp Tera was not what
Murray had envisioned when she’d migrated to
New York City to escape the social and legal system of racial segregation in the South known as Jim Crow. Born on November 20, 1910, in
Baltimore, Maryland, she was christened
Anna Pauline Murray after her paternal grandmother,
Annie Price Murray, and her maternal aunt
Mary Pauline
Fitzgerald Dame. Pauli was the fourth of six children born to William Henry Murray, a teacher educated in the College Preparatory Department of Howard University, and
Agnes Georgiana Fitzgerald Murray, a nurse trained at Hampton Institute. Pauli’s siblings were Grace, born in 1905, Mildred in 1907, William in 1909,
Rosetta in 1912, and Robert, later known as Raymond, in 1913.

Two tragedies marked Pauli’s
childhood. The first was the death of her thirty-five-year-old, seven months pregnant mother, Agnes, from a cerebral hemorrhage. Three-year-old Pauli went to
Durham,
North Carolina, to live in the household of her elderly maternal grandparents,
Robert George Fitzgerald and
Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald, and two middle-aged aunts. Sarah “Sallie” Fitzgerald, to whom Pauli bore a striking resemblance, and Pauline Dame, who would become Pauli’s adoptive mother, were teachers as Grandfather Robert had been. Grandmother Cornelia was the acknowledged daughter of
Sidney Smith, a white lawyer from a prominent North Carolina
family, and a part-Cherokee slave named
Harriet, owned by the Smiths.

The second tragedy struck when Murray’s father, William, nearly died
from typhoid fever and what relatives believed to be encephalitis. From then on, he suffered “
unpredictable attacks of depression and violent moods.” Job stress and his wife’s death intensified his instability. Relatives took custody of Murray’s siblings, who had remained in
Baltimore, and committed William to the
Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland in Crownsville. There, he would live in filthy quarters and receive no meaningful treatment.

Murray saw her father once after his institutionalization. Instead of the “
dapper gentleman” in family photographs from whom it was said she’d inherited her keen intellect, she was introduced to an inmate in tattered overalls with sad, lifeless eyes. His shoes were falling apart, his hair uncombed. She saw no likeness to the teacher who had inspired his
students to excel or the artist who had labored through the night over his writing and musical compositions. William’s appearance, the fact that he had had no previous visitors, and the revelation that the authorities were willing to release him to the custody of an adult relative—but no one had agreed to take him—broke Murray’s heart. She vowed to rescue him when she reached majority age.
Unfortunately, a burly white hospital attendant with a habit of using racial epithets clubbed William to death. He was fifty-one. Pauli was thirteen.

At the time of William’s murder, there were 275 patients and only four attendants at the hospital. That all the attendants and professional staff were white exacerbated tensions in the crowded facility. “
It was a common occurrence,” reported the
Baltimore Afro-American
, “for attendants to beat the inmates with clubs and broomsticks.”

William’s mood swings and his violent death left Pauli apprehensive about her own health. She developed “
an irrational fear of being hemmed in or struck from behind,” as William had reportedly been. She also worried that his illness might be hereditary and that someday “
she might go berserk.”

The loss of her mother, the racially motivated murder of her father in a
mental institution, and the embrace of proud elder kin instilled in Murray a compassion for the helpless, a commitment to social justice, and a lifelong hunger for knowledge. The caption next to her picture in
Durham’s
Hillside High yearbook—“
The best I can do to help others is to be the best I can myself”—aptly characterized the life of individual achievement and social uplift to which she aspired. In her senior year, she was voted “most studious girl,” and she served as editor in chief of
Ski-Hi
, the student newspaper. She graduated with honors in 1926, but Hillside did not go beyond the eleventh grade.

Murray’s pursuit of excellence meant leaving the South, where the law required her to attend an all-black college. Legally defenseless, she fought segregation with her conscience; it was the only weapon she had.
Rather than ride a segregated bus, she walked or bicycled wherever she went. She refused to go to theaters that seated blacks in the “
peanut gallery.”

In 1925,
Murray fell in love with
New York City during a summer visit to see cousins who lived in Queens. Its ethnic and artistic enclaves were a hotbed of cultural and social ferment. In Harlem, where three-fourths of the black population lived, a new cultural movement was in full bloom. Everything about the Big Apple awed Murray—Lady Liberty’s welcoming majesty, buildings that soared into the sky, theater marquees on Broadway, and the freedom to sit and ride wherever she pleased. She decided on the spot: here is where she would live.

Murray was also attracted to New York City for another reason. She had no money for college, and qualified graduates of a New York City high school could attend a city college tuition-free. It might have been more practical for Murray to attend the
North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham and live at home, but she ruled that out. She also turned down a tuition scholarship to
Wilberforce, a highly regarded black school in Ohio.

Murray’s first choice,
Columbia University, was a private school that did not admit
women. Her best and only option proved to be
Hunter College. Founded in 1870 as a city school for women, Hunter had tough admissions standards, a first-class curriculum, and a practice of admitting bright students without regard to race, religion, ethnicity, or class. To satisfy the residency requirement and complete a fourth year of high school
at Richmond Hill High, Murray moved in with her Queens relatives. The household included Murray’s cousin Maude
Womack; Maude’s husband, James; and their three young sons.

Because Murray needed more credits than the maximum allowable load in order to graduate in a year, she was permitted to audit the extra courses. The hours required to pass the courses for which she was enrolled and prepare for the state exams for the courses she audited left her no time for chores at home. Her inability to pitch in compounded the tensions with her relatives over another matter. That matter was the suspicion Murray’s “
yellow-brown skin, kinky-curly hair, and Southern accent” created in the minds of neighbors, who did not know that her fair-skinned cousins were black. The neighbors, assuming Murray’s relatives were immigrants from Europe, had not asked about their racial identity, and they had been silent on the issue.