The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (46 page)

Front left to right: Michigan governor G. Mennen Williams, Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Michigan senator Patrick V. McNamara in Michigan, 1960. During Stevenson’s bid for the presidency, ER was his most influential friend and supporter.
(Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)

54

“It Is a Bit of a Pest to Have to Keep Still”

O
n February 1, 1960, Ezell
A. Blair Jr.,
Franklin E. McCain, Joseph A.
McNeil, and
David L. Richmond, students from the historically black
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, entered
F. W. Woolworth’s, took seats at the
lunch counter, and asked to be served. Woolworth’s, like most white-owned restaurants in the South, did not serve African Americans at its counters, so the men—who came to be known as the
Greensboro Four—sat in silent protest while the white patrons ate. The following day, twenty-nine students showed up. By the end of the week, more than two hundred students, including whites from local colleges, joined in. By April, sit-ins and other forms of nonviolent protest had spread across the South.

Murray saw these sit-ins as the fruit of the seeds she and her fellow Howardites had planted twenty years earlier in their campaign against segregated eateries in
Washington, D.C. She saw the North Carolina students’ courage, and the growing number of black and white activists who joined them, as evidence that the
civil rights movement was gathering steam.

Eleanor Roosevelt was also inspired by the students’ bravery and the nonviolent-protest strategy espoused by Reverend King and the
Congress of Racial Equality. She made her sympathies known by lending her name to a full-page ad with the heading “
Heed Their Rising Voices,” published in the
New York Times
and paid for by the Committee to Defend
Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South.
She criticized a
Georgia court for sentencing King to
Reidsville State Prison Farm on the trumped-up charge of violating his probation for a minor traffic offense.
She applauded
Senate majority leader Lyndon
Johnson in her column for his efforts to bring a civil rights bill to the floor for discussion.

ER’s advocacy so angered some southerners that her address to an integrated audience of two thousand at the predominantly black
Gibbs Junior College, in Saint Petersburg, Florida, provoked a bomb threat. The auditorium had to be evacuated for thirty minutes before she could resume her talk.
Two years earlier, segregationists had bombed a tree less than three hundred yards from a church in
Guilford, North Carolina, where ER had spoken, and the
Ku Klux Klan had threatened to attack the
Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, on the day she was to participate in a workshop on integration. ER had not backed down in North Carolina or Tennessee, and she would not be silenced in Florida. Undaunted, she insisted, “
If I blew up, it wouldn’t change one iota of what inevitably is going to happen.”

Like Murray, ER was also returning to the classroom.
She had always loved teaching. She was good at it. And she had hated giving up her job at the
Todhunter School for girls when FDR became president and she
first lady.
Not surprisingly, she was delighted to accept an appointment as visiting lecturer for a seminar on international relations and the law at
Brandeis University. She would commute to the Boston area to teach and serve as host for
Prospects of Mankind
, an educational television series produced by
WGBH. This monthly program, which featured a discussion among influential thinkers and leaders, plus the Brandeis seminar, fed her need to be engaged in world affairs.

At seventy-five, ER had no plans to curtail her
schedule or be silent about what mattered to her. Only a collision with a car slowed her down.
Temporarily sidelined at home, she reported to Murray in frustration, “
I managed to get behind a car which was backing up so I was knocked down and some ligaments in my foot were torn. This necessitated my canceling most of my engagements for a week, so that I could keep off the foot. It is a bit of a pest to have to keep still but perhaps I needed the rest and this was the only way I could take one!”

· · ·

INJURY ASIDE, ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
weighed in on the
1960 presidential campaign by chairing the
Draft
Stevenson Committee.
The governor, having lost
in 1952 and
1956, refused to seek the
Democratic nomination outright. However, if nominated, he told ER, he would run. She seconded Stevenson’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention and lobbied delegates into the wee hours. In the end, she could not woo enough delegates to his camp. She went home disappointed and without endorsing the dashing forty-three-year-old nominee, Senator John Fitzgerald
Kennedy of Massachusetts.

ER knew that Kennedy had the personal drive, financial resources, and political organization to run for president.
Yet she did not believe that he had the experience, intellect, or commitment to the principles she thought necessary to serve as the nation’s chief executive. Kennedy had not distinguished himself since his election to Congress, first as a representative
in 1946, then as a senator in 1952. Moreover, his cautious approach to
civil rights, his unwillingness to denounce Joseph
McCarthy, and the disagreements his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had had with the Roosevelt administration (which eventually resulted in his resignation as ambassador to England), caused ER to doubt the senator’s integrity.

John Kennedy knew that Eleanor Roosevelt’s support was indispensable for the general election, and he sent a string of emissaries to speak on his behalf.
She finally agreed to meet him privately at
Val-Kill on Sunday, August 14, 1960. This day held double significance for ER. It marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the
Social Security Act, which was a legislative landmark in Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. It was also the day of her thirteen-year-old granddaughter
Sally Roosevelt’s funeral.
Sally,
Nina’s younger sister, had fallen off a horse four days earlier at summer camp, passed out climbing a mountain the next day, and died of a brain hemorrhage in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The child’s death “
was a great blow to all of us,” ER lamented in a letter to Murray. “It is hard to realize that she was taken from us so quickly.”

Understandably in no mood for small talk, ER laid out what the senator
needed to do to get her support: utilize Stevenson in the campaign and as a resource on foreign affairs; reach out to the governor’s supporters; and show African Americans that a Kennedy administration would be serious about
civil rights. Only by solidifying the liberal base, she maintained, could he carry the populous
Democratic strongholds of California, Illinois, and New York. Kennedy thanked her and pledged to address her concerns.

ER endorsed the senator after their meeting, but she did not offer to stump for him. Though he was a charming man with “
a quick mind” and “hospitable to new ideas,” she reported in “
My Day,” he was also “hard-headed.”
He would have to prove that he was a man of conviction before she would travel with the campaign.

· · ·

“
I THOUGHT OF YOU
with deep affection and sympathy when I read of young
Sally’s
death,” Murray wrote to ER as soon as the news reached her in
Ghana. Murray had fond memories of Sally, a charming little girl, regaling a lunch party at Val-Kill with her account of ER’s bath in the family swimming pool the morning after
Hurricane Hazel.

As far as the presidential campaign, Murray knew that Stevenson was a poor campaigner, but she felt that his intelligence, values, and knowledge of world affairs made him far superior to Kennedy. Furthermore, the senator’s lukewarm embrace of civil rights, refusal to condemn
McCarthy, and selection of Texan
Lyndon Johnson as his vice presidential running mate made the Democratic ticket unpalatable to Murray. She had long suffered the economic and emotional costs of racial
segregation and political persecution, and she had no patience with a candidate who was either unclear or afraid to say where he stood on these critical issues. Murray’s brief response to ER’s endorsement spoke volumes: “
I see you’ve finally come out for Kennedy. No comment.”

55

“I Hope You Were Not in Danger”

I
n
Ghana, Pauli Murray found herself countering criticism of U.S. race relations and foreign policy at gatherings of the
American Women’s Association of
Accra and the First Conference of
African Women and Women of African Descent. This was a new experience, as she was more accustomed to calling out U.S. shortcomings in these areas. Fearing that the United States and European nations might underestimate the desire for power and autonomy in the new African nation-states (seventeen would emerge from colonialism in 1960), Murray warned in an opinion letter she shared with friends that “
the Africans, too, are seeking to make themselves great in the eyes of the world. They aspire to be the ‘third force’ and a world leader toward peace. This is the meaning of their nationalism and
Pan-Africanism. They seek only what they believe we have achieved, but they want it on their own terms.”

Murray’s concerns struck a chord with Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote back, “
Africa is certainly pinpointed for all of us today, and the Soviets are making a great play to gain the favor of the new states who have been admitted to the U.N. I hope you were not in danger at any point!”

ER’s apprehension was justified, for danger was knocking at Murray’s door. Relations between the United States and Ghana had been tense ever since a struggle for power erupted between
Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the newly independent
Congo, and rival forces supported by Belgian colonial interests and U.S. intelligence. Ghana’s president,
Kwame Nkrumah, criticized the United States for its alliance with the colonial powers. Reprisals against native dissidents, Europeans, and Americans
escalated.
Not even the distinguished diplomat
Ralph Bunche, who was overseeing operations for the U.N. in the Congo, escaped harassment.

Nkrumah had initially favored Murray’s appointment to the law school, thanks to Maida
Springer, who had sent him copies of
States’ Laws on Race and Color
and
Dark Testament and Other Poems
, as well as a letter of introduction praising Murray as a brilliant lawyer with “
a sense of history, the love of teaching and the ability to challenge searching young minds.” However, Murray’s nationality and her assertion of American democratic values quickly put her at odds with Ghanaian officials.

Murray proved to be all Springer had promised and more. Indeed, Murray’s course on constitutional law, her opposition to the Ghanaian government’s preventive detention act, which allowed authorities to imprison those labeled as national security risks for up to five years, and her support for
Joseph Danquah angered Nkrumah. Danquah, the founder of Ghana’s first daily newspaper, had run against Nkrumah for the presidency and had spent a year in prison under the preventive detention program.

The emergence of a one-party government increasingly intolerant of free speech virtually ensured that Murray would come under surveillance.
Her suspicion that she was being watched was confirmed when half a dozen uniformed members of the
Criminal Investigation Department showed up in her class. Murray felt a sense of déjà vu as she battled the denial of
civil rights and civil liberties on African soil. Determined not to shrink in fear, she took a deep breath and taught the class as she had always done. The investigators never came back. Nevertheless, she knew her days in Ghana were numbered.

· · ·

SHORTLY AFTER MURRAY
’
S BRUSH
with security agents,
Yale Law School professor
Fowler V. Harper visited Ghana to lecture on the American judicial system.
He was awed by what Murray had accomplished despite limited resources, underprepared students, and the government’s hostility toward Americans. A civil rights and civil liberties advocate, Harper was also convinced of two things: that Murray was an extraordinary teacher and that she would be deported. He urged her to come to Yale and study for the doctor of
juridical science, a degree that would qualify her to teach in an American law school.

Murray was unsure about starting a doctorate at age fifty, but she applied anyway. When the acceptance letter arrived, indicating that the school had
awarded her a $5,000 fellowship, she had less than six months
to finish the course she was teaching and a textbook she was writing with
Leslie Rubin, a senior lecturer at the University College of Ghana.
A Jew who had been the only colored member of the South African parliament, Rubin had suffered discrimination and had left his country in protest of apartheid.
The text he and Murray were writing,
The Constitution and Government of Ghana
, became the first volume in the Law in Africa Series, published by
Sweet & Maxwell of London.