The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (7 page)

· · ·

THE FIGHT OVER ANTI-LYNCHING LEGISLATION
was but one of
Franklin Roosevelt’s worries. His attempt to purge Congress of his enemies had failed, and a coalition of anti–New
Deal Republicans and Democrats had emerged. Despite the continuing economic depression, important legislation remained deadlocked. Frightening developments loomed on the world stage, as well. Under
Adolf Hitler,
Germany’s aggression in Europe escalated with the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. During
Kristallnacht, hundreds of synagogues were destroyed. Thousands of
Jews were stripped of their citizenship, property, and business rights and sent to
concentration camps.

As Murray pounded out her letter to the president, she recalled Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to
Camp Tera. Murray had been following reports about the
first lady, listening to her
radio broadcast, and reading her syndicated newspaper
column, “
My Day,” since it had begun publication, on December 30, 1935. In it, ER chronicled get-togethers with family and friends, meetings with public figures, impressions of what she saw during her travels, and her opinions on a range of cultural and political matters. Writing the column six days a week and meeting her duties as first lady, which frequently went past midnight, required her to compose on the go. After one day-long visit to
Camp Jane Addams (as Camp Tera had been renamed, in 1936, in honor of the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize), Tommy sat her typewriter on a rock near the
Bear Mountain Bridge so that ER could dictate her copy and meet her deadline.

Southern segregation made ER uncomfortable, and she did not enjoy going to FDR’s
Warm Springs cottage, despite the delight he took in
the place.
She did not accompany the president to UNC, but two weeks earlier, she had attended the
Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama, on her own.
SCHW was an interracial gathering of liberals who met to discuss health, economics, housing, labor, race relations, voting rights, opportunities for young people, and agricultural issues affecting the region. The conferees included a mix of labor, religious, youth, and civil rights activists, politicians, government administrators, journalists, educators, and representatives from organizations affiliated with the socialist and
Communist movements.

ER was the most celebrated attendee, and her presence drew the national
press. Of her whirlwind
schedule, a
New York Times
reporter noted, “
Mrs. Roosevelt arrived at 5 o’clock this morning…and rested until 8 o’clock and thereafter in rapid succession held a press conference, visited several institutions, spoke informally to an afternoon session meeting on youth problems and tonight gave an address on ‘Democracy in Education.’ ” Seven thousand people, nearly half of them black, jammed into the city auditorium to hear her speak about the importance of “
universal education” and the contribution each citizen makes to the nation, “regardless of nationality or race.” She fielded questions for the better part of an hour.

The first lady’s participation at the SCHW was historic. However, her skillful circumvention of a local ordinance requiring segregated seating was what interested Murray most. When city officials learned that conferees were mingling freely during sessions, without regard to race, the police came and directed everyone to obey local law.
Having walked into a session late, ER sat down in the black section near her friend Mary McLeod
Bethune, who was now director of the Negro Affairs Division in the
National Youth Administration. When the police ordered ER to move, she had her chair placed between the white and black delegations. And it was there she sat, symbolically outside of racial strictures, for the remainder of the conference.

The first lady’s deft reaction warmed the hearts of conferees, angered
segregationists, and thrilled the black press. The influential
Afro-American
newspaper, of which Murray was a devoted reader, underscored the significance of ER’s aisle-straddling tactic by proclaiming, “
Sometimes actions speak louder than words.”

· · ·

AFTER CAMP TERA
, Murray got a job with the
Works Progress Administration, initially as a remedial reading teacher, then with the Workers’
Education Project. Now that the WPA was in jeopardy, she planned to return to
North Carolina, where she could do graduate work at UNC and look after her adoptive mother,
Aunt Pauline. The thought of living in the South again filled Murray with dread. On the other hand, it seemed worth the sacrifice to further her education and be with
family.

In no mood for armchair
liberalism, Murray counted herself among a group of young radicals incensed by FDR’s “
coziness with white supremacy in the South.” She reasoned that if UNC were half the institution the president said it was, its administration would find a way to accommodate her. Murray knew of only one way to challenge his roundly praised address. She typed a bold missive, spelling out what the South was like for blacks, daring him to take a stand as a fellow Christian for democracy and the liberal principles he espoused.

December 6, 1938

Dear President Roosevelt:

I pray that this letter will get past your secretaries and reach your personal consideration.

Have you time to listen to the problem of one of your millions of fellow-citizens, which will illustrate most clearly one of the problems of democracy in America. I speak not only for myself but for 12,000,000 other citizens.

Briefly, the facts are these:

I am a Negro, the most oppressed, most misunderstood and most neglected section of your population.

I am also a WPA worker, another insecure and often misrepresented group of citizens. I teach on the Workers’ Education Project of New York City, a field which has received the constant and devoted support of your wife, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.

My main interest, the tradition of my family for three generations, is education, which, I believe, is the basic requirement for the maintenance and extension of democracy.

At present, in order to do a competent teaching job, a job comparable to the work of established educational institutions, like all other professional WPA workers, I feel the need of more training. To understand the knotty economic and social problems of our country and to interpret these problems clearly and simply to workers makes it imperative that we continue our studies. Our wage standards are such that we are unable to further our education. Those of us who do not have degrees are unable to get them because of the general WPA arrangements. Those of us who have degrees, and yet feel an inadequacy of information and formal training, find it impossible to go further and obtain our Master’s Degree.

Sometime ago I applied to the University of North Carolina for admission to their graduate school. They sent me an application blank, on the bottom of which was asked, “Race and Religion.” (For your information, I am a confirmed Protestant Episcopalian.) As you know, no Negro has ever been admitted to the University of North Carolina. You may wonder then, why I, a Negro knowing this fact, did make application.

My grandfather, a Union Army soldier, gave his eye for the liberation of his race. As soon as the war was over, he went to North Carolina under the Freedmen’s Bureau to establish schools and educate the newly freed Negroes. From that time on my entire family has been engaged in educational work in that state. My own father was a principal of one of the Baltimore City schools and my sisters and brothers are also teachers. You passed through Durham, where my family lived and worked, and where my aunt now a woman of sixty-eight years, still plods back and forth to her school training future citizens of America. This aunt has been teaching since she was fifteen years old, and for more than thirty years in the Durham Public Schools, and yet if she were to become disabled tomorrow, there is no school pension system which would take care of her, neither does she qualify for the Old Age Pension system which excludes teachers.

12,000,000 of your citizens have to endure insults, injustices, and such degradation of spirit that you would believe impossible as a human being and a Christian. We are forced to ride in prescribed places in the busses and street cars of those very cities you passed through in our beloved Southland. When your party reached the station at Durham yesterday, you must have noticed a sign which said “White,” and then a fence, then another sign which said “Colored.” Can you, for one moment, put yourself in our place and imagine the feelings of resentment, the protest, the indignation, the outrage that would rise within you to realize that you, a human being, with the keen sensitivities of other human beings were being set off in a corner, marked apart from your fellow human beings?

We, as Americans and Negroes, actually have few rights as Americans. Laws are passed designed to prevent us from using the ballot, an elementary and fundamental principle of democracy. We have to live in “ghettoes” everywhere, not only in Warm Springs, Ga., but also in the city of Washington, the very heart of our democracy.

It is the task of enlightened individuals to bring the torch of education to those who are not enlightened. There is a crying need for education among my own people. No one realizes this more than I do. But the un-Christian, un-American conditions in the South make it impossible for me and other young Negroes to live there and continue our faith in the ideals of democracy and Christianity. We are as much political refugees from the South as any of the Jews in Germany. We cannot endure these conditions. Our whole being cries out against inequality and injustice. And so, we come to Northern cities to escape the mental and physical cruelties of the land in which we were born and the land we love.

You said yesterday that you associated yourself with young people, and you emphasized their importance in the current affairs of our nation. Can you ask your young Negroes to return to the South? Do you feel, as we do, that the ultimate test of democracy in the United States will be the way in which it solves its Negro problem? No, President Roosevelt, our problems are not just those of other people. They are far deeper, far more trying, and far more hopeless. Have you raised your voice loud enough against the burning of our people? Why has our government refused to pass antilynching legislation? And why is it that the group of congressmen so opposed to that passing of this legislation are part and parcel of the Democratic Party of which you are leader?

Yesterday, you placed your approval on the University of North Carolina as an institution of liberal thought. You spoke of the necessity of change in a body of law to meet the problems of an accelerated era of civilization. You called on Americans to support a liberal philosophy based on democracy. What does this mean for Negro Americans? Does it mean that we, at last, may participate freely, and on the basis of equality, with our fellow-citizens in working out the problems of this democracy? Does it mean that Negro students in the South will be allowed to sit down with white students and study a problem which is fundamental and mutual to both groups? Does it mean that the University of North Carolina is ready to open its doors to Negro students seeking enlightenment on the social and economic problems which the South faces? Does it mean, that as an alumnus of the University of North Carolina, you are ready to use your prestige and influence to see to it that this step is taken toward greater opportunity for mutual understanding of race relations in the South?

Or does it mean, that everything you said has no meaning for us as Negroes, that again we are to be set aside and passed over for more important problems? I appeal for an answer because I, and my people are perplexed.

Sincerely yours,

Pauli Murray

Hoping to ensure that the president would get her
correspondence, Murray sent a copy of it with a cover letter to the
first lady.

December 6, 1938

Dear Mrs. Roosevelt:

You do not remember me, but I was the girl who did not stand up when you passed through the Social Hall of Camp Tera during one of your visits in the winter of 1934–35. Miss Mills criticized me afterward, but I thought and still feel that you are the sort of person who prefers to be accepted as a human being and not a human paragon.

One of my closest friends and pals is “Pee Wee,” whom you know as Margaret Inness [
sic
]. I have watched with appreciation your interest in her struggle to improve herself and to secure employment. Often I have wanted to write you, but felt that you had more important problems to consider.

Now I make an appeal to you in my own behalf. I am sending you a copy of a letter which I wrote to your husband, President Roosevelt, in the hope that you will try to understand the spirit and deep perplexity in which it is written, if he is too busy.

I know he has the problems of our nation on his hand, and I would not bother to write him, except that my problem isn’t mine alone, it is the problem of my people, and in these trying days, it will not let me or any other thinking Negro rest. Need I say any more?

Sincerely yours,

Pauli Murray

Given how fired up Murray was when she composed these letters, the clamor coming from her tiny, smoke-filled apartment must have disturbed her fellow tenants. It is not known if her typing led to another eviction. What we do know is that her missives opened a conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt that would continue until ER’s
death in 1962.