The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (9 page)

Campus polls and debate revealed bitter opposition and strong support for Murray’s application. There were rumors of a
lynching posse that promised to “
tar and feather any ‘nigger’ who tried to” enroll. Then again, students like
John Alan Creedy were disturbed by the threats of violence, as well as the laurels President Roosevelt had conferred upon UNC. Creedy, editor of the campus-based
Carolina Magazine
, wrote in an editorial entitled “We, the Hypocrites…”: “
We are a conservative University with a little surface froth of liberal foam to keep everyone fooled—even ourselves.” Then, to demonstrate “
what sort of student” UNC was “missing by excluding Negroes,” he published Murray’s
“Song of the Highway”
poem in a special issue on black graduate education in the South.
Fifty-seven years later, Creedy would still insist that UNC students missed out because the state denied Murray’s admission.

The controversy over Murray’s application horrified her
aunt Pauline. “
Please be careful what you do about this,” she wrote.
Still teaching in a black segregated school in
Durham without benefit of a pension or tenure, she feared that school authorities would dismiss her or that angry whites would lynch her and set her home afire. Dame pleaded with daughter Pauli, “
You can make it very uncomfortable for me.”

North Carolina College for Negroes president
James E. Shepard, who was a “
deeply respected friend” of Murray’s
family, had a different take on the situation. A
black conservative, he saw this as a chance to expand the programs and physical plant at his school, and he told the press exactly what legislators wanted to hear: “
Negroes could do their best work only in their own schools.”

Shepard’s political opportunism and
Aunt Pauline’s vulnerability troubled Murray, but it was impossible to challenge “
deep-seated injustice” and accepted customs without “making people uncomfortable,” she reasoned. By the time the North Carolina legislature passed a bill enabling the creation of graduate and professional courses at black colleges, and then declined to appropriate funds for them, Murray was ready to go to court.

· · ·

WHEN MURRAY MET
with
Thurgood Marshall in the winter of 1939 and he told her that the NAACP would not handle her appeal, she was flabbergasted. The association had a policy of taking only “
airtight” cases, where the legal foundation for the grievance and the background of the plaintiff were flawless, he explained. Murray’s
New York State residency, notwithstanding her North Carolina roots, weakened her case. Furthermore, the loss of an expensive appeal was a risk the association could not afford. Murray countered with the argument that UNC had violated her
Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection, as it did admit whites from out of state. Nevertheless, Marshall had made up his mind. If Murray wanted to go to court, she would have to proceed without NAACP backing.

Murray left the meeting feeling as if she had been blindsided. Not only had Marshall turned down her case, his
comment about the importance of a plaintiff’s background—“
We have to be very careful about the people we select”—made her wonder if he found
her
undesirable. And, if so, why?

Was it her politics? Murray was certainly to the left of NAACP leadership.
Radicalized by her experiences with the
Workers’
Education Project and a brief residency at
Brookwood
Labor College—both of which immersed her in a community of labor and leftist activists—she had already been arrested for picketing the
New York Amsterdam News
in support of unionization. Booted from
Camp Tera on the charge that she was a
Communist, she set out “
to educate” herself on the subject and, in the process, joined a group of
“
intellectual radicals” known as the Communist
Party (Opposition) in 1936. From the group’s leader,
Jay Lovestone, a former
Communist Party USA official who had been expelled for criticizing party dogma and strategy,
Murray received an extensive “
critique” of Soviet communism. What she learned was vital for counteracting Communists who participated in liberal groups with which she worked.

Repulsed by the Communist appeal “Self-Determination for the Black Belt,” which had the uncomfortable sound of “
another form of segregation,” Murray disavowed the CPO in 1938. While she never flirted with communism again, she was still closer ideologically to the democratic
socialist
Norman Thomas, for whom she voted in the
1932 presidential election, than to NAACP officials who backed FDR and New Dealers in the Democratic Party.

Was the issue her temperament?
A self-described individualist with a first-class intellect, Murray found that bureaucracies tried her patience.
Her assertive letters to UNC officials bothered black veteran leaders, such as NAACP assistant executive secretary
Roy Wilkins. Even friends, such as National Urban League executive
Lester B. Granger, who praised Murray’s courage, and
New York Post
reporter
Ted Poston, who admired her “
literary brilliance,” saw her audacity and proclivity for working to the point of exhaustion as signs of emotional instability.

Was the problem her
family history? If Marshall, a native Baltimorean only two years older than Murray, had not heard about her father’s institutionalization and murder at the
Hospital for the Negro Insane or the false rumor that her mother had committed suicide, he certainly knew Murray’s older brother,
William H. Murray Jr.
They had been classmates at
Howard University School of Law before William, whom Marshall remembered as a talented student, dropped out with financial and emotional difficulties.

Or was the problem Murray’s
personal life?
Because the association was leery of taking on female plaintiffs, especially unmarried women, for fear that something untoward might surface and damage their reputation and the case, the fact that Murray presented herself as single and kept her marriage to Billy Wynn secret was problematic. Even the marriage, given their eight-year estrangement without divorce, would have been cause for concern. Or perhaps NAACP leaders had seen Murray’s essay and her photo as the
boy Pete in
Nancy Cunard’s
Negro
anthology. Walter
White, for example, was an award-winning author well connected to the New York literary elite. It is also possible, considering the questionable privacy of medical records in the 1930s, that Marshall got wind of Murray’s 1937 hospitalization in Amityville, New York, probably at the
Long Island Home for Nervous Invalids. Although she was admitted with symptoms of anxiety and exhaustion, her conversations with the medical staff marked the beginning of a decade-long “
inner conflict,” during which she acknowledged her attraction to women but rebuffed the medical diagnosis of homosexuality.
Murray’s notes reveal that she was a patient for eight to ten days between the third and fourth weeks of December. Her care and treatment included a thorough physical examination, wholesome meals, psychotherapy, rest, and relaxation.

As a practice, the NAACP regarded the most desirable plaintiffs as those with no arrest record, no prior association with radical groups, particularly
Communists, and no confirmed or alleged family or
personal history of mental illness, which by definition included homosexuality. (The
American Psychiatric Association would not declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1973.) Even if
Marshall knew nothing of Murray’s hospitalization or sexuality, he and NAACP officials would have likely looked upon her manner, close relationships with women, and male-sounding first name with suspicion.

Murray would never know the extent to which any of these issues might have influenced Marshall and his colleagues. What she did believe for the rest of her life was that there was more behind the decision not to take her case than he actually disclosed. In his eyes, she felt less than “
Simon-pure.”

As desperately as Murray wanted to appeal her case in court, she thought it unwise to go forward without the NAACP. She respected Marshall, in spite of their differences. Besides, she could not pay for a court battle on her own.

Having to give up this fight was a “
personal defeat” made all the more insufferable by the “irony” of Murray’s
ancestry. Not only had she been raised in
North Carolina, where many of her black relatives still lived and paid taxes that supported UNC, but her white,
slave-owning ancestors, the Smiths, had close ties to the school. Murray’s great-great-grandfather, Dr.
James Strudwick Smith, had been a trustee. His sons, James
Sidney Smith, who was
Grandmother Cornelia’s father, and
Francis Jones Smith, her uncle, were alumni. Their sister,
Mary Ruffin Smith, who reared Cornelia, left a portion of her estate to a trust fund for student scholarships. That Mary, a devoted member of the
Chapel of the Cross, had had Cornelia baptized at the old stone
Episcopal church adjacent to the campus gave Pauli, a practicing Episcopalian herself, another connection to the university.

Murray’s inability to appeal UNC’s decision, and the news that Lloyd
Gaines had vanished mysteriously before classes started at the University of Missouri Law School, fueled the
writing of her fiery essay
“Who Is to Blame for Disappearance of Gaines?” Published first in the
Carolina Times
and again in the
Black Dispatch
of Oklahoma City, this piece, like Murray’s letters to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, was the product of frustration. However, this time, Murray aimed her pen at young blacks who were wasting “
precious creative energies,” rather than organizing for the greater good. Every sentence was a mouthful, spewing the full range of her emotions.

We Negroes can throng the streets 300,000 strong, break bottles over resisting heads, stop traffic, commandeer busses and other public vehicles, and show unprecedented aggressiveness, joy and hilarity when a Joe Louis knocks out a single white opponent by appointment, but when a Lloyd Gaines, single-handedly comes up against a whole region of the country, with its hidebound folkways of “white supremacy,” with its lynching parties, and with the great majority of its population disfranchised and disinherited; when he battles his way to the Supreme Court and back again, facing the insults, the butts of criticism, the uncertainties, the threats, the great inner struggle between idealism and personal safety; when he does all this alone, with scarcely more than his own conscience and a few loyal friends to reassure him, not a single mass demonstration is held anywhere in the country!

In spite of Murray’s biting call to “
find Lloyd Gaines if he can be found; if not, finish the job he left uncompleted,” Gaines would not be heard from again.
Some blacks believed he had been murdered. Some said he accepted a payoff and fled to New York or Mexico City. Neither local authorities nor the
Federal Bureau of Investigation looked into his disappearance. Fifty-five years later, the University of Missouri School of Law would grant Gaines an honorary law degree, as a symbolic apology for the injustices of the time.

Eleanor Roosevelt presents the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal to contralto Marian Anderson (right) in recognition of “the highest or noblest achievement by an American Negro,” Richmond, Virginia, July 3, 1939. “The DAR may not think Marian Anderson is good enough to sing in their Hall,” chuckled the black White House servants, “but the First Lady thinks she is good enough to sing for a king and queen.”
(Bettmann/CORBIS)

4

“I Am Resigning”

I
n January 1939, Eleanor Roosevelt took a public stand against
lynching and discrimination. She had been working for five years with Walter White and the NAACP to persuade Congress and Franklin Roosevelt to pass anti-lynching legislation. Disturbed by the Senate filibuster that had blocked a recent bill, she decided to say how she felt
about the issue at the Second National Conference on the Problems of the Negro and Negro Youth.

Prefacing her statement with “
On the clear understanding that I am speaking for myself, as an individual, and in no other sense,” she told a thousand black youths gathered in Washington, D.C., under the auspices of the
National Youth Administration that she wanted an anti-lynching bill “as soon as possible.” Though she doubted that such a “law would do away with lynching,” she believed this kind of legislation was important “because it would put us on record against something we all should be against.”

A month later, the first lady spoke out again. The impetus was the Daughters of the
American Revolution’s refusal to allow
Marian Anderson, the celebrated African American contralto, to sing in
Constitution Hall.
The DAR, an organization whose members claimed bloodline descent from the founders of the American republic, restricted its spacious hall to
white artists and patrons only. ER, who’d joined the DAR by invitation when she came to Washington as first lady, had already hosted a concert by Anderson in the White House. The singer had one of the most “
moving” voices ER had heard.