Eleanor and Franklin (114 page)

Eleanor refused to be insulated and shielded from a problem. The more perilous it was politically, the more twisted its roots in history, custom, and law, the more urgent that it be ferreted out, confronted, and dealt with. She received Negro sharecroppers in the White House and visited them in their tarpaper shacks in the cotton fields, and with kindly questions persuaded them to talk about themselves and their needs. After seeing Shaw's
Saint Joan,
she remarked on the remorse of the priest in the last scene,

when with his own eyes he saw the suffering he had caused. “I did not know until I saw” is something which every human should recognize as being as true today as it was when people were tortured and burned at the stake. Only by seeing can we save ourselves the same kind of remorse that haunted the wicked, self-satisfied old priest.
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This was what the Negro wanted—that he be
seen
and recognized as an individual and accepted in the fullness of a humanity that he shared with the whites—and this was what the First Lady understood.

It represented for her an immense inner journey. “I quite understand the southern point of view,” she replied to critics from that region, “because my grandmother was a Southerner from Georgia and her sister had a great deal to do with bringing us up when we were small children, therefore, I am familiar with the old plantation life.”
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Eleanor had absorbed the southern point of view along with her first lessons in reading from her Great-aunt Annie Gracie, who had held the children spellbound not only with her Br'er Rabbit stories but with her description of the personal slaves that she and Grandmother Roosevelt had been given on the Bulloch plantation, slaves who had slept at the foot of their beds and accompanied and served them wherever they went. Eleanor still called the Civil War the War between the States because “those who lose are apt to be more sensitive” than
those who win, and while Walter White had sent her Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois'
Black Reconstruction,
praising it as a different way of looking at the Reconstruction period in American history, she was more influenced by
Gone with the Wind,
which she sat up several nights reading. The most interesting part for her was “the Reconstruction period. It is so easy to understand why the women of the South kept their bitterness toward their northern invaders.” She still used terms like “pickaninny” and “darky”; a Tuskegee graduate reading the magazine installments of Eleanor's autobiography “couldn't believe [her] eyes” when she came across the “hated” and “humiliating” term “darky,” and it was more hurtful because Mrs. Roosevelt, whom she considered “the paragon of American womanhood,” had used it. A little bit on the defensive, Eleanor explained: “‘Darky' was used by my Georgia great aunt as a term of affection and I have always considered it in that light. I am sorry if it hurt you. What do you prefer?”
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Eleanor admired Walter White, who with his blue eyes, fair skin, and blond hair could have escaped his Negro heritage had he chosen to do so. When White came to Hyde Park, she urged him to bring his wife and sister. She liked to talk things over with him—he clarified situations for her and helped her to see them more objectively. In his moments of deepest despair, White later wrote, when he was ready to give up on the white race, the thought of Mrs. Roosevelt was one of the few things that kept him from hating all white people.
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Mary McLeod Bethune was another Negro who became a friend as well as co-worker. “She's real black,” a Negro policeman said, “she's black as a black shoe.” Unlike Walter White, who was born into the Negro middle class, Mrs. Bethune was the fifteenth of seventeen children, some of whom had been sold in slavery, and she came from the rural South. Her mother was a matriarchal figure who sent her to be trained as a teaching missionary. Her heart's pride was Bethune-Cookman College, which she developed from a few adult classes and which was the center of her life until Aubrey Williams brought her to Washington to direct the NYA's Division of Negro Affairs. She had “the most marvelous gift of affecting feminine helplessness in order to attain her ends with masculine ruthlessness,” a male colleague said admiringly. She was a great lady, but without Eleanor's support she could have accomplished little. Mrs. Bethune never came to see Eleanor without a long budget of requests—Negroes to be appointed, a conference to speak at, a Negro housing project to be financed, and, as a footnote, something that she wanted Mrs. Roosevelt to do
for Bethune-Cookman College. She had to check into the hospital for two months, Mrs. Bethune informed Eleanor, first to lose thirty pounds, then to be operated on. “I realize how much the inactivity will irk you,” Eleanor responded sympathetically, and she instructed the White House gardener to send flowers with her card once a week for two months to Mrs. Bethune at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. A personal experience with Mrs. Bethune taught her how deeply inbred racial feelings were among whites. She liked to kiss people whom she knew well when greeting them and when saying good-by, but it took some time and a conscious effort for Eleanor to give Mrs. Bethune a peck on the cheek, and it was not until she kissed Mrs. Bethune without thinking of it that she felt she had at last overcome the racial prejudice within herself.
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To Mary Bethune and Walter White, old fighters for their race who had learned to walk warily in the world of the white man, it was new and bracing to have someone else as close to the seat of power as the First Lady thinking of them, worrying about them as individuals. It made the world a friendlier place. But they were veterans who knew when to advance and when to retreat, how to swallow a humiliation with a smile and how to bide their time. A new, more rebellious generation was growing up to whom the dominant fact was not what the New Deal had done for the Negro but what the white race had done to the Negro.

“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—,” wrote Pauli Murray, a WPA teacher, enclosing for Eleanor's attention an angry, defiant letter she had just sent the president: “I am a Negro, the most oppressed, most misunderstood and most neglected section of your population. . . . 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.” Although from that time on Miss Murray's entire family had been involved in educational work in North Carolina, she could not get into the University of North Carolina, which on its application asked for the “Race and Religion” of the applicant. The president had spoken the day before at Chapel Hill, hailing the university as a center of liberal thought and calling on Americans, especially the young people, to support a liberal philosophy based on democracy. “What does this mean for Negro-Americans?” Miss Murray demanded.

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 University of North Carolina is ready to open its doors to Negro students . . . ? Or does it mean that everything you said has no meaning for us as Negroes, that we are again to be set aside and passed over for more important problems?

Prophetically, the letter closed, “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?”

The letter stirred Eleanor deeply: “I have read the copy of the letter you sent me,” she wrote Miss Murray.

and I understand perfectly, but great changes come slowly. I think they are coming, however, and sometimes it is better to fight hard with conciliatory methods. The South is changing, but don't push too hard. There is a great change in youth, for instance, and that is a hopeful sign.
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She was attracted to people, especially young people, who showed fight and indignation, and she encouraged Pauli Murray to write regularly and invited her to Hyde Park. When Miss Murray became secretary of National Sharecroppers Week, Eleanor spoke at the dinner. Eleanor also backed her in her decision to go to law school, and, as in the case of Mrs. Bethune, watched over her when she became ill.

Pauli Murray helped her understand the mood of Negro youth. So did Richard Wright. Because Wright was “a product of the WPA writers' enterprise,” his publisher, Harper's, sent her
Uncle Tom's Children,
his first collection of stories. “It is beautifully written,” Eleanor wrote the publisher, “and so vivid that I had a most unhappy time reading it.” In all four stories a mob goes to work, and Wright showed with great graphic power that violence was the way civilization kept the Negro in his place. Wright thanked her for the help she had given him in bringing his book to public attention, adding, “I am at present engaged upon a long novel dealing with Negro juvenile delinquency, with Chicago's Southside as the background and locale.” He was applying for a Guggenheim grant in order to finish it, and asked if he could
use her name as reference. “Certainly,” she replied. If the racial problem was to be dealt with it had to be understood, and Wright's vivid writing helped the white community to understand what it had done to the Negro people.
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“It is true,” she wrote a woman in Philadelphia who complained that Negroes were ruining the neighborhood,

that it may take years to educate the great mass of colored people to be good in desirable neighborhoods; but we are largely to blame. We brought them here as slaves and we have never given them equal chances for education, even after we emancipated them. They must be given the opportunity to become the kind of people that they should, and I often marvel that they are as good as they are in view of the treatment which they have received. . . . You are suffering from a difficult situation and it is always hard on the individuals who reap the results of generations of wrong doing.
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She refused to allow Negro “backwardness” to become a pretext for denying the Negro equality of treatment, but with Negro audiences she was equally firm in urging them not to permit white injustice to keep them from helping themselves and from putting forward their best efforts. Anyone in a minority group, she told Hampton Institute students,

has to strive to do a better job, not just for himself as an individual, but because it is going to help the whole group that he belongs to and because it is going to have an effect on what all the others are going to be able to do. Every time we fail, every time we do not do our best, we don't just let ourselves down, we let down all the others that we might help if we did our best and if we did succeed.
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In February, 1936, Eleanor invited Marian Anderson, the Negro contralto, to sing at the White House. Thirty-three years later Miss Anderson, a woman of imposing majesty who had a voice that even in speech still enthralled her listeners, recalled the warmth and friendliness of the president and Mrs. Roosevelt that evening.
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She might perform in the White House but in 1939 when Howard University approached the Daughters of the American Revolution to arrange for the use of Constitution Hall, the one auditorium in Washington large enough to hold the capacity audience that was expected to come out
to hear Miss Anderson, the DAR refused and its president said that no Negro artist would be permitted to appear there.

People were aghast and Miss Anderson's fellow-musicians were outraged, but what turned a local episode of bigotry into a world-wide
cause célèbre
was Eleanor Roosevelt's decision to resign from the DAR. She did not reach it lightly. She was never sure resignations were effective. When Elinor Morgenthau had been excluded from the Colony Club because she was Jewish, Eleanor had quietly quit that group, but insisted she did so because she was no longer in New York City enough to make use of the club's facilities. An abrasive staged resignation over anti-Semitism, she felt, would have confirmed the ladies in their prejudice rather than softened hearts. But the DAR's ban on Negroes was a public matter from the very beginning; its openly proclaimed lily-white policy, if not challenged, was likely to set back the evolution of a more decent attitude in white America and further deepen the sense of estrangement of Negro America.

A few weeks earlier she had attended the founding meeting in Birmingham of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, an organization which had the support of the CIO and southern New Dealers. There were a large number of Negro delegates, and the Birmingham city authorities insisted that the town's segregation ordinance be complied with or the conference would not be allowed to proceed. The delegates decided to go ahead with the meeting rather than disband, but Eleanor, coming in with Mrs. Bethune, refused to observe the segregation order. The police told her she was violating the law, so she had her chair placed in the center aisle, which the police had insisted must separate the white from the Negro delegates. Her action electrified black America. A National Conference of Negro Youth, the most restless, impatient group in the Negro community, had little affirmative to say about Washington's policies, but it enthusiastically passed a resolution thanking her for her moral courage in Birmingham.
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The DAR's defense of racism posed the same public challenge that Birmingham's enforcement of its segregation ordinance had. Eleanor talked with Walter White and others about whether she should resign, and finally she reached her decision. “I have been debating in my mind for some time a question which I have had to debate with myself once or twice before in my life,” she wrote in her column: