The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (16 page)

Some day the poet and warrior

Who grapple in my brain

Shall lock in final contest

And I will be ground under
.

As much as Murray wanted to write full-time, it seemed impractical for a black woman without independent means. Only a handful of blacks sustained themselves by writing, and she doubted she could write as well as the acclaimed poet
Countee Cullen, who—even with a master’s degree in English and French from
Harvard—earned his living teaching high school. “
Without a trade or profession,” Murray believed she was destined for “a grubby existence in rented rooms on the fringes of society.” She simply “
didn’t have the courage” to pursue writing.

Law, Murray reasoned, would equip her with the tools to live a middle-class life
and
fight for civil rights. It also appealed to her love of intellectual inquiry and debate. Convinced that a law degree was her ticket to meaningful work and a better life, Murray left the WDL to enter Howard in the fall of 1941.

The delegation that went to see Franklin Roosevelt about the Odell Waller case at the entrance to the Office of the U.S. Attorney General, July 1, 1942.
Front row, left to right:
Reverend William Lloyd Imes, Mary McLeod Bethune, A. Philip Randolph, Frank R. Crosswaith.
Second row, left to right:
Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Pauli Murray, Ralph Matthews, Layle Lane, Albert Hamilton, Frank D. Reeves, and Channing H. Tobias. When Murray organized this group, she did not know that FDR was in Hyde Park or that he had written to Virginia governor Colgate W. Darden Jr.
(New Pittsburgh Courier Archives)

12

“I Have Done Everything I Can Possibly Do”

O
n December 7, 1941, before Pauli Murray finished her first semester in law school,
Japanese bombers attacked the U.S. naval base at
Pearl Harbor, destroying eighteen ships. More than two thousand military personnel and civilians died. The next day at a special joint session of
Congress, Franklin Roosevelt called for and got a declaration of war. Three days later,
Germany and
Italy declared war on the United States. Congress responded in kind.

The war tested Murray’s philosophical beliefs. She hated violence, yet every fiber of her body was
opposed to
Hitler and Nazism.
A religious pacifist, she had already joined the
Fellowship of Reconciliation and spent eight months at the
Harlem Ashram, a multiracial commune of
Christian pacifists that included
James Farmer, the future founder of the Congress of Racial Equality. She would not sign up for
military service, as many
Howard University students did, but she advocated fiercely for their right to serve according to their ability and without segregation.

Despite her concerns about the war and the demands of her studies, Murray continued to monitor developments in the Odell Waller case.
Between March 1941 and June 1942,
John Finerty and the WDL defense team argued before the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, the
U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. District Court, and the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. They also submitted separate petitions to U.S. Supreme Court Justices
Harlan F. Stone,
Hugo Black,
Robert H. Jackson, and
Felix Frankfurter.

Even though Waller’s attorneys worked pro bono, there was never enough money to cover the expenses of preparing and filing briefs, travel, telephone bills, printing, and office supplies. For this reason, Annie Waller went on another national tour in the spring of 1942, soliciting assistance from labor unions, churches, and humanitarian groups.

As the case made its way through the judicial system, a coalition of ministers led by Waller’s pastor, Reverend
Robert L. Gilbert, designated May 31 as a day of prayer. Murray asked Eleanor Roosevelt “
to do whatever you can.” Odell wrote to the first lady as well. “
I have heard lots of people speak of what a nice lady you are and…that you believe in helping the poor,” he said. “I always worked hard but I couldn’t get anything out of it. I raised some
wheat with a man named Oscar Davis and he took all of the wheat and I tried to get my share of it. He wouldn’t let me have the wheat. We got in a quarrel. And I shot him to keep him from hurting me not meaning to kill him. He carried a gun.… I was afraid of him.… Please write to the Governor and get him to have mercy on me and allow me a chance. You will never regret it.”

· · ·

EVERYTHING ER HAD LEARNED
about Waller—from the circumstances surrounding the shooting to the problems with the original trial—spoke to his disadvantaged status as a black sharecropper. She believed, as did Murray and the WDL, that Waller’s powerlessness personified the plight of countless poor farmers. Pained by the prospect of his execution, the
first lady sent the newly elected governor of Virginia, Colgate Darden, a copy of an opinion letter by Professor
John Dewey that had been published in the
New York Times
.
In his piece, Dewey discussed how poverty, the
poll tax, and the composition of the
jury
thwarted
Waller’s ability to get a fair trial. Dewey called on the
Supreme Court, which had declined to hear the case without comment, to rehear the case and for Darden to grant clemency should the appeal to the high court fail.

To Dewey’s letter, ER attached her own appeal. “
My dear Governor Darden,” she wrote,

I have had a great many letters about Odell Waller’s case and the thing which impresses me is that one of the women who made the original investigation, writes me that she feels very strongly Odell Waller should not be executed. She begs me to ask you for clemency.

I am, of course, not familiar enough with the case, but the letter from Dr. John Dewey about this case, makes me feel it is important enough to take into consideration.…

If the facts as stated by Dr. Dewey are true, I hope very much that you will be able to go over the case very carefully, as it has created a great deal of feeling among both white and colored people and it may have not only national but international implications.

It is hard to imagine that the first lady had as little knowledge of the Waller case as her letter suggested. Murray had been sending ER material since November 1940. By implying that she had not chosen sides, perhaps ER hoped to avoid making Governor Darden defensive.

· · ·

BY THE SUMMER OF
1942, the Waller case was the subject of front-page news stories and editorials around the country. Word of ER’s advocacy for the convicted sharecropper leaked and aroused “
bitterness” among whites who saw Waller’s trial and conviction as a matter of “
states’ rights”; blacks and their supporters took this catchphrase as a euphemism for white supremacy.

Franklin Roosevelt found himself in a tough spot.
He was grieving for his mother, Sara, who had died in September. He was worried about the war and the economy. He knew that his wife wanted him to convince Governor Darden to grant clemency. He also knew that any effort on his part to stop Waller’s execution would be politically costly. But the first lady would not relent. She bombarded her husband with “
notes and messages,” which she dropped into a “
small basket” near his bed.

On June 15, a week after the U.S. Navy faced down the Japanese fleet in the
Battle of Midway, FDR drafted a “
personal and unofficial note” to Governor Darden, describing a case in
New York in which a man was convicted of first-degree murder for shooting his neighbor. The man and his neighbor had argued. The neighbor made a threat, and the man shot him. Roosevelt, who happened to be governor at the time, commuted the man’s sentence to life in prison. The president had no regrets about his decision, he told Darden. In fact, he was thankful he had shown mercy. FDR closed his letter with the plea that Darden “think of this note as merely a suggestion from an old friend who has let the death sentence take its course in very many cases, but who really hopes that you will recognize that perhaps the killer element in human nature may not have been present in the case of this unfortunate man who might have been just ‘scared’ for his own life.”

· · ·

THE PRESIDENT
’
S LETTER FORETOLD
the onslaught of appeals that would descend on the governor in the countdown to
Waller’s execution.
Among the expanding network of people who would take up Waller’s cause were former first lady
Grace Anna Goodhue Coolidge, American Federation of Labor president
William Green, and Congress of Industrial Organizations president
Philip Murray. The
New York Times
published a letter to the editor by the Nobel Prize–winning novelist
Pearl S. Buck in which she addressed the
unconstitutional aspects of the Waller trial and the problem it posed for the world’s leading
democracy. Murray saw a commission of inquiry appointed by the president as a practical solution. On June 15, the Waller campaign released to the press a petition to FDR for such an inquiry.

On June 16,
Harlem residents and business owners voluntarily shut off their lights to protest Waller’s sentence and discrimination in employment. That evening, twenty thousand blacks gathered at a
Madison Square Garden rally, where “Save Odell Waller” banners swayed from the ceiling.
A. Philip Randolph, whose voice had the resonance of a classically trained actor’s, hailed the gathering as the “
beginning of a nationwide drive to
kill Jim-Crow.” Mother Waller, who shared the platform with Randolph,
Bethune, and Reverend
Adam Clayton Powell Jr., begged the “
vast crowd to help save her boy.”

Twenty-four hours before Waller’s scheduled execution, Governor Darden granted a reprieve—it was Waller’s fifth—and announced that he would hold a commutation hearing on June 29. Murray, now on her
summer break, traveled to
Waller’s hometown, the neighboring counties, and
Richmond to gather information in preparation for the hearing.
She learned that the governor, a Democrat married to the daughter of one of the richest men in the United States, had aspirations of becoming “
a national figure noted for his humanitarian attitude.” However, the “
political repercussions” of commuting Waller’s sentence coupled with national criticism of the commonwealth troubled him. Darden needed “
a convenient way out” of this dilemma.

On June 28, the day before the hearing, the first lady took the train to Richmond to fulfill two commitments. The first was to give the opening address at the annual meeting of the
Virginia Veterans of Foreign Wars. The second was to make a personal appeal for clemency to the governor, whom she planned to see privately.
To the veterans, ER spoke of winning the war and the battle for
democracy. With Darden, she discussed “
a number of questions…very important to his state and to all Southern states today,” she wrote in her column. While ER did not mention Odell Waller by name, African Americans took her comments as evidence of her support. Waller’s opponents accused her of “
preaching racial unrest” and “fishing for the Negro vote.”

Tens of thousands of people, some from as far away as Europe, sent letters and telegrams urging the governor to spare Waller’s life.
The pressure came closer to home when Virginius
Dabney and a group of prominent Virginians called on Darden to grant clemency. In a commutation-day editorial that bore the imprint of Murray’s conversations with him and for which the
Danville Register
would brand him a “
pussyfooting” coward, Dabney asserted that “
pertinent facts” had not been presented at the original trial, that the climate “was not conducive to an objective hearing of the evidence,” and that the testimony of the only eyewitness,
Henry Davis, “was unbelievable.” Waller’s execution would affect the “morale of colored peoples” around the world, Dabney warned. Indeed, the nation’s enemies would use the execution as proof that the United States was not the democracy it claimed to be.

· · ·

THE HEARING BEGAN
at nine-thirty on the morning of June 29 in the Senate chamber at the capitol in Richmond. For the next eleven hours, twelve witnesses testified, including Henry Davis for the prosecution and Mother Waller for the defense.
Finerty, Waller’s lead counsel, and
Edmund M. Preston—a highly regarded local attorney who joined the defense after Thomas
Stone, the original counsel, withdrew—argued
that circumstantial evidence supported
Waller’s belief that he was acting in self-defense. Davis was known to carry a gun and have a temper, and tensions between him and Waller had escalated in the weeks leading up to the shooting.

As far as the original trial, the presiding judge had made little effort to appear objective.
Stone had erred in not documenting the jurors’ and Waller’s
poll-tax status, and this evidence, had it been presented, was proof Waller had not been tried by a
jury of his peers. Because Stone’s error was foundational to Waller’s first-degree murder conviction, he stood to be executed on the basis of a flawed trial.