The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (25 page)

After
Lillian Smith agreed to publish the poem in
South Today
, Murray sent an excerpt to ER and asked for her blessings and a favor. “
When you read it, will you tell me whether it remains sufficiently objective not to hurt the white people of the South. With your comment, I’ll be ready to turn it loose. I’ve held it for a year, just to be sure. Even so I still resist a stronger ending. It is the fragment of a longer poem which a
legal career has interrupted.”

Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic poem
John Brown’s Body
was the inspiration and prototype for “Dark Testament.” ER loved
John Brown’s Body
, and she enjoyed reading it aloud to friends, family, and
schoolchildren. Murray’s work impressed her. “
Thank you for letting me read your poem,” replied the first lady. “It is a fine poem—not too bitter.”
This was reassuring feedback for Murray, as the poem’s initial title had been “Dark Anger” and several editors had said the tone was too strident for
publication.

When ER learned of Murray’s plans to go to law school in California, she contacted her friend
Flora Rose, who had retired to the Bay Area after an illustrious career as cofounder and head of the Cornell University Department of Home Economics. “
This will introduce Miss Pauli Murray, whom I have known for several years and who has just graduated from
Howard University in Washington,” wrote the first lady. “She wishes to study further, in Berkeley, and I know that she could profit greatly by your advice. I hope you will find it convenient to see her.”

· · ·

MURRAY HEARD
, as did most Americans, of the
D-Day invasion of Europe by Allied forces via
radio broadcast the morning of June 6, 1944. This maneuver, code-named
Operation Overlord, was an amphibious invasion of the beaches at Normandy, France. The largest such operation in history, it involved more than 10,000 aircraft, 5,000 vessels including warships, and 150,000 Allied troops. The magnitude of the effort was breathtaking, and the casualties were grave. More than 200,000 Allied and German troops were killed or injured in the campaign.

That evening, Murray gathered with friends to hear the radio broadcast of FDR’s six-and-a-half-minute prayer for the troops. The text had been disseminated by news agencies in advance so that listeners could “
recite the words” as the president spoke. “
Almighty God,” he began, “our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.”

The faces of family, friends, and classmates flashed across Murray’s mind as the president acknowledged the loss of life and the grief that would inevitably follow: “Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom. And for us at home—fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters and brothers of brave men overseas—whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them—help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.”

“
So at last we have come to D-Day,” the first lady said in her
column the next day. She had been “waiting for” and “dreading” word of the invasion. Now that it had come, she was neither excited nor relieved, for D-Day marked the “beginning of a long, hard fight.” ER urged Americans on the home front to do their part, “no matter what these jobs may be.” Doing one’s job, she said, meant that employers and employees alike must avoid “unauthorized and unwarranted strikes” that might endanger “the boys over there” and the overall war effort.

Murray pronounced ER’s D-Day column “
eloquent.” Nevertheless, she believed that doing one’s job meant more than preserving harmonious
labor relations in the war industry. It meant fighting for
democracy and against racism at home and for freedom and against oppression abroad, as the
Pittsburgh Courier
, one of the most widely read black newspapers, had called for in its
Double V campaign.

21

“This Harvard Business Makes Me Bristle”

A
week after graduation, Murray received a packet from Franklin Roosevelt’s private secretary
Grace G. Tully. That packet contained a response from Harvard dean
George H. Chase to the president’s query about Murray’s application. “
The problem is comparatively simple,” Chase wrote to FDR. “Miss Murray would be very welcome as a graduate student in
Radcliffe College and I have asked
Mrs. Cronkhite, Dean of the Radcliffe Graduate School, to send her the necessary application blanks. Under arrangements recently made with Radcliffe College, Radcliffe degrees
are
really Harvard degrees.” While Chase’s explanation may have satisfied the president, Murray saw it as a diversion from the real issue: Radcliffe had no curriculum in law, and enrolling there would not allow her to earn the equivalent of a graduate law degree from Harvard.

Harvard’s rejection, the mounting casualties among friends—such as former WEP teacher
Neil Scheinman Russell, who died on the battlefield in Europe—and word that an agent from the
Federal Bureau of Investigation was asking questions about her on Howard University’s campus prompted a pensive letter from Murray. “
Dear Mr. Roosevelt,” she began, “Tomorrow is Father’s Day, and as I ponder over the sentiment of this day, I wish to send you greetings. My own father who died a tragic death would be pleased to have me do this, I think.” Murray thanked FDR for his “intercession” with Harvard president Conant and she asked for his understanding as well. “Most of my letters to you during the past six years have been caustic, critical and perhaps impertinent by turns. Perhaps you never even got them. But Mrs. Roosevelt did. Now, without
having reviewed that file of letters, I wish to apologize for those impertinent sections but not for the spirit in which they were written.”

Murray felt guilty about her
Harvard ambition in the wake of her friend’s death. “If Neil could come back from that grave in
Italy and speak to me,” she told FDR,

I believe he would say, “Pauli, don’t waste your time trying to gain prestige, which is about all Harvard would give you that you can’t get elsewhere; don’t keep butting your head against brick walls; but identify yourself with the future, the common people, the little people who need you, so they won’t let happen to our children what has happened to us. Harvard…does not recognize that in death there is no sex and that a man or woman’s soul is judged by what he did with his talents, not his accident of birth.”

Hoping, perhaps, that the president would intercede with the bureau, she lamented, “I’ve taken plenty of punishment for my ideals, and you and the FBI know it too.”

· · ·

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT WAS FOCUSED
on the Allies’ advance through Italy and
France and the deadly battle against the
Japanese in the Pacific when Murray notified Harvard that she intended to appeal the
“ruling that
women are not entitled to attend the School of Law at Harvard University.” She offered multiple reasons for her “
request” for reconsideration.

Some of her reasons had to do with “
personal factors,” such as her personality, which she described as a “ 
‘male slant’ ” on things; the
sex discrimination she faced as an aspiring attorney; the predominance of Harvard alumni among her professors at
Howard; and the time-honored practice of Howard sending its best students to Harvard Law for advanced study. Other reasons were rooted in such “
social factors” as the movement of women into nontraditional arenas, including law, and the determination of talented women to earn the coveted law degree from Harvard. If Harvard did not admit her, she cautioned school officials, it would stain the school’s
“
liberal” reputation and embolden, rather than discourage, prospective women applicants.

Among those to whom Murray distributed copies of her appeal were four Harvard men she held in high esteem: Franklin Roosevelt, William
Hastie, University of
Wisconsin Law School dean
Lloyd K. Garrison, and
Associate Supreme Court Justice
Felix Frankfurter. FDR was a symbolic father. Hastie was an academic mentor. Garrison, the great-grandson of abolitionist
William Lloyd Garrison, had met and befriended Murray at a Howard University
School of Law banquet, where he was the featured speaker. Frankfurter was a cofounder of the
American Civil Liberties Union, for which Murray would one day serve as a board member.

Murray’s classmates thought it futile to contest Harvard’s decision. Eleanor Roosevelt, by contrast, offered encouragement, and it was with her that Murray shared her feelings. “
I’m sorry, Mrs. Roosevelt but this Harvard business makes me bristle, fume and laugh by turns. I wish I could forget about it, but I guess there were times when the women suffragists wished the same thing a quarter of a century ago.”

Harvard’s administrators and FDR may have looked upon Murray’s appeal as unmerited or even ridiculous. ER, on the other hand, appreciated the young woman’s spunk. “
Dear Pauli,” the first lady wrote, “I loved your Harvard appeal.” That ER addressed her missive to “Pauli” instead of “Miss Murray” signaled a growing ease in the
friendship. It was precisely the kind of acceptance and endorsement Murray craved.

PART IV

STANDING UP TO LIFE’S CHALLENGES,
1944–45

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt pinning the Soldier’s Medal on Private Sam Morris (left), April 5, 1943. In February, he had rescued several people trapped in a burning packing plant in Seattle, Washington.
(Bettmann/CORBIS)

22

“You Wouldn’t Want to Put Fala in Here”

W
hile
Democratic Party leaders awaited word of
Franklin Roosevelt’s
campaign plans in the summer
of 1944, Eleanor Roosevelt was writing
columns and books, speaking to a wide array of groups, visiting wounded veterans, sponsoring relief projects, and raising funds for charities, such as the
Wiltwyck School for Boys, on whose board she served. No matter what her
schedule, she made time for
her grandchildren. On one occasion, as she was about to have tea with guests in the White House, she paused respectfully for a cortege led by “
a black dog, followed very solemnly by a five-year-old boy with a flag twice as big as himself. It was evidently meant to be a very solemn occasion,” she told readers, “so we all waited for the procession to pass.” Sometimes, she engaged the children in her work. One morning when she had to leave Hyde Park before her overnight guests awakened, she had a young grandson escort them to the president’s library and “
see them off at 10 o’clock to their train.”

Meanwhile, Pauli
Murray, who had been admitted “
with enthusiasm” by the
Boalt Hall of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, began her fourth
cross-country trip. She was ambivalent about leaving the East Coast, and it consoled her to have her sister Mildred as a traveling companion.
Mildred had taken a nursing position at the
Veterans Hospital in West
Los Angeles, where she would become one of the first African American nurses on the staff.

During the trip, they suffered one mishap after another. Mildred’s tiny white Chevrolet, stuffed with enough utensils and canned food to fill “
a full-sized trailer,” repeatedly broke down. Their decision to pick up two young white males headed to
Denver—one was a civil air patrolman; the other was trying to get to a military base before his brother shipped out—made the car even tighter. After driving for two days, they stopped in Hiawatha, Kansas, to rent two cabins and rest. When the woman checking them in realized that Pauli was African American—Mildred was fair-skinned enough to pass—she refused them lodging. After they got to Denver and dropped the men off, they were forced to stay there for four days because Mildred had lost her gas-rationing book and they had to secure a replacement. The sisters finally rolled into Los Angeles on July 8. It took them a week to find a place to live. Pauli planned to work and stay with Mildred until school started in the fall.

On her third day in Los Angeles, Murray sent ER a letter. Having “
just finished
This Is My Story
,” which covered ER’s life from
childhood to FDR’s gubernatorial campaign, Murray wrote, “Understand so much now why I have been drawn to you. My own mother whose memory I have idealized through the years (she died when I was three) was born one year later than you. And many of your comments on childhood sorrows and joys are familiar to me.” Like ER, Murray had lost her parents as a young girl and had been reared by elderly kin. Murray’s father,
William, and ER’s father, Elliott, were both bright, winsome men who suffered from illnesses for which they were institutionalized and whose lives
ended tragically. Murray’s grandfather
Robert was blind by the time she joined his household.
Nonetheless, he nurtured her intellect in much the same way that ER found inspiration in her aunt
Anna Roosevelt Cowles, who, despite curvature of the spine in her youth and deafness, and arthritis in adulthood, was one of the most confident people ER knew.