The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (44 page)

50

“Discrimination Does Something Intangible and Harmful”

W
hile Pauli Murray was earning her stripes in corporate law,
Morris Milgram, her old friend from the
Workers Defense League, was starting a
new career as a housing developer.
His recent projects, the
Concord Park and
Greenbelt Knoll housing subdivisions near
Philadelphia, were the first privately funded and racially integrated developments for middle-class families in the nation.

Murray’s friendship with Milgram and one of his investors, her former
Howard University School of Law professor William
Hastie, gave her a personal connection to the venture.
In fact, Milgram credited his work with Murray on the
Odell Waller campaign and her epic
poem
“Dark
Testament,” which he had read in full to audiences around the country at least fifty times, as the inspiration for his decision to devote his life to building integrated housing. The cycle of poverty that entrapped the Wallers and Davises and the legacy of
slavery Murray chronicled in her poem convinced Milgram that housing segregation played a central role in the creation and maintenance of a racial caste system in the United States.

After Murray sent Eleanor Roosevelt an
Ebony
magazine feature about integrated housing that mentioned Milgram’s enterprise, ER promised to visit Concord Park and Greenbelt Knoll “
sometime soon.” On July 3, 1958, she met with Milgram and Murray at her
New York City apartment. There, over lunch, Milgram laid out an ambitious plan for a new project,
Modern Community Developers, Inc.
MCD was a for-profit corporation whose goal was to provide technical, practical, and, where possible, financial assistance to developers seeking to build integrated housing around the country.

ER was so taken by Milgram’s passion, intelligence, and winning personality that she agreed to join the MCD board and to mention the project in her column. She also made a rare request of her own. A young friend of hers was having trouble finding an apartment, and she asked Milgram and Murray if they could help. ER was so incensed about her friend’s situation that she shared her feelings with readers.

“
I am sure that every New Yorker was shocked the other day to read that
Harry Belafonte and his charming wife and baby were finding it practically impossible to get an apartment in New York City except in what might be considered segregated areas or in a hotel,” she wrote. “I have long been saying that in the North we have only one step to take to meet the
Supreme Court order of non-segregation in schools, and that is non-segregation in housing. In New York State we have the laws necessary to achieve non-segregated housing if we saw that they were diligently respected.”

Belafonte was a native New Yorker and a consummate entertainer whose popularity spanned the globe.
ER had seen him mesmerize audiences from off-Broadway theater houses to the American pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. That landlords in his hometown turned him away because of his race was unconscionable to her.

“
I can think of nothing I would enjoy more than having Mr. and Mrs. Belafonte as my neighbors,” she continued. “I hope they will find a home shortly where they and their enchanting little boy can grow up without feeling the evils of the segregation pattern. Discrimination does
something intangible and harmful to the souls of both white and colored people.”

Belafonte’s case was proof positive that housing discrimination transcended regional and class boundaries.
Although he would eventually purchase the thirteen-story building on West End Avenue where he had been denied an apartment, the impact of his ordeal worried ER so deeply that she invited him and his family to move into her apartment. Belafonte “
thanked her profusely” and declined. To accept this offer, he explained, would have meant “
walking away from a battle” he had to face.

ER profiled
Milgram in her
column, citing his successful track record as a developer of integrated housing projects in
Philadelphia. She highlighted the importance of MCD, which would allow him to share his expertise and foster desegregated housing at a national level. Like Milgram, who practiced what he preached by moving into one of his housing developments, ER was ready to move into an integrated complex. “
Now I am waiting to have someone announce the construction of apartment houses here in New York City on an open occupancy basis,” she wrote. “I have tried to find one in the area in which I would like to live, but so far have been unsuccessful. I hope before long to hear of such a development.”

Housing discrimination was on ER’s mind the night she saw
A Raisin in the Sun
,
Lorraine Hansberry’s prize-winning play about an African American family’s struggle to move into an all-white neighborhood. ER had already read the script, and the production touched her. “
This play has been praised by all the critics so it does not need my praise to add to its popularity,” she opined in her column. “But I would like to thank both the author and
Mr. Poitier for an evening that had real meaning, and I hope meaning that will sink into the conscience of America.”

51

“There Are Times When a Legal Brief Is Inadequate”

B
etween the fall of 1958 and the summer of 1959,
Pauli Murray learned about two cases that persuaded her that corporate law was not her calling.
The first, which was detailed in a story
Ted Poston broke in the
New York Post
, was about two black boys in
Monroe,
North Carolina. Nine-year-old
James Hanover Thompson and seven-year-old David “Fuzzy”
Ezzelle Simpson were charged with sexual assault and sentenced indefinitely to the
Morrison Training School for Negro Delinquent Boys for playing a kissing game with seven-year-old
Sissy Marcus. Marcus was white. Her father vowed to kill the boys and
lynch their parents. The boys were beaten and threatened with castration while incarcerated.

The lengthy sentence and the fact that the authorities denied the boys advice of counsel and visitation by their mothers for six days triggered a flood of telegrams and letters from around the world. Only after national press coverage, public outrage, and the efforts of
Robert Williams, president of the Monroe chapter of the
NAACP, and
Conrad Lynn, a
civil rights attorney from New York, were the children released. Lynn, who asked Eleanor Roosevelt to help, later recalled that she had cried when he told her about the children. She then called
Eisenhower and insisted that he “
put a stop to the persecution.” The president, in turn, called North Carolina governor
Luther Hodges, and the boys, who had served three months, were released to their mothers.

The second incident took place in
Poplarville,
Mississippi, where a gang of masked, white-gloved men abducted
Mack Charles Parker, a twenty-three-year-old black truck driver, from jail and murdered him.
Parker was awaiting trial for the kidnapping and rape of a pregnant white woman. Although his accuser had picked him out of a lineup, she was not certain that his vehicle was the one used in the kidnapping, and she wavered on whether Parker looked or sounded like her attacker. Parker went to his death claiming his innocence. Nine days after his abduction, his battered and bullet-ridden body surfaced in the Pearl River near Bogalusa, Louisiana.

Parker’s murder came on the heels of the tenth anniversary of the
Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. “
What made the recent miscarriage of justice in a Mississippi case particularly sad,” said ER, was that Parker “was kidnapped from his jail cell and lost his life without even going to trial.”
The chance of a fair trial, had Parker lived, was doubtful. There were men in the community intent on meting out their own punishment, and the sixty-three-year-old trial judge,
Sebe Dale, was a white supremacist. Though the FBI identified several white suspects in an in-depth report to the local authorities, no one was indicted for the murder.

The Parker lynching and Murray’s inability to help the North Carolina boys drew her into a state of despair. It had been seventeen years since
Odell Waller’s execution, and the judicial system was still failing African Americans. Furthermore, the financial security and prestige of being a corporate attorney brought her little personal gratification. She craved a creative outlet.

Murray retreated as often as she could to The
MacDowell Colony. There, she channeled her emotions into a series of prayerful
poems.
“For Mack C. Parker” was a meditation on “
The cornered and trapped, / The bludgeoned and crushed, / The hideously slain” victim of lynching.
“Collect for Poplarville” was an entreaty for “
that most difficult of tasks— / to pray for them, / to follow, not burn, thy cross!” Murray revised and sent “
Dark Testament,” her homage to
Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic poem
John Brown’s Body
, to Eleanor Roosevelt, along with
“Psalm of Deliverance,” a poem she dedicated to the black schoolchildren of the South. ER found Murray’s poems “
strong and stirring and disquieting, as they should be.”

· · ·

BY THE SPRING OF 1959
, Murray was beginning to believe that practicing law put her in conflict with her true calling as a poet. “
There are times when a legal brief is inadequate to make the point,” she wrote to ER. As a lawyer, Murray was bound by the facts, but as a poet, her job
was to respect the truth. And this required that she write about
“the ‘shape of things to come’ long before people…are able to comprehend them,” as her role models
Countee Cullen and
Benét had done.

While Murray pondered her options, she continued to work at the firm, write poetry, and contribute wherever she could to
civil rights.
She reviewed and recommended changes in a book contract for
Martin Luther King. She monitored developments with the
Bateses in Arkansas. She followed civil rights legislation at the federal and state levels, and she reached out to one of the most influential men in government.

Murray had watched
Senate majority leader Lyndon Baines
Johnson engineer passage of the 1957 civil rights bill. This bill, the first such legislation in eighty-two years, authorized the creation of a civil rights division in the U.S. Department of
Justice and a commission on civil rights with investigatory power. The bill made
voting rights violations a federal offense and empowered the U.S. attorney general to prosecute voting rights abuses.

Johnson was now considering two new civil rights proposals. One, his own bill, called for a federal conciliation commission that would be an advisory body without enforcement power on school desegregation. The other measure, advanced by Florida governor
Thomas LeRoy Collins, would establish administrative commissions within the states to plan and oversee desegregation.

Murray favored the Collins proposal, but she forwarded a critical summary of both bills to ER. She also wrote Majority Leader Johnson a pointed letter, urging him to seize the moment. “
If you would use your genius for drafting a
Wagner-type ‘charter of civil rights’ as was done in the Wagner Labor Relations Act, you would go down into history and probably up into wherever you want to go. But piecemeal legislation won’t do it,” she warned. “You’ve got to approach fundamental solutions. The time is ripe and you are at the helm of the Senate. What are you going to do about it?”

Eleanor Roosevelt (second from left), the camel Duchess, granddaughter Nina (third from right), and unidentified Israeli hosts in the camel market, Beersheba, Israel, 1959. It amused ER that people at home seemed more curious about Duchess than other aspects of the trip.
(Courtesy of Werner M. Loval)

52

“That Granddaughter Must Be a Chip off the Venerable Block”

E
leanor
Roosevelt and her sixteen-year-old granddaughter,
Nina Roosevelt, took a month-long
trip abroad in March 1959. They stopped in Italy,
Iran, Israel, France, and England, visiting historic sites and humanitarian projects. They met socially with foreign leaders and diplomats. They spent time in Iran with ER’s daughter, Anna, and her husband,
James A. Halsted, both of whom were working at the newly established
Pahlavi University Medical School, in Shiraz.

Nina, the eldest daughter of ER’s youngest son,
John, and Anne Lindsay Clark, was a shy, serious girl.
An avid reader like her grandmother, Nina buried her head during the long flight to Rome in
The Ugly American
,
a popular novel about American arrogance in Southeast Asia by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer.
ER’s reading material included
Michel Del Castillo’s novel
Child of Our Time
, which was based on the author’s internment in a Nazi concentration camp.

ER had never traveled alone with one of her granddaughters, and she was eager to introduce Nina to her favorite places. In
Rome, they lingered at the Pantheon. At St. Peter’s Basilica, they admired
Michelangelo’s
Pietà
. In Iran, they walked through the tombs of ancient Persian kings and dined with the shah in the Marble Palace. In
Israel, they saw the
Dead Sea Scrolls, attended Easter rites in Jerusalem, and admired “
sapphire blue” fish while riding a glass-bottomed boat in the Red Sea.