The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (35 page)

On December 10, 1948, in
Paris, after the
assembly had adopted the
Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, for which she had so diligently labored, ER had hosted a champagne reception for a small circle of colleagues. Later, as she was about to exit the
Palais des Chaillot, she gave in to unbridled joy. ER “
ran, gathered momentum, and then slid down” the hall’s empty, black marble floor, “her arms outstretched in triumph.” It was so much fun that ER “did it again,” she wrote to her niece and namesake
Eleanor Roosevelt II.

In addition to losing her U.N. post, ER lost her incomparable assistant, collaborator, and confidante of thirty years.
Malvina Thompson died of a brain hemorrhage on April 12, 1953. She was sixty-one. Her death coincided with the eighth anniversary of
Franklin Roosevelt’s death from the same illness. ER had attended a memorial ceremony at
FDR’s grave site earlier and arrived at Tommy’s bedside just before she passed. “
Her standards were high for me, as well as for herself,” ER said of her beloved friend in “My Day.” To Murray, she wrote, “
I will miss her terribly and I know you will as you were very fond of her.”

Murray was indeed fond of Tommy and had frequently praised her in letters to ER. Tommy had faithfully routed Murray’s materials to ER,
scheduled their social visits, and been present at most of their gatherings. To be sure, the friendship between Pauli and Eleanor could not have flourished without Tommy’s supportive hand.

Left to right: attorneys George E. C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James M. Nabrit on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court after the NAACP’s historic victory in the
Brown
case, Washington, D.C., May 17, 1954. “For those of us who are restrained Episcopalians,” Pauli Murray wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, “this decision has had the effect of a good old time ‘conversion,’ with shouting and singing.”
(Associated Press)

36

“I Know How Much This Decision Means to You”

P
auli Murray spent the first half of 1954 tracing her maternal
ancestors, the
Fitzgeralds, through census, tax, and property records from
Chester County, Pennsylvania, to
Orange County, North Carolina. On May 17, she was at the typewriter mulling over
chapter 10
of her
memoir when Aunt Sallie burst into the room with news of
a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court had ruled unanimously in the case of
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
that racial segregation of the public schools violated the
Equal Protection Clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment.
NAACP chief counsel
Thurgood Marshall had represented the plaintiffs.

Murray was ecstatic. The
Brown
decision confirmed what she had known all along—that black segregated schools were inherently unequal to white schools. “
I think I can now understand for the first time how my great-grandfather felt when he, a former
slave, read the
Emancipation Proclamation,” she said in a letter to the editor published in the
New York Times
. “
I could not let the event of the United States Supreme Court decision grow colder without making some personal contact with you,” she wrote jubilantly to ER. “
I know how much this decision means to you, how it is an individual as well as a national triumph, and how much you have done to bring it about.… I’m writing a book called
Proud Shoes
which
Harper and Bros. will publish if I ever finish it. Another Supreme Court decision like May 17th and I’ll never finish it. I’ll be too happy! I think, however, you’re going to like it.”

Murray’s happiness was sweetened by her connection to several people involved in the
Brown
case. She knew Chief Justice
Earl Warren from her days in
California, when she was acting deputy attorney
general and he was governor. She had known Marshall since the 1930s, when she’d sought his help in challenging the
University of North Carolina’s whites-only admissions policy. The team of lawyers who helped Marshall shape the
Brown
brief included
George E. C. Hayes and
Spottswood W. Robinson III, with whom Murray had studied at
Howard University School of Law.

She was astonished to learn later from Robinson that the NAACP defense team had used an essay she wrote in
Leon Ransom’s
civil rights seminar as background for the case. In that essay,
“Should the Civil Rights Cases and
Plessy v. Ferguson
Be Overruled?,” Murray had argued that segregated schooling placed black children
“in an inferior
social and legal position.” Finding “
no legal precedents to rely on,” she had drawn on the work of social scientists to demonstrate that segregation did “
violence to the personality of the individual affected whether he is white or black.”

Representative of this kind of work was the research of
Mamie Phipps Clark and
Kenneth B. Clark, who began their research on discrimination and children’s identity
development as graduate students at Howard in the psychology department.
Their experiments with black and white
dolls, which demonstrated
black children’s preference for white skin, had grown out of Mamie’s 1939 master’s
thesis, “The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children.” The Clarks made an impression on Chief Justice
Earl Warren, who said in the court’s opinion, “
To separate them [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

The significance of the moment prompted Murray to propose that the
NAACP award the
Spingarn Medal to Eleanor Roosevelt and
Lillian Smith for paving the way for the
Brown
decision. But to do so would require the association’s board to open the competition, presently reserved for blacks, to whites. Changing the policy was precisely what Murray asked the board to do. To deny the award to these women on racial grounds was “
rubbish,” she protested. ER and Smith had stood firm in the face of criticism about their
friendships with African Americans, their support of
civil rights, and their uncompromising writings. “
If legalities must be observed,” Murray told ER, “then any one of us would be willing to donate a drop a blood (Smile).… Not that you need a Spingarn,” she added, “but it would do our souls good to give it to you.”

· · ·

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT WAS APPEARING
on the
Tex and Jinx
television talk show the day the Supreme Court announced the
Brown
opinion. She was “
delighted” that the ruling “wiped out segregation in the schools.” She was especially pleased that the decision was unanimous, for this made it hard for segregated school districts to find hope in a dissenting opinion. Because the ruling removed “
one of the arguments offered by totalitarian states against democratic states,” ER believed the
Brown
ruling strengthened the United States’ standing in the world community. On the question of
interracial marriage, that hot-button issue that so inflamed segregationists, she said, “
One can no longer lay down rules as to what individuals will do in any area of their lives in a world that is changing as fast as ours is changing today.”

ER loved Murray’s reaction to the
Brown
decision so much that she shared it in “My Day.” “
I have been thinking more and more of how some of my friends, to whom the Supreme Court decision on segregation was a matter of great personal concern, are feeling now that it is over,”
she wrote. “I would like, therefore, to give you a little quotation from a letter sent me by a brilliant young
Negro woman lawyer. She tells me she is writing a book which will be published, if she ever finishes it, and adds, ‘Another Supreme Court decision like May 17 and I will never finish it. I will be too happy!’ ”

Writer Langston Hughes (front right) appears with his attorney, Frank D. Reeves (front left), before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Washington, D.C., March 1953. The questions raised, directly and by innuendo, frightened Pauli Murray.
(Associated Press)

37

“I Cannot Live with Fear”

P
auli Murray’s elation over the
Brown
decision was dampened by the ongoing hearings of the
Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Joseph
McCarthy, and by the growing number of
State Department and military personnel, intellectuals, artists, and labor, civil rights, and peace activists denied work because of alleged ties to subversive groups. Hundreds of entertainers and artists had been suspended, fired, or
blacklisted.
Eventually, 214 witnesses would be summoned to testify in public before McCarthy’s subcommittee. Some 395 would be questioned in closed session. Among those prominent figures interrogated were cartoonist
Herbert Block, Pulitzer Prize–winning composer
Aaron Copland, writers
Dashiell Hammett and
Lillian Hellman, and artist
Rockwell Kent. The writer Langston
Hughes was summoned, too.

Hughes, who testified in closed testimony on March 24, 1953, and in public two days later, retained Murray’s friend
Lloyd Garrison and
NAACP attorney Frank D. Reeves as his counsel. The purpose of the hearing, Senator
Everett Dirksen
stated at the outset, was to determine if books by certain authors, purchased with government funds and placed in libraries abroad by the State Department and the
International Information Administration, promoted American culture and values. While subcommittee members never clarified for
Hughes what they considered an acceptable representation of American culture, they deemed his writings un-American, pro-Communist, and anti-Christian.

Roy Cohn, chief counsel for the subcommittee, alternated in a closed session between asking Hughes if he was or had ever been a Communist and calling him an “
undeviating follower of the Communist party.” Cohn hounded Hughes about the meaning of two poems,
“
Goodbye Christ” and
“Put Another ‘S’ in the USA,” published twenty years earlier. Cohn grilled Hughes about his affiliation with the
League of American Writers and about the trip he took with twenty-two black artists and intellectuals to the Soviet Union in 1932 for a film project on African American life.

Hughes denied in open and closed sessions that he was a Communist. He did admit that communism had seemed promising when he was a young man frustrated by segregation, that some of his early writings had appeared in Communist periodicals, and that he had been associated with the
International Labor Defense campaign to free the
Scottsboro Boys, which had been headed by
William L. Patterson, a Communist. Now that Hughes was “
older” and could “see social progress accelerating itself more rapidly” in the recent Supreme Court decisions and the work of the
Fair Employment Practices Committee, communism had no appeal for him.

Hughes confirmed that he had written the poems the subcommittee cited, but he rejected Cohn’s interpretation of certain passages. “
A portion of a poem,” said Hughes, like “a bar of music out of context[,] does not give you the idea of the whole thing.” Because the poems Cohn singled out were misconstrued and “
not very representative” of his writings, Hughes said, he agreed that they should not be in American libraries abroad.

Cohn, a homosexual who would die of AIDS thirty-three years later, badgered some witnesses into admitting that they were homosexual and demanded that they name others. Cohn did not explicitly ask Hughes about his sexuality; however, he was asked about his relationship status. This indirect question about the personal life of the fifty-one-year-old, never-married writer created an aura of suspicion.

Murray admired Hughes. Like him, she had migrated to
New York
City in the 1920s and immersed herself in a social milieu that fueled her activism and
writing. They were friendly, and their paths had crossed several times.
The
Harlem Suitcase Theatre, which Hughes had cofounded with
Louise Thompson, the wife of
William Patterson, gave a benefit performance for the
Negro People’s Committee for
Spanish Refugees when Murray was acting secretary. She had contributed a
short story and poem to
Nancy Cunard’s
Negro
anthology and
“protest
poetry” to a special issue of the journal
Voices
. Hughes played an influential role in both projects. Murray had also worked with groups that had Communists, former Communists, and socialists as members.
She had even considered joining Hughes and the group of blacks who went to the Soviet Union. Only lack of funds and the need to finish college had stopped her from going.