The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (57 page)

For support at important moments during the years it took to write this book, I thank Kizmet S. Adams, Joanne Allen, JoBeth Allen, Donna and Jack Alvermann, Maya Angelou, Patricia Arnold, Harriette Austin, Christina Baldwin, Deborah Bell, Lewis C. Bell Jr., Brenda Faye Bell-McAdams, Dawn Bennett-Alexander, Genie Smith Bernstein and Irwin Bernstein, Leanore and Randall Bramblett, Gene Brody, Gregory and Doretta Broughton, the Chattanooga, Tennessee, Howard High School Class of 1968, Pearl Cleage, Bronte Colbert, Evelyn Coleman, Bettye Collier-Thomas, Bettye Jean Craige, Margaret Cramer, Joyce Crawford, Dan Crawford and Van Shephard, Dac Crossley, Miriam DeCosta-Willis, Gina Dress, Terri Earl-Kulkovsky, Freddie Lee Fallins, Lucie Fultz, Marcia Ann Gillespie, Carl and Sara Glickman, Theodore Goetz, Doug Graf, Karen Hankins, Mike Healy, Wyler Hecht, Aileen Clarke Hernandez, Melody Higginbotham and her staff, bell hooks, Jane Penland Hoover, Pat King Hoveland, Sylvia Hutchinson, John Inscoe, David Earl Jackson, William Jackson, Patricia Kay Janes, Valerie Jean, Joel C. Jenkins, Juanita Johnson-Bailey and Marvin Bailey, Patricia Kalivoda, Monica Kucher and the staff at Good Hands Veterinary Hospital, Cheryl Legette, Patricia Lester, William Long Sr. and William Long Jr., Jacqueline Looney, Audre Lorde, Carol Jean Carter Lowery and Charles Lowery, Benjamin McAdams Sr., Sylvia McDowell, Donna McGinty, Pat McKenry, Angela Meltzer, Jessica Garris Miller, Brenda Mitchell-Powell, Diane Batts Morrow and John Morrow, Melissa A. Morse, Jim and Andrea Murdoch, Goldie Newsom, Ligaya and Onofre Paguio, Nell Irwin Painter, Margaret Ralston Payne, Robert W. Penland, Wayne Langston Perry, Kirk Philpot and Bernard Ferraro, Joseph and Elizabeth Pleck, Mary Lou Ponsell, Gleam Powell, Sharon J. Price, Paul B. Pruett, Kimberly Purnell, Regina M. Quick, John Shane Rayburn, Susan Reverby, Annice Ritter, Kate Rushin, Sapphire, Pat Schneider, Franklin Gregory Scott, Kirt Scott, Peter Shedd, Ann R. Silverman, Ronald Simpson, Janet Sims-Wood, Shelly Smith, Vivian Smith, Ana Maria Spagna, Maida Springer-Kemp, Robert E. Staples, Fred and Sharon Stephenson, Michelle Swagler, Mary Tatum, Crista Tinsley, Unity Athens Center for Spiritual Growth, Elvena Walker, Marian Walker, Charlotte Wallinga, Margaret Webber, Karen Weddle-West, Mark and Jan Wheeler, Dorothy Wilbanks, Anna J. Williams, and Patricia Underwood Williams.

This list of supporters would be incomplete without mention of my girls. Scarlett, the sweetest cocker spaniel in the world, died before I finished the book, and Pearl, my cunning rat terrier, joins me every morning in my writing
chair. They listened to me read aloud, heard my complaints, accompanied me on daily walks, and kept vigil when I worked through the night.

This book is dedicated to four people, three of whom have passed away. Louis Wilbanks Jr., my father and a World War II navy veteran, always believed that our country would eventually get it right. Patrick McKenry, my beloved friend and colleague of three decades, comforted me when I faltered and pushed me when I needed to move forward. Hilda A. Davis, one of the first black college deans of women and Pauli Murray’s contemporary, never stopped teaching me what it meant to be a friend.

Charles Vernon Underwood Jr., my husband, deserves a gold medal. Always at the ready, he untangled computer snafus, helped me locate and prepare images, checked every page multiple times, made sure I never wanted for a nutritious, home-cooked meal, and danced me across the finish line. He has made all the difference in my life. My love and deepest appreciation go to Charles.

NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES

INTRODUCTION

“You need to know”
: PM to Pat[ricia Bell-Scott], December 12, 1983, in author’s possession.

“dratted autobiography”
: Ibid. Murray completed the manuscript, and Casey Miller and Kate Swift finished the remaining revisions. On their contributions, see Elizabeth Isele, “Casey Miller and Kate Swift: Women Who Dared to Disturb the Lexicon,”
WILLA
3 (1994): 8–10, accessed August 8, 2012,
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/old-WILLA/fall94/h2-isele.html
.

“until late in 1984”
: PM to Pat[ricia Bell-Scott], December 12, 1983.

“veterans who knew”
: Joseph P. Lash,
Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship Based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s Private Papers
(New York: Norton, 1971), 523.

“How come you give”
: PM,
Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage
(New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 23.

And I believe
: The number of doctoral dissertations, master’s theses, books and book chapters, journal articles, and essays devoted to some aspect of Pauli Murray’s life and work has mushroomed since the 1990s. The Pauli Murray Project of the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Center maintains a representative list of published works and related projects at
http://paulimurrayproject.org
.

“friendship with Mrs. R.”
: PM to Skipper [Caroline Ware], August 19, 1971, PMP.

“fan”
: PM, interview by Thomas F. Soapes, February 3, 1978, FDRL.

“a credit to Mrs. Roosevelt’s”
: Maida Springer-Kemp, interview by author, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 15, 1995.

“The Quarrel”
: PM, “The Quarrel,” in
Dark Testament and Other Poems
(Norwalk, CT: Silvermine, 1970), 57.

“further along the road”
: Blanche Wiesen Cook,
Eleanor Roosevelt
, vol. 1,
1884–1933
(New York: Viking, 1992), 7.

“women’s caucus”
: PM to Dave and Mrs. ——, July 5, 1970, in author’s possession.

“Eleanor Roosevelt lighted”
: PM to Dave and Mrs. ——, July 5, 1970.

“is a handshake across time”
: Richard Holmes, “Reflections on Biography” (Leon Levy Biography Lecture, Graduate Center, City University of New York, September 23, 2014).

PRELUDE: CAMP TERA, 1933–35

“I like this place”
: “Camp Red Tape Irks President’s Wife: Disappointed on First Visit to Find Only 30 Jobless Women Living There,”
NYT
, June 19, 1933.

“I sing of Youth”
: PM, “Youth, 1933,” in
Dark Testament
, 51.

“We can not pass”
: ER, “Facing the Problems of Youth,”
National Parent-Teacher Magazine
29 (February 1935): 30.

Pauli Murray was sitting
: For Murray’s account of the Camp Tera experience, the events that led to her residency, and the first time she saw ER, see PM,
Song
, 94–97. This was not ER’s first visit to the camp, as Murray thought. On the camp’s opening, ER’s first visit, and residents’ reaction to her subsequent visits, see “17 Jobless Women Enter New Camp: Rest Is the Only Thing on the Schedule, Now as Centre on Lake Tiorati Opens,”
NYT
, June 11, 1933; “Mrs. Roosevelt Disappointed in Women’s Camp: Finds Only 30 Jobless at Bear Mountain Haven for 200, Looks for Remedy,”
NYHT
, June 19, 1933; “Camp Red Tape Irks President’s Wife,
NYT
; Thomas W. Patton, “ ‘What of Her?’: Eleanor Roosevelt and Camp Tera,”
New York History
87, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 228–47; and
TT
, August 11, 1933; January 21, 1934; March 2, 1934; June 15, 1934; and July 15, 1934, in author’s possession.

“slight figure”
: PM,
Song
, 79.

When Camp Tera opened
: William E. Leuchtenburg,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 19; Robert S. McElvaine,
The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941
(New York: Times Books, 1993), 75, 187–88.

“to put people to work”
: “Text of New President’s Address at Inauguration,”
WP
, March 5, 1933.

One of the earliest
: The Emergency Conservation Work Act, signed into law on March 31, 1933, gave birth to the CCC twenty-seven days after FDR took office. For a history of the CCC, see John A. Salmond,
The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933–1942: A New Deal Case Study
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1967).

It was the first time
: Robert Stone,
American Experience
, “Civilian Conservation Corps,” December 8, 2009 (Arlington, VA: Public Broadcasting Service Video, 2009), DVD.

By August 1935
: Louis Easterling, “More Social Value in CCC Than Any Other U.S. Department,”
Philadelphia AA
, September 19, 1936.

The majority lived
: On the experience of black CCC enrollees, see Charles Johnson, “The Army, the Negro and the Civilian Conservation Corps: 1933–42,”
Military Affairs
36, no. 3 (October 1972): 82–88; and John A. Salmond, “The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Negro,”
Journal of American History
52, no. 1 (June 1965): 75–88.

“They never believed”
: Stone, “Civilian Conservation Corps.”

The segregated and militaristic
: On ER’s opinions of the CCC and her advocacy for a women’s counterpart, see Allida M. Black,
Casting Her Own Shadow: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of a Postwar Liberalism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 31; Blanche Wiesen Cook,
Eleanor Roosevelt
, vol. 2,
1933–1938
(New York: Viking, 1999), 88–91; and Martha H. Swain,
Ellen S. Woodward: New Deal Advocate for Women
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 42–45.

The idea of women
: See Swain,
Ellen S. Woodward
, 42–45; Susan Waldver-Morgan, “Young Women and the New Deal Camps and Resident Centers, 1933–1943,” (PhD thesis, University of Indiana, 1982); Susan Ware,
Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 112. On the concern of Camp Tera administrators about women’s morality, see Harry Gersh, “She-She-She Camps: An Episode in New Deal History” (unpublished term paper, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, spring 1979), Schlesinger Library, 17–18. Of the cultural concerns about women’s camps, see Michele Mitchell, “A ‘Corrupting Influence’: Idleness and Sexuality During the Great Depression,” in
Interconnections: Gender and Race in American History
, ed. Carol Faulkner and Alison M. Parker (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2012), 205–6.