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The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice - Softcover

Bell-Scott, Patricia

 
9780679767299: The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0679767290 ISBN 13: 9780679767299
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NOMINEE • The riveting history of how Pauli Murray—a brilliant writer-turned-activist—and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt forged an enduring friendship that helped to alter the course of race and racism in America.

“A definitive biography of Murray, a trailblazing legal scholar and a tremendous influence on Mrs. Roosevelt.” —Essence

In 1938, the twenty-eight-year-old Pauli Murray wrote a letter to the President and First Lady, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, protesting racial segregation in the South. Eleanor wrote back. So began a friendship that would last for a quarter of a century, as Pauli became a lawyer, principal strategist in the fight to protect Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and a co-founder of the National Organization of Women, and Eleanor became a diplomat and first chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

PATRICIA BELL-SCOTT is professor emerita of women’s studies and human development and family science at the University of Georgia. Her previous books include Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women, Flat-Footed Truths: Telling Black Women’s Lives, and Double Stitch: Black Women Write About Mothers & Daughters, which won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize. She lives in Athens, Georgia, with her husband, Charles V. Underwood Jr.

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1

“It Is the Problem of My People”

The clatter of Pauli Murray’s old typewriter bounced off the walls of her one-room Harlem apartment on December 6, 1938. Working at breakneck speed, she stopped only to look over a line in her letter or take a drag from her ever-present cigarette. Although she was only five-foot-two and weighed 105 pounds, she hammered the keys with the focus of a prizefighter. She had been forced to move three times because neighbors found the noise intolerable.

The catalyst for Murray’s current agitation was Franklin Roosevelt’s speech at the University of North Carolina the day before. It was his first address since the 1938 midterm elections and the fourth visit to the university by an incumbent president. The reports of his isolation at his vacation home in Warm Springs, Georgia, and the arrangements for radio broadcasts to Europe and Latin America had sparked international interest in his speech.

Thousands lined the motorcade path to UNC in the drenching rain, holding handmade signs and flags, hoping to catch a glimpse of the fifty-six-year-old president in his open car. When it became apparent that there would be no break in the downpour, organizers moved the festivities from Kenan Stadium to the brand-new Woollen Gymnasium. There, in an over-capacity crowd of ten thousand, a man fainted from the swelter. Many people went to other campus buildings to listen to the broadcast. Countless numbers stood outside the gym in the rain. Before FDR spoke, the university band played “Hail to the Chief,” school officials awarded him an honorary doctor of laws degree, and an African American choir sang spirituals.

Under the glare of klieg lights, the warmth of his academic regalia, and the weight of his steel leg braces, the president made his way to the flag-draped platform. He paused often during his twenty-five-minute address for roaring applause, wiping his face with the handkerchief he slipped in and out of his pocket, gripping the lectern to maintain his balance. He praised the university for its “liberal teaching” and commitment to social progress. He declared his faith in youth and democracy. He urged Americans to embrace “the kind of change” necessary “to meet new social and economic needs.”

Having listened to the broadcast the day before, Murray underlined passages in the speech from the New York Times front-page story “Roosevelt Urges Nation to Continue Liberalism.” The “contradiction” between the president’s rhetoric and her experience of the South made her boil. She would never forget the day a bus driver told her to “relieve” herself in “an open field” because the public toilets were for whites only. Insulted, she rode in agony for two hours, not knowing if there would be toilet facilities for blacks at the next stop.

Murray wondered if it mattered to the president that the “liberal institution” that had just granted him an honorary doctorate, and of which he claimed to be a “proud and happy” alumnus, barred black students from its hallowed halls and confined those blacks who came to hear him to a segregated section. Did he understand the psychological wounds or the economic costs of segregation? And how could he rationally or morally associate a whites-only admissions policy with liberalism or social progress? Having applied to UNC’s graduate program in sociology a month before FDR’s visit, Murray aimed to see just how liberal the school was.

...

exacerbating murray’s frustration with the president was his previous condemnation of lynching as “a vile form of collective murder” and his recent silence during a thirty-day Senate filibuster of the Wagner–Van Nuys bill that would have made lynching a federal offense. After the bill died, FDR proposed that a standing committee of Congress or the attorney general investigate “lynchings and incidents of mob violence.”

The black press lashed out against his political maneuvering. The New York Amsterdam News condemned him for keeping “his tongue in his cheek!” The Chicago Defender called him “an artful dodger.” The Louisiana Weekly, predicting that blacks would abandon the Democratic Party, declared, “You’re too late, Mr. President, and what you say is NOTHING.”

Murray understood that FDR’s reticence on anti-lynching legislation was an attempt to placate conservative politicians from the South, where whites lynched blacks with impunity. Her introduction to politics had begun as a preschooler, reading newspaper headlines to her grandfather Robert Fitzgerald, a Union army veteran whose injury in the Civil War cost him his vision in his old age. Robert, originally from Pennsylvania, settled in North Carolina after the war to teach ex-slaves. He had also nurtured his granddaughter’s intellect and her love of African American literature and history. That this year marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation made the president’s inaction even more objectionable to Murray. Since 1863, more than three thousand blacks had been lynched, and at least seventy of these murders had taken place during FDR’s presidency.

Murray’s indignation was rooted in bone-chilling stories she had heard as a child of racial brutality and the Klansmen who circled her grandfather’s property nightly on horseback, threatening to shut down his school for blacks. Ever brave, Robert had kept “his musket loaded” and the school door open. Murray had her own stories, too.

When she was six years old and on her way to fetch water from a community well, she and a neighbor came upon a group of blacks gathered around the body of young John Henry Corniggins, sprawled near a patch of thorny shrubs. Murray saw “his feet first, the white soles sticking out of the grass and caked with mud, then his scratched brown legs.” His eyes were open. Blood seeped through a bullet hole in his shirt near his heart. John Henry lay motionless as large green flies wandered over his face and into his mouth. Nearby, a solitary “buzzard circled.” Murray raced home, trembling in a cold sweat. The word among blacks was that a white man had assumed John Henry was stealing watermelons and shot him. No evidence of theft was found near the boy’s body. No one was arrested for his murder.

Six years later, violence touched Murray’s family when a white guard at Maryland’s Hospital for the Negro Insane murdered her father. At the funeral, she could hardly believe that the “purple” bloated body in the gray casket was her once proud father. She was horrified by the sight of his mangled head, which had been “split open like a melon” during an autopsy “and sewed together loosely with jagged stitches crisscrossing the blood-clotted line of severance.”

...

the fight over anti-lynching legislation was but one of Franklin Roosevelt’s worries. His attempt to purge Congress of his enemies had failed, and a coalition of anti–New Deal Republicans and Democrats had emerged. Despite the continuing economic depression, important legislation remained deadlocked. Frightening developments loomed on the world stage, as well. Under Adolf Hitler, Germany’s aggression in Europe escalated with the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. During Kristallnacht, hundreds of synagogues were destroyed. Thousands of Jews were stripped of their citizenship, property, and business rights and sent to concentration camps.

As Murray pounded out her letter to the president, she recalled Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to Camp Tera. Murray had been...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0679767290
ISBN 13 
9780679767299
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
480
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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