The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (20 page)

Murray’s experience was similar to Clarke’s. Like many institutions of
its kind, the law school at Howard was a male bastion.
There were currently no
women on the faculty, although
Ollie M. Cooper, the registrar, who was an HU law school graduate, had taught a course between 1925 and 1930 without pay or recognition.
Murray was one of two women to enroll in the class of 1944, and the only woman to complete the first year. Often seen “
trudging alone by herself carrying a huge armful of books,” she stood out from her male peers and the stylish female undergraduates. She wore no makeup. She kept her hair short and unprocessed. Her clothes were drab and worn. She often wore pants, which school administrators deemed inappropriate attire for “
nice” young women.

Murray, who had been reared in a family that placed no restrictions on women and where women were expected to be self-reliant, had graduated from a women’s college and worked under women supervisors in the
WPA. She had little awareness of sex bias. But her consciousness was awakened the first week of her first semester when
Professor William Robert Ming Jr. told his class that “
he really didn’t know why women came to law school, but that since” they had, “the men would have to put up with” them. Drowned out by the louder, aggressive males, Murray seldom got the chance “
to recite” in class.

She was deeply hurt
when Ransom, whom she adored, told her she could not attend a “
smoker,” which was a gathering at his home for first-year male students sponsored by the campus chapter of a legal fraternity.
Murray could not fathom how Ransom could risk his life fighting for civil
rights in southern courtrooms yet host an event for students that excluded her. That he made light of women’s exclusion, when she approached him about the issue, moved her to think of civil rights as an issue that went beyond race and class.

In a letter to the fraternity’s president, Murray raised the question of equal opportunity for women. “
I have no right to quarrel with the policies of your fraternity, if the objective of the fraternity is purely social and has no interest outside of that field of relationships,” she wrote. “If, however, the objectives of the legal fraternity are professional in character, then I have a deep concern over the exclusion of women law students from your membership.” According to the
National Bar Association, there were only fifty-nine black
women attorneys in the United States. Given this small number, Murray said, it was ill-advised to use “
the same policies of exclusion” in membership “which are applied against us by the majority group.”

The fraternity refused to revise its membership policy. Murray responded by outperforming her peers in class. She had
“entered law
school preoccupied with the racial struggle and single-mindedly bent upon becoming a civil rights attorney.” But she would graduate “an unabashed feminist” and take on
sex discrimination—or
Jane Crow, as she called it—“as well.”

Pauline Redmond, circa 1934, worked for the Cook County Welfare Department and headed the Chicago Urban League Youth Activities Department before she came to Washington, D.C., to work for the federal government. Redmond’s empathy, activism, and training—she held a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Chicago and a master of social work from the University of Pittsburgh—was the foundation of her lifelong friendship with Pauli Murray.
(Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library)

Murray’s closest allies and confidantes were socially conscious
women on campus and in the community.
In addition to
Ware, Murray befriended
Ruth Powell, an undergraduate sociology major from Milton, Massachusetts, who was sitting in at segregated eateries by herself when they met. Murray also became close with Pauline Redmond, a social worker from Chicago and a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s who worked in the
National Youth Administration with Mary
McLeod Bethune.
Murray also reconnected with
Corienne Robinson Morrow, an old friend from New York,
who now worked in the Race Relations Division of the
Housing and Home Finance Agency.

Murray’s friends, her faculty mentors, a campus culture politicized by debate over war and civil
rights, and the influx of war veterans fed her activist impulse. In the spring of 1942, she and
Redmond coauthored a hard-hitting essay,
“Negro Youth’s Dilemma,” condemning racial discrimination in the military, the defense industry, and other government programs. Their piece appeared in
Threshold
, the
official publication of the U.S. committee of
International Student Service.

Eleanor Roosevelt was on the ISS executive board, and it was she and the Roosevelt administration that Murray and Redmond had in mind when they penned the closing lines: “
It is difficult for the Negro to locate the battlefield. Is it Java or Sikeston—Luzon or Alexander, Louisiana?” By comparing battle sites in Indonesia and the Philippines with Sikeston, Missouri, the scene of a
lynching, and Alexander, Louisiana, where twenty-eight black soldiers were beaten and shot, Murray and Redmond highlighted the hypocrisy in the nation’s fight for
democracy abroad and its undemocratic domestic policy.
To protect Redmond, who was a federal employee, from reprisal, they agreed that their provocative essay would carry only Murray’s name.

Malvina (“Tommy”) Thompson, circa 1941. The private secretary and principal conduit to Eleanor Roosevelt for thirty years, she was fiercely protective of the first lady. The access Thompson granted Murray demonstrated her interest in, and concern for, the young activist.
(Associated Press)

16

“Many Good Things Have Happened”

P
auli Murray’s participation in the
International
Student Assembly was a warm-up for her role as co-organizer of a student boycott campaign against a local
restaurant in the spring of 1943.
This campaign was set off by the arrest in January of three Howard University students. Sophomores
Ruth Powell,
Marianne Musgrave, and
Juanita Morrow entered a
United Cigar Store, ordered hot chocolate, and refused to leave without service. After the police came and directed management to serve the women, the staff overcharged them for their beverages. When the students refused to pay the extra charge, the police took them to jail, where they were searched and tossed into a cell already occupied by women inmates. No charges were filed, and after several
hours, the police released them to the custody of HU dean of women
Susie A. Elliott.

Word of the three students’ arrest and incarceration spread across the campus, releasing “
a torrent of resentment.” Because the administration encouraged them to work with “
established” groups rather than engage in “individual” protest, the women took their grievance to the
NAACP campus chapter. They also went looking for the woman law student said to be experienced in civil rights.

The day
Ruth Powell met Pauli Murray, Murray was walking jauntily to class, barely visible behind the stack of thick law books she carried. Her singular focus and her total disregard for the holes in her socks signaled to Powell that there was “
nothing superficial about Pauli in any way.” Because Murray could not find affordable housing off-campus, Dean Susie A. Elliott, who happened to be Murray’s cousin, allowed her to live in the
“powder room” on the first floor of
Sojourner Truth Hall, the women’s dormitory. In this space, which included a sink and a toilet, Murray set up a small bed, a bookcase, and a makeshift desk. After Powell,
Morrow, and
Musgrave discovered that Murray lived close by, they routinely took the passageway connecting their side of the dorm to Murray’s room on the lower level. No matter how early they arrived, Murray was
“sitting at her
typewriter halfway through some project, always open to discussion.” Powell, who “
made more trips than anybody,” observed that Murray “was an extremely sensitive person.” She had “
the heart of a poet, the mind of a high-powered attorney, and the soul of Saint Francis.” Their freewheeling dialogue, laced with strong cigarettes and stronger coffee, laid the groundwork for a boycott campaign against the
Little Palace Cafeteria.

Little Palace was situated in the center of the black community. Yet Mr.
Chaconas, its Greek immigrant owner, served only whites. The cafeteria’s strategic location and the stream of “
unsuspecting” Howard students who wandered in and were turned away made it a logical choice for the first demonstration. As chair of the
NAACP Campus Chapter Direct Action Committee, Powell took responsibility for recruiting students for the boycott. Murray served as the student legal adviser and liaison to the faculty.

On Saturday, April 17, 1943, nineteen students, twelve of whom were women, walked into the Little Palace in groups of threes and fours and requested service. Upon being denied, they took their trays to a table, sat down, and read or did their homework silently. The remaining students formed a picket line outside in the rain. The police came, but they made
no arrests since the protest was lawful. Forty-five minutes later, Chaconas closed the cafeteria. When he opened on Monday morning, the picketers returned. On Tuesday, he began serving blacks.

While the mainstream
press essentially ignored the boycott, Murray assumed that Eleanor Roosevelt had read about it in the black press and heard what school administrators thought about it from two of her friends—HU president
Mordecai Johnson and dean
Howard Thurman. Eager to share a student perspective on the demonstration and its aftermath, Murray forwarded her own lengthy account. “
Many good things have happened since I talked to you last August,” she wrote to ER.

Murray had not forgotten the concern for racial reconciliation the first lady had expressed after
Waller’s death. With that in mind, Murray and
Powell made sure that no students carried “Don’t Patronize” signs outside the restaurant.
Their placards had less confrontational slogans, such as “Our Boys, Our Bonds, Our Brothers Are Fighting for YOU! Why Can’t We Eat Here?,” “United We Win,” and “There’s No Segregation Law in Washington D.C.—What’s Your Story, Little Palace?”

Having “
induced” the owner of Little Palace “to change his policy from ‘white only’ to all races,” Murray and the students were “now pursuing a policy of reconciliation and cooperation.” Chaconas had lost one-third of his white patrons, and the students were trying “
to help him maintain his trade,” Murray reported.

The boycott also opened the door to new relationships with white college students in the district. Howard students had invited
American University students to a chocolate ice cream hour and a “
discussion on Inter- and Intra-racial Relationships.” In return, AU students hosted a
Student Christian Fellowship hour and tea for HU students. On Easter Sunday, a week after the boycott, the HU and AU choirs gave a joint concert at the
National Archives. The all-white AU choir performed despite opposition from some of its members and the school’s board of trustees. “
It was wonderful, Mrs. Roosevelt,” Murray boasted. “It was real
democracy in action.”

Murray and her faculty advisers recognized the need for student leadership training, and they set about planning a one-day institute “
to discuss techniques of organization, of securing and using factual information, of working with community organizations, of lobbying, methods of creative publicity, and analysis of various techniques of pressure.” Murray invited ER,
Caroline Ware,
Anna Arnold Hedgeman,
Ted Poston,
Frank S. Horne (the race relations adviser in the Housing and Home Finance Agency), and
Lillian Smith, the white liberal activist and writer who had
just published an essay of Murray’s in the journal
South Today
and who would become a friend and mentor.

Activism stirred Murray’s creative juices. Along with news clippings about the boycott, she sent ER the essay
“An Alternative Weapon,” which she’d coauthored with
Henry Babcock. Babcock was a conscientious objector and, like Murray, a member of the
Fellowship of Reconciliation. Their essay was a passionate call for “
full and equal opportunity…and justice for all—particularly sharecroppers, domestic workers, migratory workers, Negroes, Jews, Orientals, and other neglected groups.”