The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (41 page)

Against the historical backdrop of
slavery and
Reconstruction, Murray cast multidimensional portraits of her great-grandfather
Thomas Fitzgerald, a manumitted mulatto from Pennsylvania, and his wife, Sarah, a “
blue-eyed, black-haired” white woman from Delaware whose parents never forgave her for running away to marry a black man. Their son Robert, a
Civil War veteran who went to the South to teach ex-slaves,
was Murray’s grandfather. Robert and his wife,
Cornelia Smith, the daughter of a white North Carolina lawyer and a part-Cherokee slave, became the central characters in
Proud Shoes
.

Having grown up in her grandparents’ home listening to family legends, Murray had conceived the book as a story for her nieces and nephews. Over time, her motivation for the book expanded. What began as the history of one black family grew to include an account of the Civil War and Reconstruction in a North Carolina community. What started out as a conventional work of nonfiction developed into a novelistic narrative. Writing it had soothed the wounds of suspicion
Cornell officials and
FBI surveillance had raised about Murray’s “
past associations” and
loyalty.

Proud Shoes
was technically and emotionally the most difficult writing Murray had ever done. It required her to portray her ancestors—slave, free black, and white—with their accomplishments, disappointments, and contradictions in full view. To do this meant broaching the provocative issues of racial
passing, the color-caste system among blacks, the
accepted rape of black women by white men, and voluntary interracial liaisons between black men and white women. It also demonstrated that a family heritage of racial pride and achievement, rather than Communist subversion, had inspired her intellectual fervor and social activism.
Murray’s personal identification with her characters was so complete that for months after visiting the ancestral home place, she unintentionally substituted 1854 for 1954 in her correspondence.

On October 17, 1956,
Harper & Brothers released
Proud Shoes
. It was a 276-page
book whose tan dust jacket carried handsome pictures of Murray and her grandparents. In addition to a blurb from
Lillian Smith, the cover bore an endorsement from the black writer and intellectual
J. Saunders Redding: “
What a story! It is history and it is biography, and neither history nor biography is sacrificed to the drama which is itself superb.”

For Murray, the joy of holding the published memoir in her hand was second only to the reception it received. A telegram from Lillian Smith made her heart sing. “
You have done a beautiful job on the book,” Smith wrote. “There is distinguished writing in it and it is at times deeply moving and at other times delightfully entertaining. A truly impressive documentary. I am proud of you and happy.” The
San Francisco Chronicle
applauded Murray’s “
effective use of fictional techniques,” noting that “many sections do indeed read practically like a novel.” The
Akron Beacon Journal
said the memoir was history “
told with an uncanny newness.” The
New York Post
dubbed it “a
Civil War story as moving as
Gone with the Wind
or
Andersonville
.” The
New York Public Library placed
Proud Shoes
on the
“Books to Remember” list, and the
New York Herald Tribune
named it one of the
“
Outstanding Books of 1956.” For several months, the memoir sold “
100 copies per week.”

ER introduced Murray’s memoir to her readers as a work “
anyone interested in the problem of civil rights in this country will find stimulating and enlightening. It is written with a sensitive feeling for the past as well as the present.” Of the characters’ tenacity, ER noted, “This is an American story about American people. The roots of the family lay in slavery and then came the long hard years of freedom which were never really freedom. Yet there was a tremendous pride handed down from the day when the children, who were almost white, knew they belonged, as blood relatives of the family, in the big plantation house and that they were free.”

Murray’s description of the “
intangibles” her grandparents gave her so touched ER that she excerpted a passage in “My Day”:

They had little of the world’s goods and less of its recognition, but they had forged enduring values for themselves which they tried to pass on to me.

I would have need of these resources when I left the rugged security of Grandfather’s house and found myself in the maze of terrifying forces which I could neither understand nor cope with. While my folks could not shield me from the impact of these forces, with their own courage and strength they could teach me to withstand them.

Murray was bowled over by ER’s praise. “
Your review was perfect—you caught the feeling I had in mind when I wrote the book,” she wrote back to ER, “and your quote was my favorite passage!”

The string of positive reviews helped blunt the criticism of Jane Speights, who wrote in the Mississippi
Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News
, “
The cause for miscegenation is herewith presented by a writer who has been actively associated with the cause of
civil rights.… With this background, it is perhaps too much to expect a fair appraisal of her family history from the author.” Speights coupled the innuendo about Murray’s motives with a rebuke of her sources and methodology: “Built on a thin framework of Robert’s reminiscences to his small granddaughter, the book is fleshed out with the most inaccurate generalities.” In view of these alleged weaknesses, Speights concluded, “a book such as this can serve no useful purpose.”

Frank Hains, literary editor for the newspaper, sent Murray’s publisher a letter vouching for Speights’s “
objectivity.” She was “an intelligent and perceptive woman” from Ohio, he insisted, who “had done reviews for Columbus newspapers before coming South.” Murray forwarded his letter and the review to ER. “
It’s amazing,” Murray remarked, “how differently two people can react to the same printed word.”

Left to right: Ray N. Moore, head, Stanford L. Warren Library; Pauli Murray; John Hervey Wheeler, president, Farmers and Mechanics Bank and civil rights activist; and Lyda Moore Merrick, founder,
Negro Braille Magazine
, in Durham, North Carolina, circa 1956. Murray was the featured author at the library’s American Heritage Series.
(North Carolina Collection, Durham County Library)

46

“I Never Cease to Marvel at the Greatness of Your Humanity”

I
n the fall of 1956, Pauli Murray got a “
professional opportunity” she had thought she would never have.
Lloyd Garrison recommended her for a position in the litigation department of his law firm.
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison was a venerable practice whose character was rooted in the experience of its cofounders.
John F. Wharton, a Christian, and
Louis S. Weiss, a Jew, had been classmates at
Columbia Law School. When no law firm would hire them on the same staff, they set up a practice together in 1923, defying the custom of religious segregation.

Their firm, from its inception through its succeeding mergers, welcomed attorneys like
Walter Pollak, who took on controversial clients, such as the nine
black boys falsely accused of raping two white
women in
Scottsboro, Alabama. It was the first prominent white practice to hire an African American attorney,
William T. Coleman, in 1949, and the first to name a woman partner,
Carolyn Agger, in the early 1950s. It set another example by hiring Murray as an associate attorney.

Ten years earlier, no white or black firm in
New York City would hire a black woman. It mattered not that Murray held law degrees from
Howard University and the University of
California, Berkeley, or that she was the first African American appointed to the post of deputy attorney general for the state of California. Therefore, her new job called for a celebration. In the absence of the customary meal
Aunts Pauline and Sallie would have prepared, Murray marked the occasion by savoring a note of congratulations from Eleanor Roosevelt that included an invitation to tea.

· · ·

A WEEK BEFORE HER VISIT
with ER, Murray attended a
family reunion in
Baltimore, where her adolescent niece
Rosita mentioned that she wanted to meet Eleanor Roosevelt. “
It’s too bad you won’t be in New York next Saturday,” Murray chuckled, “since I am having tea with Mrs. R.” Murray gave no further thought to the matter until the high schooler called at a quarter past six the following Friday morning and announced, “
Aunt Pauli, Daddy sent me the money and I have bought a new dress for the occasion. Would you meet me at 7:51? I’m taking the Congressional out this afternoon.”

Murray promptly got permission to bring her spunky niece, and they arrived at
ER’s East Sixty-second Street apartment on the afternoon of December 1,
1956.
Seated around the living room in rapt conversation with ER were Israeli minister of foreign affairs
Golda Meir;
Justine Wise Polier, a human rights activist and the first woman judge in New York City; and several Protestant leaders. ER paused long enough to introduce Pauli and Rosita, and then she returned to the discussion, which focused on the
Suez crisis and the treatment of
Jews in Egypt.

Because this powerhouse gathering so mesmerized Rosita, it shocked her when ER began “
emptying the ashtrays, putting back the chairs” after the dignitaries left. To see the former first lady feed “
bits of cookies” to her Scottish terrier
Mr. Duffy struck the teenager as odd. Rosita’s “
eyes popped even wider” as she watched the most admired woman in the world “
calmly munching nuts from a dish” and “in deep conversation about the fate of aid to education, the
NAACP, [Adam Clayton] Powell, the Negro vote, etc.” with her aunt Pauli.

“
I never cease to marvel at the greatness of your humanity,” Murray wrote to ER after the visit. “
I shall never forget the picture of you sitting—in a moment of respite from world problems—dutifully writing
nine
autographs for a fourteen-year-old!” When asked what she planned to do with her bounty, Rosita had said, “
One for my billfold; one for my scrapbook; one for my boy friend; one for my best girl friend; and one for my sister. I’ll save the other four for special events.”

Murray always left visits with ER inspired, but this moment was special, she explained. “
By contact with such youngsters you are projecting the greatness of your spirit into the future many decades. She’s one of my favorite nieces and I think the exposure to current history she got at your home will have a significant effect upon her life.”

47

“Our Friendship Produced Sparks of Sheer Joy”

P
auli Murray moved into her quarters at Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton and Garrison shortly after the November 1956 election. Her accommodations in the firm’s Madison Avenue office, which boasted more than sixty attorneys and an army of clerks and secretaries, dwarfed the one-woman operation she had run for four years. The change was so dramatic that she felt like a “
sandlot player catapulted overnight into major league baseball.”

Being a middle-aged African American woman in this setting made Murray a “
triple minority.” Although she was the second
black attorney the firm had hired, she was the only black associate on the legal staff at the time, for William
Coleman had taken a position with another firm. All the other associates, except two white
women who would soon leave, were white males under thirty, and the senior partners were ten to fifteen years younger than Murray. That she worked in the litigation department on “
corporate mergers, bankruptcies, mechanics’ liens, and the like” upped the ante, given that her experience and passion were in labor and
civil rights law.

Despite the circumstances, Murray was motivated to succeed. She had “
earned the right to be delivered from the civil rights struggle long enough to become a top notch lawyer. If I can do well here,” she told Caroline Ware, “it will mean much to those who come behind me, particularly the gals in the profession.”

Murray spent the first year boning up on tax law and acclimating herself to the firm’s culture. As a junior associate, she was at the bottom of “
the totem pole” and relegated to doing research for the partners. She neither interacted with clients nor appeared in court. The workload was heavy and the demands unremitting. She spent so much time in the library that she had to change the prescription for her eyeglasses. “
I’ve been so busy trying to clean the rust off my legal equipment that I haven’t had time to wish you New Year’s greetings,” she wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt on January 20, 1957.

Murray especially wanted to make a favorable impression on her department head,
Simon H. Rifkind, a Russian émigré who was a former federal district court judge. Though he “
was rumored not to think too highly of women lawyers,” Murray resolved to counter his prejudice by producing excellent work. She admired Rifkin’s trial skills and his efforts to secure aid for
Holocaust survivors. That Franklin Roosevelt had appointed Rifkin to the bench enhanced his judicial aura in her eyes.