The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (42 page)

In addition to demonstrating her competence, Murray had to negotiate an ambiguous code of office etiquette. Since she was not one of the “girls,” as the secretaries were called, or one of the “boys” who made up the majority of the legal staff, she had no one after whom to model herself. Typical of the “
awkwardness” she experienced was the interaction one day when she and Rifkind approached the elevator to leave the office. Murray stepped aside in deference to the judge’s status and waited for him to board. Rifkind, “the
essence of courtesy” in his social interactions with women, stood back and waited for Murray. While they remained frozen in front of the elevator “
staring foolishly at one another,” several passengers loaded and the doors closed.

Lloyd Garrison, having joined the firm after a stint in the federal government and a decade as a law school dean and professor, tried to bolster Murray’s confidence. He knew how hard it was to enter corporate law at midlife. He advised Murray to use the criticism of her work as a “
grindstone to sharpen” her skills. She took his counsel to heart.

Murray found an ally and more in Irene
Barlow, the office manager. An organizational whiz whose winsome personality had earned her the unofficial title “
the managing partner,” Barlow was a tall, attractive Brit with blue-green eyes. She had come to the United States when she was six with her mother and four older sisters. Renee (“
pronounced to rhyme with Jeannie”), as family and close
friends called her, had worked her way through high school and finished her college degree at night, after she’d joined the firm. Ridiculed as a child for her “
threadbare hand-me-down clothing” and Yorkshire accent, she determined to open the door to others
who had been marginalized because of their nationality, ethnicity, religion, poverty, or sexual orientation.
Consequently, the clerical staff Barlow hired was one of the most diverse among the city’s law firms.

Barlow’s “
job kept her on the go, moving unobtrusively through the corridors, untangling snafus which interrupted the flow of paperwork, hustling messengers on their rounds, putting out brushfires of revolt in the stenographers’ pool, mediating between lawyers and secretaries, solving problems of space, or, on occasion, offering a kind word to an associate who had just been humiliated by an irate partner.” She had a way of defusing conflict and provoking “
spasms of laughter” with English colloquialisms. “
Now don’t get up in the boughs” was a favorite of
Murray’s. “
Oh, blast” was as close as Barlow came to cursing.

Barlow sensed the loneliness and apprehension behind Murray’s proud façade and invited her to lunch. During their first meal, they discovered that they were both devout
Episcopalians. They would later learn that they were close in age. Murray was forty-six, Barlow forty-two. As children, both had lost parents (Renee’s father had abandoned the
family after she was born) and moved away from their birthplaces. Each had a thirst for knowledge that had fueled a hard-won battle for education. By Easter, they were going to
St. Bartholomew’s Church together for noon services on their lunch break.

Barlow walked like a gazelle balancing several tasks at once, whereas Murray moved as if she had been “
shot out of a cannon,” jumping “from thought to thought.” While Barlow never disclosed “
firm confidences,” she cheered Murray on, urging her to dress and speak gracefully and to be “
less the rough diamond and more the sophisticate.” In spite of the difference in personality and style, “
our friendship produced sparks of sheer joy,” Murray would write in her autobiography. Their common religious heritage gave the “
relationship a special quality” Murray had not known.
She likened their bond to that of
Damon and Pythias, friends in a Greek legend whose trust and loyalty were so deep that they risked their lives for each other.

Barlow’s beauty and her “
strong-willed, creative, traditional-on-the-outside-and-revolutionary-on-the-inside” spirit captivated Murray. Of their feelings for each other, Murray later recalled, “
I think she loved me as much because she saw me as identified with the ‘despised and rejected’ of the earth as because of whatever qualities I had which she admired. I loved her because of her steadfastness, her loyalty, her quiet support and the many things she did (without my ever knowing it) to save me heartache.”

This relationship proved the most satisfying of
Murray’s adult life, as it gave her acceptance and the embrace of family again.
Barlow’s mother, Mary Jane, who took to mending Murray’s “
neglected clothing,” relieved the void left by the loss of
Aunts Pauline and Sallie. Though Murray and Barlow never lived in the same apartment, together they opened a bank account, owned a car, vacationed, lunched with ER, and would eventually share the same burial plot. When they were unable to see each other, they spoke by phone, and they sprinkled their letters with pet names, such as “Barney Google,” “Ms. Marple,” “darling,” and “mushroom.” Barlow sent care packages of vitamins and named Murray executor of her will. Murray kept Barlow’s portrait on her mantelpiece with the family photos, which included the snapshot of ER with Aunts Pauline and Sallie. The “
gift of this friendship,” Murray confided in her
journal, “is to have been blessed beyond riches.”

Left to right: Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, translator Anna Lavrova, and Eleanor Roosevelt at his vacation home near the Black Sea, Yalta, Ukraine, on September 28, 1957. ER would earn the New York Newspaper Women’s Club Best Series of Articles Award for the “My Day” columns she wrote during the tour.
(Bettmann/CORBIS)

48

“You Can Say We Had a Friendly Conversation, but We Differ”

I
n March 1957, Eleanor
Roosevelt went to
Morocco at the invitation of Sultan
Mohammed V. She embarked on this
trip with several goals in mind. She hoped to promote better relations with the United States. She was eager to see how Morocco was faring, now that it was no longer a French protectorate. She wanted to visit
Casablanca, which had been the site of the 1943 conference between
Franklin Roosevelt and
Winston Churchill. And she intended to investigate the situation of Moroccan
Jews, whose right to emigrate to Israel had been suspended after Morocco’s independence.

ER arrived with a party that included her son Elliott; his wife,
Minnewa; ER’s personal physician,
David
Gurewitsch; and his daughter Grania.
From Casablanca, the group went to Rabat, Fez, and Marrakech, stopping at historic sites, the Jewish quarter, and model projects along
the way. One day their car hit a rock, and they were forced to picnic under a weeping willow tree. When the
caid
, the village leader, learned of the mishap, he sent “
a beautiful orange and
black Berber rug” and “two cushions to lean against ‘for the ladies.’ ”

Everywhere ER went, she saw the need for economic development and a better standard of living.
The longing of Moroccan
Jews to leave deepened her support for emigration and the young nation of
Israel.

Murray had not been abroad, and she was uneasy whenever ER was on foreign soil. ER’s trip coincided with Murray’s growing interest in Africa.
This interest was stirred in part by Maida
Springer’s work with
African labor leaders and her attendance at
Ghana’s independence celebration a few months earlier. The example of these two friends and a curiosity about the cultural links between
African Americans and Africans would eventually lead Murray to Africa.

· · ·

ER BELIEVED
, as did Murray, that it was important to learn as much as possible about political ideologies one disagreed with. For this reason, ER jumped at the opportunity to go to the
Soviet Union in September 1957 as a reporter for the
New York Post
.
She took Maureen Corr, an Irish immigrant who had succeeded Malvina Thompson as her personal secretary, and
David Gurewitsch, who spoke fluent Russian. In addition to touring well-known places, such as Lenin’s tomb, the Kremlin, the Winter Palace, and Moscow University, ER ventured beyond the typical tourist sites. She told representatives of Intourist, the government’s travel bureau, that she “
wanted to get as far away from Moscow as possible.”

Determined to see the country through the eyes of its people, ER made her way to Tashkent and
Samarkand, two of the oldest cities in central Asia. She met with the esteemed Committee of Soviet
Women. She talked to people in their homes, schools, and at state and collective farms. At one hospital, she and Gurewitsch put on white surgical garb and entered an operating room. There, a young woman, “
under local anesthesia” with an open abdomen, “nearly fell off the table in her eagerness to shake Mrs. Roosevelt’s hand.”

The highlight of the trip was undoubtedly ER’s three-hour interview with Premier
Nikita Khrushchev. The short, portly premier, known for his brashness, sat down at a large table to talk with the deceptively cool former first lady through her interpreter. This was Khrushchev’s first major interview with a Western journalist, and he discussed a range of issues, such as the proliferation of atomic weapons, the treatment of
Soviet Jews, the violation of the Yalta agreement, and the requirements for peaceful coexistence. He “
flared up” when ER raised the issue of
Israel’s security and the Soviet sale of arms to
Syria, but she held her own. When the premier asked, at the end of their meeting, if he could say they “
had a friendly conversation?” she replied, “You can say we had a friendly conversation, but we differ.”

ER observed that women’s work in the Soviet Union included much of what Americans thought of as men’s work, from “
street-cleaning and section-hand work on the railroads” to all kinds of farm labor. She thought some features of the Soviet education and health care systems were commendable. Nonetheless, she found the low standard of living, government censorship, and regimentation of daily life unacceptable. “
I think I should die,” she wrote upon reflection, “if I had to live in Soviet Russia.”

Elizabeth Ann Eckford (center front, in sunglasses) and anti-integration protesters outside Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas, September 4, 1957. This scene and news accounts from
New York Post
reporter Ted Poston, a friend of Murray’s, caused her to question her decision to go into corporate law.
(Bettmann/CORBIS)

49

“The Chips Are Really Down in Little Rock”

O
n September 4, 1957, a crowd of angry whites cornered a slight African American girl near the entrance to Little Rock’s Central High School. Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford and the eight black students who arrived later were soon to be known as the Little Rock Nine. They had registered to attend the all-white school because its curriculum and state-of-the-art physical plant were among the best in the nation. They also lived close to Central, and it was far superior to the city’s
segregated black schools.

The day before the students showed up, truckloads of
National Guardsmen cordoned off the school.
White supremacists were heading
toward Little Rock from all over the state, Governor Orval Eugene Faubus claimed, and he had called up the troops to keep the peace. If black students entered Central, he warned, “
blood will run in the streets.”

In the wake of the governor’s actions, Little Rock city school superintendent
Virgil T. Blossom asked black parents not to accompany their children to Central. Should there be violence, said Blossom, “
It will be easier to protect the children if the adults aren’t there.”

Fearing the worst,
Daisy Lee Gatson Bates, the thirty-seven-year-old president of the Arkansas State Conference of the
NAACP, who was the principal adviser to the students and their families, arranged for an interracial escort of ministers to accompany the students to Central. On September 3, she notified the parents by telephone to have their children meet the ministers at eight-thirty the next morning. After a day of nonstop preparations, Bates fell asleep, forgetting to send word to the
Eckfords, who had no telephone.