The firebrand and the First Lady Portrait of a friendship : Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the struggle for social justice

Review by Choice Review

Pauli Murray, an accomplished civil rights activist, feminist, and all-around crusader for social justice, forged a partnership with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. During her lifetime, Murray labored under a triple burden of discrimination. She fought against Jim Crow restrictions in her native North Carolina, engaged in campaigns to desegregate lunch counters and restaurants, and worked for the rights of marginalized tenant farmers. She felt the sting of male chauvinism as she forged a path in higher education, in which she earned two advanced degrees in law. Finally, as a lesbian at a time when homosexuality was still regarded as deviant behavior and illegal, Murray felt compelled to keep some aspects of her personality private. Murray frequently wrote letters to Eleanor Roosevelt and recruited her to causes of social justice. The First Lady often devoted portions of her daily newspaper columns to causes championed by Murray. While the two women did not always agree on tactics, they became staunch allies. Bell-Scott (emer., women's studies, Univ. of Georgia) extends her analysis beyond the death of Roosevelt in 1962 to examine the legacy that the First Lady exerted on a generation of "firebrand" activists like Murray. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. --Bob Miller, University of Cincinnati-Clermont

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

THE FEBRUARY 1953 issue of Ebony included an article entitled "Some of My Best Friends Are Negroes." The byline was Eleanor Roosevelt's, though the headline, apparently, was not. "One of my finest young friends is a charming woman lawyer - Pauli Murray, who has been quite a firebrand at times but of whom I am very fond," Roosevelt wrote. "She is a lovely person who has struggled and come through very well." Indeed, nothing was ever easy for Murray, a black woman born in 1910, a woman attracted to women and also a poet, memoirist, lawyer, activist and Episcopal priest. But her tender friendship with Roosevelt, sustained over nearly a quarter-century and more than 300 cards and letters, helped. It is the rich earth Patricia Bell-Scott tills for "The Firebrand and the First Lady," a tremendous book that has been 20 years in the making. You could say Pauli Murray was born too soon, and saying so captures the essential injustice of her life, but it would also rob her of credit for making her own time the best she could. "I'm really a submerged writer," Murray once told her friends, "but the exigencies of the period have driven me into social action." The granddaughter of a woman born into slavery and a mixed-race Union soldier, Murray was arrested for refusing to sit in the colored section of a bus 15 years before the Montgomery bus boycott and for participating in restaurant sit-ins in the early 1940s, long before the 1960 sit-ins at Woolworth's lunch counter. She led a national campaign on behalf of a black sharecropper on death row. In 1938, Murray, then a W.P.A. worker who had once glimpsed the first lady and been chastised for refusing to rise, wrote a furious letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt for speaking at the all-white University of North Carolina. "I am a Negro, the most oppressed, misunderstood and most neglected section of your population," she informed him. "You called on Americans to support a liberal philosophy based on democracy. What does this mean for Negro Americans?" She sent a copy with a brief introduction to Roosevelt's wife, who had met with N.A.A.C.P. representatives when her husband refused to. It worked. The two women were different in age, race and class, but they had a few things in common. They were orphaned as children and raised by elderly relatives. They were inquisitive, they were readers, they were idealists. They didn't mind a fight, but they channeled institutional power for good, if they could. Though Mrs. Roosevelt rebuked Murray for not understanding the constraints the president was under, what with the Southern white supremacists in his fractious coalition, she plainly admired Murray's spirit and did what she could to support her. Murray was a guest in her homes and at the White House, and Roosevelt cheered her from afar. (Years later, Roosevelt sent the presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson a copy of "Proud Shoes," Murray's family memoir, apparently to improve his understanding of black Americans.) But the first lady had no magic wand for what her young friend was up against. Murray was repeatedly hospitalized and resisted the diagnosis of homosexuality, then considered a mental illness, failing to persuade doctors to give her male sex hormones. Early in her career, Murray published an essay accompanied by her gender-ambiguous photo and under the name "Pete," calling it her "boy-self.") Her sexuality, along with suspicions of Communism and mental instability, may have been why, when Murray was refused entry to that same University of North Carolina, Thurgood Marshall, then with the N.A.A.C.P, turned down her case, telling her, "We have to be very careful about the people we select." Later, despite her considerable intellect and three law degrees from elite institutions, no law faculty and only one law firm would offer her a permanent position. Near the end of her life, Murray declared, "If anyone should ask a Negro woman what is her greatest achievement, her honest answer would be, 'I survived.'" On the way there, Murray's earnest chutzpah knew no limits. In 1939, Murray wrote to Franklin Roosevelt to ask him to name a "a qualified Negro" to the Supreme Court. It would take nearly three decades and 17 more white male justices before her friend Marshall made it onto the court. Bell-Scott allows these women to speak for themselves, a light touch that works with two heavyweights. The format has its limitations: During most of the years of their friendship, Roosevelt's life was marked by a series of international delegations that don't quite make for riveting reading, and Murray did her most important intellectual and political work after Roosevelt's death. But the fact that Mrs. Roosevelt is here more foil than subject hardly detracts from this distinguished work. Some stories are more urgent and untold than others. And Bell-Scott, who was an editor of the important anthology "All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave," persuasively suggests that Roosevelt's influence contributed to what would be Murray's most lasting mark, on women's rights. "She had spent the first half of her life fighting for equal rights as an African-American, only to discover she would have to spend the second half fighting for equal rights as a woman," Bell-Scott writes. A brilliant legal strategist, Murray formulated a plan for rendering sex discrimination unconstitutional using the 14th Amendment, co-founded the National Organization for Women and tried her best to build bridges between black and white feminists. In Ruth Bader Ginsburg's first brief to the Supreme Court, in 1971, she listed Murray as a co-author, though Murray had not worked on it, a nod to the brief's intellectual ancestry. Ginsburg's win in that case wrested from the Supreme Court its first ruling against sex discrimination as unconstitutional. As Eleanor Roosevelt lay dying, in October 1962, Murray wrote her friend: "For many years you have been one of my most important models - one who combines graciousness with moral principle, straightforwardness with kindliness, political shrewdness with idealism, courage with generosity, and most of all an ongoingness which never falters, no matter what the difficulties may be. Two generations of women have been touched by your spirit." Not long afterward, Murray fought to keep the prohibition on sex discrimination in the Civil Rights Act, arguing that it could not be severed from the scourge of racial discrimination. "If it is true that slavery and all that followed has denied the Negro male his manhood, isn't it equally true that the view of a Negro woman as a sex object or a body to be employed in domestic labor has denied her due respect?" she demanded of a reporter. When she won that battle, Murray told her colleague Lloyd Garrison, "Mrs. Roosevelt's spirit marches on." The disappointments of the years did not altogether extinguish Murray's audacity. When she heard that the F.B.I. had been sniffing around her, she sent a letter to J. Edgar Hoover with a "personal history" and a photo of herself to avoid any confusion. In 1971, still unbowed, she wrote to another president with another bold proposal: that Nixon nominate her to the Supreme Court. Forty-five years later, no black woman has yet been appointed to that body. Eleanor Roosevelt admired Murray's spirit and did what she could to support her. IRIN CARMON, a national reporter at MSNBC, is a co-author of "Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 21, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Eleanor Roosevelt, born to privilege, prosperity, and power, first crossed paths with Pauli Murray, the granddaughter of a slave struggling against racism and poverty, in 1934 when the First Lady visited an upstate New York facility for unemployed women. Murray was in residence after fleeing the Jim Crow South to put herself through college in Manhattan. Four years later, Murray sent the opening salvo in what became a fervent correspondence that lasted until Roosevelt's death, as these two brilliant, courageous, committed trailblazers both orphaned young, taunted for their appearance, devoted to reading and writing, boundlessly energetic, and fiercely independent joined forces to fight for justice and equality. Bell-Scott meticulously chronicles their boundary-breaking friendship, telling each remarkable woman's story within the context of the crises of the times, from ongoing racial violence to WWII and the vicious battle over school integration, creating a sharply detailed and profoundly illuminating narrative. Roosevelt's heroic compassion and world-altering accomplishments shine with fresh significance, while Murray's phenomenal life of firsts delivers one astonishment after another. A clarion writer and seminal civil rights activist, a professor with a doctorate in law and an Episcopalian priest, Murray analyzed and protested every manifestation of discrimination she encountered based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. Bell-Scott's groundbreaking portrait of these two tireless and innovative champions of human dignity adds an essential and edifying facet to American history.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Bell-Scott (Life Notes), professor emerita of women's studies and family science at the University of Georgia, deftly reveals two women's crucial involvement in the struggle for civil rights. Pauli Murray, a young African American woman, crossed paths with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1934 when Murray was living at Camp Tera, a New Deal facility for unemployed women. The burgeoning professional relationship between these two smart, strong-minded, and ambitious women developed into genuine affection. They shared similar ideas about social justice, and each chose her own course of action. The fascinating, complex Murray takes center stage in this absorbing historical page-turner. In the decades before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and Rosa Parks's 1955 bus protest, Murray challenged racial segregation at the University of North Carolina (1938) and on public transportation in Virginia (1940). As a law student in the early 1940s, she battled gender discrimination, foreshadowing her co-founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966. Until Roosevelt's death in 1962, she supported Murray's various projects and helped the younger woman with her career goals. Murray's considerable achievements weren't dependent on Roosevelt's assistance; Bell-Scott brilliantly shows that the friendship equally enriched both women. Illus. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In 1983, civil rights activist Pauli Murray (1910-85) instructed Bell-Scott (emerita, women's studies, Univ. of Georgia; Life Notes) to "know some of the veterans of the battle whose shoulders you now stand on." When Murray died two years later, Bell-Scott began researching the activist's life. After reviewing the correspondence between Murray and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Bell-Scott decided to focus on their decades-long friendship. Murray first wrote to both Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938 to express outrage that she was barred from the University of North Carolina's graduate school because of her race. Over the next few years, Eleanor became mentor to Murray, urging her to be patient with the progress of civil rights, while Murray encouraged Eleanor to consider the plight of African Americans who were suffering from discrimination during the Great Depression and World War II. The quotes from their lengthy correspondence, up to Eleanor's death in 1962, reveal their mutual respect and honesty. VERDICT Bell-Scott makes a convincing case that Murray influenced -Eleanor's views on civil and human rights and though not popularly known, she should be remembered as an important leader in both the civil rights and feminist movements. [See Prepub Alert, 8/31/15.]-Kate Stewart, American Folklife Ctr., Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A significant new exploration of the enormously important friendship between two activist crusaders in advancing the cause of civil rights for blacks and women. Although the Baltimore-born black lawyer Pauli Murray (1910-1985) and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) exchanged more than 300 letters during their lifetimes, met occasionally, and worked in tandem on issues of social justice, there has not been a proper study of their mutually influential friendship until now. In this stellar work of scholarship, Bell-Scott (Emerita, Women's Studies and Family Science/Univ. of Georgia; Flat-Footed Truths:Telling Black Women's Lives, 1998, etc.) has sifted through their correspondence for evidence of their evolving ideas on black-white issues and how each took the measure of the other while working doggedly to bring down social and professional barriers. Eleanor tirelessly promoted integration despite the public caution that her husband demonstrated, and she first met Murray in 1933 as a college graduate attending Camp Tera (Temporary Emergency Relief Administration), a pilot facility for struggling unemployed women that Eleanor had pushed to create during the Depression. Subsequently, Murray would go on to get advanced law degrees and work as deputy California attorney general and, later, as a professor. All the while, Murray idolized Eleanor ("the most visible symbol of autonomy and therefore the role model of women of my generation") and frequently wrote to heror to the president, sending her a copy of the letter. She laid out in no uncertain terms the plight of the African-American, "the most oppressed, most misunderstood and most neglected section of your population," especially in the South, where she had lived as an orphan. From getting anti-lynching legislation passed to pressuring institutions of higher learning to integrate, the two women bolstered or chided each other candidly in their letters involving issues which Eleanor frequently referred to in her newspaper column. With generous excerpts from the letters, Bell-Scott shines a bright light on this significant relationship. A fresh look at Eleanor Roosevelt and a fascinating exploration of a cherished, mutually beneficial friendship. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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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 following reports about the first lady, listening to her radio broadcast, and reading her syndicated newspaper column, "My Day," since it had begun publication, on December 30, 1935. In it, ER chronicled get-togethers with family and friends, meetings with public figures, impressions of what she saw during her travels, and her opinions on a range of cultural and political matters. Writing the column six days a week and meeting her duties as first lady, which frequently went past midnight, required her to compose on the go. After one day-long visit to Camp Jane Addams (as Camp Tera had been renamed, in 1936, in honor of the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize), Tommy sat her typewriter on a rock near the Bear Mountain Bridge so that ER could dictate her copy and meet her deadline. Southern segregation made ER uncomfortable, and she did not enjoy going to FDR's Warm Springs cottage, despite the delight he took in the place. She did not accompany the president to UNC, but two weeks earlier, she had attended the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama, on her own. SCHW was an interracial gathering of liberals who met to discuss health, economics, housing, labor, race relations, voting rights, opportunities for young people, and agricultural issues affecting the region. The conferees included a mix of labor, religious, youth, and civil rights activists, politicians, government administrators, journalists, educators, and representatives from organizations affiliated with the socialist and Communist movements. ER was the most celebrated attendee, and her presence drew the national press. Of her whirlwind schedule, a New York Times reporter noted, "Mrs. Roosevelt arrived at 5 o'clock this morning . . . and rested until 8 o'clock and thereafter in rapid succession held a press conference, visited several institutions, spoke informally to an afternoon session meeting on youth problems and tonight gave an address on 'Democracy in Education.' " Seven thousand people, nearly half of them black, jammed into the city auditorium to hear her speak about the importance of "universal education" and the contribution each citizen makes to the nation, "regardless of nationality or race." She fielded questions for the better part of an hour. The first lady's participation at the SCHW was historic. However, her skillful circumvention of a local ordinance requiring segregated seating was what interested Murray most. When city officials learned that conferees were mingling freely during sessions, without regard to race, the police came and directed everyone to obey local law. Having walked into a session late, ER sat down in the black section near her friend Mary McLeod Bethune, who was now director of the Negro Affairs Division in the National Youth Administration. When the police ordered ER to move, she had her chair placed between the white and black delegations. And it was there she sat, symbolically outside of racial strictures, for the remainder of the conference. The first lady's deft reaction warmed the hearts of conferees, angered segregationists, and thrilled the black press. The influential Afro-American newspaper, of which Murray was a devoted reader, underscored the significance of ER's aisle-straddling tactic by proclaiming, "Sometimes actions speak louder than words." ... after camp tera, Murray got a job with the Works Progress Administration, initially as a remedial reading teacher, then with the Workers' Education Project. Now that the WPA was in jeopardy, she planned to return to North Carolina, where she could do graduate work at UNC and look after her adoptive mother, Aunt Pauline. The thought of living in the South again filled Murray with dread. On the other hand, it seemed worth the sacrifice to further her education and be with family. In no mood for armchair liberalism, Murray counted herself among a group of young radicals incensed by FDR's "coziness with white supremacy in the South." She reasoned that if UNC were half the institution the president said it was, its administration would find a way to accommodate her. Murray knew of only one way to challenge his roundly praised address. She typed a bold missive, spelling out what the South was like for blacks, daring him to take a stand as a fellow Christian for democracy and the liberal principles he espoused. December 6, 1938 Dear President Roosevelt: I pray that this letter will get past your secretaries and reach your personal consideration. Have you time to listen to the problem of one of your millions of fellow-citizens, which will illustrate most clearly one of the problems of democracy in America. I speak not only for myself but for 12,000,000 other citizens. Briefly, the facts are these: I am a Negro, the most oppressed, most misunderstood and most neglected section of your population. I am also a WPA worker, another insecure and often misrepresented group of citizens. I teach on the Workers' Education Project of New York City, a field which has received the constant and devoted support of your wife, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. My main interest, the tradition of my family for three generations, is education, which, I believe, is the basic requirement for the maintenance and extension of democracy. At present, in order to do a competent teaching job, a job comparable to the work of established educational institutions, like all other professional WPA workers, I feel the need of more training. To understand the knotty economic and social problems of our country and to interpret these problems clearly and simply to workers makes it imperative that we continue our studies. Our wage standards are such that we are unable to further our education. Those of us who do not have degrees are unable to get them because of the general WPA arrangements. Those of us who have degrees, and yet feel an inadequacy of information and formal training, find it impossible to go further and obtain our Master's Degree. Sometime ago I applied to the University of North Carolina for admission to their graduate school. They sent me an application blank, on the bottom of which was asked, "Race and Religion." (For your information, I am a confirmed Protestant Episcopalian.) As you know, no Negro has ever been admitted to the University of North Carolina. You may wonder then, why I, a Negro knowing this fact, did make application. My grandfather, a Union Army soldier, gave his eye for the liberation of his race. As soon as the war was over, he went to North Carolina under the Freedmen's Bureau to establish schools and educate the newly freed Negroes. From that time on my entire family has been engaged in educational work in that state. My own father was a principal of one of the Baltimore City schools and my sisters and brothers are also teachers. You passed through Durham, where my family lived and worked, and where my aunt now a woman of sixty-eight years, still plods back and forth to her school training future citizens of America. This aunt has been teaching since she was fifteen years old, and for more than thirty years in the Durham Public Schools, and yet if she were to become disabled tomorrow, there is no school pension system which would take care of her, neither does she qualify for the Old Age Pension system which excludes teachers. 12,000,000 of your citizens have to endure insults, injustices, and such degradation of spirit that you would believe impossible as a human being and a Christian. We are forced to ride in prescribed places in the busses and street cars of those very cities you passed through in our beloved Southland. When your party reached the station at Durham yesterday, you must have noticed a sign which said "White," and then a fence, then another sign which said "Colored." Can you, for one moment, put yourself in our place and imagine the feelings of resentment, the protest, the indignation, the outrage that would rise within you to realize that you, a human being, with the keen sensitivities of other human beings were being set off in a corner, marked apart from your fellow human beings? Excerpted from The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship - Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice by Patricia Bell-Scott All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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