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Racial justice did not always concern Eleanor Roosevelt. Although
she began her social activism working with the immigrant communities
of the Rivington
Street Settlement House in 1903, ER began to recognize
racial discrimination only after she moved to the White House
in 1933.
As she traveled the nation, ER witnessed the seemingly intractable
hardships wrought by the Great
Depression. Lorena
Hickok's field reports detailed the inadequacies of Federal
Emergency Relief Administration programs and brought individual
stories of personal hardship to ER's attention. And although
ER had visited African Americans when she toured poverty stricken
areas the summer after she became First Lady, she did not
recognize the depth of institutional racism until she pressured
the Subsistence Homestead Administration to admit African
Americans to Arthurdale.
Her intervention failed and she invited NAACP
Executive Secretary Walter
White and the presidents of African American universities
to the White House to discuss the situation. This unprecedented
meeting quickly became a tutorial on racial discrimination
and lasted until midnight. ER then pressured National Recovery
administrator Donald Richberg to investigate the raced-based
wage differentials implemented by southern industries and
asked Navy secretary Claude Swanson why blacks were confined
to mess hall assignments.
ER embraced a civil rights agenda which accepted segregation
and championed equal opportunity. Quality education became
her top public priority. As she told the Conference on Negro
Education, "wherever the standard of education is low,
the standard of living is low" and urged states to address
the inequities in public school funding. Her symbolic outreach
generated a strong response from African Americans. The African
American press and a strong communication network extolled
her efforts. By January 1934, she received thousands of letters
describing racial violence, poverty and homelessness exacerbated
by racial discrimination, and pleading for some type of assistance.
She frequently forwarded some of these letters to Harry
Hopkins and Aubrey Williams, to whom she had already sent
a list of suggestions on ways to include African Americans
more fully within Federal Emergency Relief Administration
programs.
FDR aides
tolerated ER's intercessions, but became incensed when she
supported Walter White's relentless efforts to secure administration
support for the Costigan-Wagner anti-lynching bill. The bill
had been introduced in early 1934, and while FDR agreed with
its sentiments, he did nothing to urge its passage. A frustrated
White turned to ER for advice and additional pressure. Her
support not only frustrated FDR, but enraged press secretary
Steve Early who sent ER a strong memo condemning White's single-mindedness.
The tension within the White House increased when Claude Neal
was lynched in October. Despite her best efforts, ER could
not convince FDR to lend public support to the bill for fear
of alienating the senior southern senators, or to argue that
lynching was covered under the Lindbergh kidnaping statute.
In protest, White resigned his position with the Virgin Islands
Advisory Council and ER once again found herself defending
him against FDR and Early's anger. And when White asked her
to attend the NAACP-hosted art exhibit entitled "A Commentary
on Lynching," ER, although concerned about alienating
Congress, lent her public support to this depiction of white
mob violence. Southern critics, led by Senator Eugene Talmadge,
seized the opportunity to attack FDR through ER's support
of the NAACP and throughout 1935 published photos of ER with
blacks in The Georgia World. Rumors circulated throughout
the South of Eleanor Clubs, an ER inspired organization of
black domestics urging them not to work for white women, so
frequently that they became treated as fact. FBI Director
J. Edgar Hoover was so offended by her actions that he became
convinced that she had black blood. Other Americans did as
well and wrote to ask if this was true only to receive a reply
from ER which said that her family had lived so long in the
nation that she could not answer the question with certainty.
Mary McLeod Bethune,
whom ER had met in 1927 at an education conference and whom
ER urged be appointed to the National
Youth Administration in 1935, also helped shape ER's understanding
of the problems facing black Americans. She brought lists
of requests for ER's intervention when the two met and often
sent reports, novels and other reading material to ER's attention.
An extremely close relationship developed between the two
women. ER's decision to challenge the segregation ordinance
at the 1938 convening of the Southern Conference on Human
Welfare in Birmingham was based partly on her desire to sit
with Bethune. ER later credited her deep affection for Bethune
with helping her move beyond her racial awkwardness and often
called Bethune her "closest friend in her own age group."
Young, outspoken blacks also shaped ER's perspectives. Richard
Wright's collection of short stories depicting mob violence,
Uncle Tom's Children, so moved ER that she agreed
both to help publicize the book and to endorse Wright's application
for a Guggenheim fellowship to complete Native Son.
When Howard University students picketed lunch stands near
the university that denied them service, ER praised their
courage and sent them money to continue their public education
programs. ER also developed a life long friendship with Pauli
Murray, whose outspoken critical letters to FDR first drew
ER's attention. By the late thirties, the two women had developed
what Murray called a friendship grounded in "confrontation
by typewriter." By 1940, the two women worked together
to promote National Sharecroppers Week, to organize the National
Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax and to defend sharecropper
Odell Waller against charges of premeditated murder. Although
their struggle to save Waller from execution failed, Murray
and ER continued their close collaboration, with Murray's
report to Kennedy's Presidential Commission on the Status
of Women capping a thirty-year association.
Ironically, the event for which ER received the most press
was the issue upon which she took the least public action.
ER had invited the contralto Marian Anderson to perform at
the White House in 1936 and had lavishly praised her talents
in "My Day." In late 1938, she had invited the diva
to perform for the forthcoming visit by the British monarchs
and had agreed to present the Spingarn Medal to Anderson at
the NAACP's annual convention. When the Daughters of the American
Revolution (DAR) refused to allow Anderson to perform in Constitution
Hall in the spring of 1939, ER initially refused to get involved,
writing Walter White that the DAR thought her much too liberal
anyway and that she would have minimal influence on the organization.
Yet a month after White's request, ER resigned from the DAR
and used her February 27, 1939 "My Day" column as
a forum for the announcement. Even though ER refrained from
naming the organization or the issue involved, the column
made the front pages of more than four hundred newspapers.
ER's resignation from the DAR not only put the organization
on the defensive but also transformed the incident from a
local slight to one of national importance. While folklore
credits ER with recommending the Lincoln Memorial for the
site of the Easter concert, ER's documented contributions
have a greater impact. She pressured radio stations which
carried her broadcasts to cover the event live, urged the
NAACP to use the radio broadcasts as fund-raising events,
and asked her readers why they cursed Hitler but suppressed
Anderson.
Aryanism increased her disgust with American racism. By 1939,
ER decided to attack the hypocritical way in which the nation
dealt with racial injustice. She wanted her fellow citizens
to understand how their guilt in "writing and speaking
about democracy and the American way without consideration
of the imperfections within our system with regard to its
treatment . . . of the Negro" encouraged racism. Americans,
she told Ralph Bunche in an interview for Gunnar Myrdal's
American Dilemma, wanted to talk "only about
the good features of American life and to hide our problems
like skeletons in the closet." Such withdrawal only fueled
violent responses; Americans must therefore recognize "the
real intensity of feeling" and "the amount of intimidation
and terrorization" racism promotes and act against such
"ridiculous" behavior.
By the early forties, ER firmly believed civil rights to
be the real litmus test for American democracy. Thus, she
declared over and over again throughout the war, there could
be no democracy in the United States that did not include
democracy for blacks. In The Moral Basis of Democracy
she asserted that people of all races have inviolate rights
to "some property." Repeatedly ER insisted that
education, housing, and employment were basic human rights
which society had both a moral and political obligation to
provide its citizens. The government must not only provide
protection against discrimination, but develop policies which
create a level economic playing field. In making clear exactly
what she meant, ER explained: "This means achieving an
economic level below which no one is permitted to fall, and
keeping a fairly stable balance between that level and the
standard of living."
When white America refused to see how segregation mocked
American values, ER addressed this issue sternly and directly:
"We have never been willing to face this problem, to
line it up with the basic, underlying beliefs in Democracy."
Racial prejudice enslaved blacks; consequently, "no one
can claim that . . . the Negroes of this country are free."
She continued this theme in a 1942 article in the New
Republic, declaring that both the private and the public
sector must acknowledge that "one of the main destroyers
of freedom is our attitude toward the colored race."
"What Kipling called `The White Man's Burden',"
she proclaimed in The American Magazine, is "one
of the things we can not have any longer." Furthermore,
she told those listening to the radio broadcast of the 1945
National Democratic forum, "democracy may grow or fade
as we face [this] problem."
This outspokenness exacerbated the tensions within the wartime
White House. ER had championed the creation of the Fair
Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), investigated claims
of harsh treatment and blatant discrimination in the Women's
Army Auxiliary Corps barracks in Des Moines and in the training
program for the Tuskeegee
Airmen, and used her column as a tutorial on American
race relations. Her behind the scenes efforts to push FDR
to defend the integration of Detroit's Sojourner Truth housing
development for defense workers angered Early and other key
aides. When Detroit erupted in flames after the families moved
in, many in the White House blamed ER for the riot, agreeing
with the southern press that "it is blood on your hands,
Mrs. Roosevelt." FDR then reversed himself and allowed
his wife to visit the troops because, as Henry
Wallace later recalled, "the Negro situation is too
hot." While touring the Pacific, ER refused to be cowed
by the Detroit backlash and was photographed visiting wounded
black soldiers. She returned home and helped open an integrated
CIO canteen. Criticism of her activities increased, with The
Alabama Sun devoting an entire issue to "Eleanor
and Some Niggers."
FDR's death freed ER from the constraints the White House
wanted to impose on her activities. She joined the NAACP Board
of Directors in May 1945 and the Congress on Racial Equality
Board in the fall. When a white induced race riot nearly destroyed
Columbia, Tennessee in October, she responded to White and
Bethune's request to chair the investigative committee and
worked with Thurgood Marshall to force the Justice Department
to look beyond the scenario painted by town officials. The
NAACP then appointed her to its legal affairs committee. She
pressured the Truman administration to recommend a permanent
FEPC, to lobby against the poll tax, and to propose low income
federally financed housing. She urged the president to address
the 1948 NAACP annual convention and joined him on the steps
of the Lincoln Memorial as he became the first president to
address the organization's national convention. Although Truman
had appointed her to the American delegation to the United
Nations (as a way to shore up black support for his administration),
their early relationship was rocky. Truman's speech and his
decision to integrate the military encouraged her to reassess
his leadership and played a strong role in her endorsement.
ER used "My Day," her monthly question and answer
column "If You Ask Me," and her lecture tours as
a tutorial on race relations. Indeed, she devoted as many
columns to civil rights issues as she did to the creation
and positions of the United Nations. In many of these arenas
ER assumed the responsibility of explaining the NAACP legal
strategy in terms which the majority of her readers could
understand. Restrictive housing covenants, segregated schools,
employment discrimination, literacy tests, and voting procedures
were critiqued with increasing impatience. She often responded
with single spaced typed letters to those who wrote questioning
the legality of her stances and urging patience. In the throes
of Cold War politics,
she argued against red-baiting civil rights organizations
and declared that the best defense against communism was making
democracy work.
The Brown decision thrilled her, but she knew that
integrating the schools would not be a swift or temperate
exercise. The Montgomery Bus Boycott reinforced her fears
and her determination. She worked with Martin Luther King,
Jr. and Rosa Parks to raise money for the boycott and introduced
Autherine Lucy, who had tried to integrate the University
of Alabama, to a Madison Square Garden fund-raiser. She, despite
the caution of some of her advisors, supported the Southern
Conference Education Fund's efforts to desegregate hospitals
and protect voting rights. Knowing that her credibility with
the civil rights community was beyond reproach and worried
that Brown might divide the 1956 convention, Democratic National
Committee chair Paul Butler asked her to chair the platform
hearings on civil rights. She agreed, and after moderating
a heated debate between those opposed to the decision and
civil rights activists drafted a plank which condemned the
use of force and declared the Supreme Court the nation's legal
arbiter. Although the plank did not mention Brown by
name, it only passed the committee by one vote. ER then mentioned
the decision in every speech she gave for Adlai
Stevenson, endorsed the Powell Amendment to bar federal
funds from construction of segregated schools, and chided
those Americans who did not see the inherent hypocrisy of
critiquing communism and supporting Jim
Crow.
By 1957, ER had become impatient with the Democratic Party's
commitment to civil rights and began to identify more strongly
with activists who wanted to change the system rather than
with political officials. "Some of my best friends are
Negro," she wrote in a cover story of Ebony Magazine.
The struggle to integrate Little Rock's Central High School
enraged her so that she questioned Eisenhower's
courage, declaring that he was absent without leave from the
major domestic crisis of his presidency. She phoned Daisy
Bates to offer encouragement and then wrote the forward to
the NAACP activist's account of the crisis, In The Shadow
of Little Rock.
As Congress began to debate the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960,
ER used her column to critique those Democrats who tried to evade
the issue and bitterly condemned the decision to include the jury
trial amendment, which placed voting rights obstructionists in front
of an all white jury instead of a federal judge. She wrote to activists
that she understood their frustration and struggled against despair.
She opposed John Kennedy's nomination as much for his non-existent
support of civil rights as she did for his silence on McCarthy.
And she chaired a Highlander Folk School workshop on non-violent
civil disobedience for civil rights activists and wrote the introduction
for CORE's pamphlet "Cracking the Color Line" concluding
that "advocating civil rights does not constitute anarchy."
But it was the violent treatment the Freedom Riders received
that provoked ER's harshest comments. Asked by CORE and the
NAACP to chair a hearing investigating the conduct of the
federal judges before whom the assailants were tried, ER lost
her temper with those administration supporters who urged
that the committee go into executive session to hear testimony,
brusquely responding that she did not come to the hearing
to equivocate. She told readers of Tomorrow is Now
that this sickened her, compared it to the conduct the Nazis
pursued, and wondered if the nation had learned anything from
its war against Aryanism. For the United States to reclaim
its true position as moral leader of the world, it must have
"a social revolution." It could not be a nation
with signs reading whites only. It must be done with "practical
application of democratic principles."
By 1962, ER was dying and the slow progress to a race-blind society
depressed her immensely. While praising the courage of King and
other civil rights advocates, her columns and interviews became
more pessimistic. She criticized the president for showing more
profile than courage on civil rights issues. Yet she struggled to
trust "the future of essential democracy." It was a disheartening
and delicate balance. When she learned of the violence greeting
James Meredith when he tried to enrol at the University of Mississippi
and attacks on Birmingham churches, she phoned Martin Luther King
to ask him to appear on her television show to discuss racial violence.
He agreed, but the show was never taped. Two days later, ER entered
the hospital.
When she died November 7th, King summarized her commitment
to racial justice. "The impact of her personality and
its unwavering devotion to high principle and purpose cannot
be contained in a single day or era." Three months later,
Tomorrow is Now was published and ER issued her own
call for civil rights activism. "Staying aloof is not
a solution, but a cowardly evasion."
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