The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice by Patricia Bell-Scott

anti-lynching legislation. Disturbed by the Senate filibuster that had blocked a recent bill, she decided to say how she feltabout the issue at the Second National Conference on the Problems of the Negro and Negro Youth.
    Prefacing her statement with “On the clear understanding that I am speaking for myself, as an individual, and in no other sense,” she told a thousand black youths gathered in Washington, D.C., under the auspices of theNational Youth Administration that she wanted an anti-lynching bill “as soon as possible.” Though she doubted that such a “law would do away with lynching,” she believed this kind of legislation was important “because it would put us on record against something we all should be against.”
    A month later, the first lady spoke out again. The impetus was the Daughters of theAmerican Revolution’s refusal to allowMarian Anderson, the celebrated African American contralto, to sing inConstitution Hall.The DAR, an organization whose members claimed bloodline descent from the founders of the American republic, restricted its spacious hall towhite artists and patrons only. ER, who’d joined the DAR by invitation when she came to Washington as first lady, had already hosted a concert by Anderson in the White House. The singer had one of the most “moving” voices ER had heard.
    Unwilling to sanction DAR policy by keeping quiet, on February 26, the first lady wrote to President GeneralMrs. Henry M. Robert Jr., “I am in complete disagreement with the attitude taken in refusing Constitution Hall to a great artist. You have set an example which seems to me unfortunate, and I feel obliged to send in to you my resignation. You had an opportunity to lead in an enlightened way and it seems to me that your organization has failed.”
    In her column the next day, ER discussed the deliberations that led her to resign. While she did not name the organization, press accounts of the Anderson concert controversy left no doubt about the target of the first lady’s disapproval.
I have been debating in my mind for some time, a question which I have had to debate with myself once or twice before in my life.… The question is, if you belong to an organization and disapprove of an action which is typical policy, should you resign or is it better to work for a changed point of view within the organization? In the past, when I was able to work actively in any organization to which I belonged, I have usually stayed until I had at least made a fight and had been defeated.
…But in this case, I belong to an organization in which I can do no active work. They have taken an action which has been widely talked about in the press. To remain as a member implies approval of that action, and therefore I am resigning.
    The first lady’s advocacy for Anderson did not end with her resignation or the remarks in her column.After a group known as theMarian Anderson Citizens Committee, cochaired by former Howard University School of Law deanCharles Hamilton Houston and Secretary of the InteriorHarold Ickes, arranged for Anderson to give a free concert on the steps of theLincoln Memorial, ER agreed to serve as honorary cosponsor.Over a hundred politicians, religious and civil rights leaders, and artists joined her. In that distinguished group were Secretary of the NavyClaude A. Swanson, Secretary of the Treasury HenryMorgenthau Jr., Attorney GeneralFrank Murphy, Supreme Court JusticesCharles Hughes andHugo Black, orchestra conductorLeopold Stokowski, and actorKatharine Hepburn.
    The Easter Sunday concert was a critical and political success. Its interracial audience, some seventy-five thousand strong, was the largest for a performance of this kind hosted at the Capitol. There were no incidents and no segregation among the platform guests or in the audience. Millions listened to the radio broadcast.
    As Anderson, a caramel-skinned woman clad in a full-length fur coat, took her place behind a bank of microphones and