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

sang,“My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” a wave of emotion washed over the crowd. Many wept silently, moved by her rich deep voice, the patriotic song, and her prayerful bearing against the backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial. That this magnificent artist could sing in the best venues around the world but not in certain sections of her own country was a message about injustice the nation could not ignore. While Eleanor Roosevelt did not attend the concert, her support assured Anderson the national audience she deserved.
    Within weeks of the first lady’s resignation, a survey conducted by theAmerican Institute of Public Opinion indicated that 67 percent of the public approved of her decision. Although the survey results were good news, ER had decided to follow her own mind no matter what. “I have by now learned to care little or nothing for what other people may think,” she wrote in the May 23 issue of Look magazine. “I have a belief that one must hold to personal standards rather than wait for the judgment of others.”
    ER’s personal standards allowed her to wear a comfortable ginghamdress and serve Nathan’s hot dogs with ham and smoked turkey to the queen and king of England and their entourage at a picnic on the Roosevelt estate. The first lady’s attire and the menu embarrassed many social elites, including her mother-in-law, Sara, and some White House staffers. The royals, on the other hand, had “great fun.” King George liked his very first hot dog so much he asked for seconds.
    Pauli Murray took note ofER’s comments and actions. Still roiled by the UNC decision and her inability to challenge it in court, she aimed to see just how far the first lady was willing to go on the question of social justice.

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    “We…Are the Disinherited”
    I n August 1939, shortly before the government eliminated the Workers’Education Project, for which Pauli Murray worked, she took the position of acting executive secretary for theNegro People’s Committee forSpanish Refugees. The NPC, an auxiliary of theNorth American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, was established to raise financial and moral support from African Americans for refugees who fled Spain after the dictatorFrancisco Franco defeated the democratically elected government. Murray’s assignment was to raise an operating budget that included her own salary—a tall order for someone not yet thirty with no executive experience.Compounding this challenge was internecine conflict among the organization’s leaders.
    The NPC board and its sponsors were a contentious group ofpolitical figures. Among the most influential were Democrats Mary McLeodBethune and LesterGranger, RepublicanHubert T. Delaney,CommunistsPaul Robeson andWilliam L. Patterson, and socialistA. Philip Randolph. Murray waspersonally closest to Granger, her former supervisor at theNational Urban League. But she did not share his allegiance to theDemocratic Party. After voting for theSocialist Party ticket in the 1932 presidential election and her brief association with the Communist Party (Opposition), she was politically independent.
    Notwithstanding the gamesmanship, workload, and uncertain salary, Murray’s work put a face on the victims of war.Photographs of grief-stricken refugees, many of whom were children, marched across her desk. These images, plus the updates she received fromBrookwood Labor College classmates who had joined theAbraham Lincoln Brigade, themilitary units of American volunteers fighting in support of the Spanish Republic against Franco, kept her going.
    Murray’s job gave her reason to contact Eleanor Roosevelt, who was already engaged in refugee relief.The first lady had sponsoredLorenzo Murias, a twelve-year-old who had lost his family in the Spanish Civil War, and she denounced the “propaganda of fear” and discrimination against émigrés. In “My Day,” she praised the noted black artistRichmond Barthé for donating “his sculptured figures of two Spanish