THE FIREBRAND AND THE FIRST LADY: Portrait of a Friendship by Patricia Scott-Bell
“The day after Eisenhower's inauguration, Murray was thumbing through the February 1953 issue of Ebony magazine when she discovered ER's essay "Some of My Best Friends Are Negro." The cover featured a photograph of ER and Mary McLeod Bethune seated together. Inside, Murray was mentioned and pictured alongside Walter White, Bethune, musician Josh White, U.N. delegates Channing Tobias and Edith Sampson, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ralph Bunche.
ER admitted in this candid piece that she had had no significant contact with African Americans or any awareness of racial discrimination until she was in her mid-teens. Not until adulthood did she develop genuine friendships with blacks and relate to them as "social equals."
"One of my finest young friends," she boasted, "is a charming woman lawyer - Pauli Murray, who has been quite a firebrand at times but of whom I am very fond. She is a lovely person who has struggled and come through very well." Of Murray's growth in the fourteen years they had been friends, ER wrote, "I think there were times when she might have done foolish things. But now I think she is well ready to be of good use. My relationship with Pauli is very satisfying."
ER's upbringing made it difficult for her to address people by their given names, and her status made friends reluctant to call her Eleanor, she told readers. To bridge the social gap, she encouraged young and "really close friends" to call her "Mrs. R.," and she pushed herself to use their first names. ER probably did not know that Murray's first name was actually Anna, and so called her Pauli, as she preferred.
That ER spoke so honestly about their friendship in Ebony, a glossy, photo-rich African American-interest magazine with more than five hundred thousand subscribers, pleased and amused Murray. "I howled when I read that line about the 'firebrand’," she wrote to ER. "I had always thought of myself as a 'spearhead' but never a firebrand. Anyway, I was deeply moved that you counted me among your close friends and delighted that you thought of me as Pauli - as naturally as it should be.”
The Firebrand and The First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship, Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice by Patricia Bell-Scott pgs. 211 - 212
Invitation: “…as she preferred.”
More about Eleanor Roosevelt, Pauli Murray, and Patricia Bell-Scott - and more
We will meet for the Community Table Monday, March 10th at 8:00 PM ET. Contact us for information HERE.
We will begin our daily Shared Solitude: Embracing the gift of silence in community offered by our Courageous friend Emily - March 3rd through April 18th. See details on our Calendar HERE
Learn More About Circles of Courageous Commons HERE
I wonder about the white people I've met who like ER created friendships with people like me or never at all. Am I the first brown person in there home and whom have they have ignored?
To consider that Eleanor Roosevelt had an article in Ebony magazine in 1953 describing her friendship with Black people is worth noting. Patricia Bell-Scott: "ER admitted in this candid piece that she had had no significant contact with African Americans or any awareness of racial discrimination until she was in her mid-teens. Not until adulthood did she develop genuine friendships with blacks and relate to them as "social equals." The story of Eleanor Roosevelt finding an alternative site for Marian Anderson to sing is somewhat well known, and to learn of her connections with Pauli Murray is heartening in both directions,