My admiration starts with her resilience during her childhood. She was rejected as unattractive and too serious by her beautiful socialite mother, who called her young daughter “Granny”; neglected by the handsome and charming alcoholic father she adored; and told to care for her brothers. She was orphaned and, by the age of ten, had lost one of her brothers to illness.
Raised in the home of her maternal grandmother, Eleanor craved affection and considered herself an “ugly duckling.” She received limited private tutoring until she left for a “finishing” school outside London, where she thrived under the direction of the headmistress, Marie Souvestre, who encouraged independent thinking among her students. Souvestre mentored Eleanor, who flourished at the school until she was ordered home in 1902 at the age of eighteen to make her social debut.
Back home, Eleanor began a courting relationship with her fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and they became engaged the following year. Franklin’s formidable mother, Sara Ann Delano, opposed the marriage. But her son was determined, and on March 17, 1905, Eleanor and Franklin were married, with Eleanor’s uncle, President Theodore Roosevelt, giving the bride away.
Eleanor had six children, but one tragically died in infancy. Having lost her own mother when she was eight, Eleanor hoped Sara would be the mother she never had; instead, her marriage was complicated by her mother-in-law’s constant interference and demands. Sara paid all the bills and controlled their lives. She even gave them a home connected to hers—without any locks on the connecting doors.
Sara also fought to control the raising of Eleanor’s children, telling them: “Your mother only bore you, I am more your mother than your mother is.” It was another blow to the still-insecure Eleanor, who later wrote that she did not consider herself suited for motherhood. With no space of her own, either to relax or parent as she wished, Eleanor reached the breaking point and told her husband that Sara’s dominance made her feel like a stranger in her own home.
In 1918, Eleanor discovered her husband’s affair with her social secretary. She was devastated. Franklin rejected her offer of divorce, which in those days was very difficult to obtain for a woman. She decided to stay in the marriage (which can be, as I know well, a “gutsy” decision). She found her voice and redoubled her commitment to alleviating poverty, pursuing peace, and helping veterans.
And then, once again, adversity struck.
When Franklin was stricken with polio in 1921, Eleanor took over his care, probably saving his life. The doctor treating Franklin praised her as a “rare wife” who bore “your heavy burden most bravely,” and proclaimed her “one of my heroines.” That might have been the first recorded time anyone really spoke about the depth of Eleanor’s strength and determination. She took charge of Franklin’s recovery and stood up to her mother-in-law by championing Franklin’s potential for a future political career, even though his mother wanted him to retire from public life. Eleanor entered politics in New York on behalf of her husband and other Democrats in the 1920s, and advocated for a progressive agenda. When Franklin was elected governor in 1928 and then president in 1932, Eleanor emerged not only as an activist first lady but as an effective—and controversial—public leader for the rest of her life.
“Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.”
—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Allida Black, the American historian and founding editor of The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, described this period of Eleanor’s life: “In the twenties, Eleanor Roosevelt found her voice, and Franklin and Eleanor found new ways to complement, support, and care for one another. They had battled betrayal and polio, loneliness and despair in ways that made them both courageous, more hopeful, more skilled, and more independent. They forged a compromise that allowed them to grow into the leaders they wanted to be and the nation needed them to be.”
Through her time as first lady, she encountered controversy, backlash, vicious personal attacks, and even assassination plots against her. After FDR’s death in 1945, Eleanor continued her activism into the next chapter of her life. President Harry Truman invited her to join the first U.S. delegation to the newly created United Nations. She accepted but was unsure of her role and aware that she was the only woman and the only member without a college degree. By the time she left the UN seven years later, she was regarded as a skilled debater, smart negotiator, and stalwart supporter. She took up the cause of the sixty million displaced persons in Europe and toured the camps where they were held, seeing and hearing firsthand the horrors of the war and the Holocaust. She used her writing and speaking to urge Americans to learn that “you cannot live for yourselves alone. You depend on the rest of the world and the rest of the world depends on you.”
Her greatest public achievement was as the chair of the UN Human Rights Committee. She oversaw thousands of hours of contentious debate and traveled thousands of miles to discuss the idea of a universal declaration of human rights (UDHR) to guide the world forward after the horrors of two world wars in fifty years. She worked relentlessly to convince the member countries to accept the UDHR, which embodied the most far-reaching and advanced definition of social, economic, cultural, civil, and political rights in human history. “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?” she asked. “In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”
Eleanor continued to use her visibility throughout the 1950s and until her death in 1962 to speak out for racial justice and in favor of school desegregation and voting rights for black Americans. Her outspokenness brought death threats from the Ku Klux Klan, but she persisted, pushing politicians of both parties to live up to our nation’s founding ideals. “Do what you feel in your heart to be right—for you’ll be criticized anyway,” she once said. “You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”
There’s no easy way to describe Eleanor’s impact on our country. She was born into privilege but became a teacher, journalist, party leader, citizen activist, lecturer, writer, and diplomat. She stood up against racism, advocated for the trade union movement, worked to alleviate poverty and create jobs during the Great Depression, advised her husband on New Deal programs (whether he wanted her advice or not!), and held her own press conferences in the White House. She advised against the internment of Japanese Americans, urged women to join civil defense work and enlist in the military, and became FDR’s emissary during World War II, traveling to visit American troops on battlefields across the Pacific theater. At the same time, she published a weekly column and answered thousands of letters. She wrote 28 books, 580 articles, and 8,000 columns describing her life and views.
In her last book, Tomorrow Is Now, she stressed that America’s greatness sprang from the power of its ideas, not its economic or military power. She worried about our country, and she described her purpose for writing this last book in its introduction as what she wanted to tell her fellow Americans: “One woman’s attempt to analyze what problems there are to be met, one citizen’s approach to ways in which they may be met, and one human being’s bold affirmation that, with imagination, with courage, with faith in ourselves and our cause—the fundamental dignity of all mankind—they will be met.”
During my time as first lady, I used to kid people that I’d have imaginary conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt. In reality, however, those interior
dialogues were helpful. I often asked myself: “What would Eleanor do?” Many times, I’d arrive somewhere to do something only to discover Eleanor had been there first. There was finally one thing I did as first lady that Eleanor Roosevelt had not done before me: winning a Grammy in 1997 in the spoken word category for my book It Takes a Village. I was surprised and delighted. But I quickly realized that, had Eleanor ever recorded one of her books, she probably would have beaten me to the Grammy stage as well.
I still often think of Eleanor. Her words, and her example of a courageous life well lived, are as important and relevant today as they always have been.
Elizabeth Peratrovich
Chelsea
Thanks to Mr. Ellis Turner, the same excellent history teacher who introduced me to Margaret Knight and Madam C. J. Walker, I learned about several American heroes I likely wouldn’t have otherwise encountered in a high school class, particularly in the mid-1990s. One of those heroes was Elizabeth Peratrovich.
A member of the Tlingit tribe in Alaska, growing up in the 1920s, Elizabeth experienced the brutal reality of segregation and racism from a young age. Some of her first memories of education involved a school with no Alaska Native teachers, where students who spoke Tlingit were sometimes punished for having the audacity to speak in their native language. (The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted citizenship to American Indian and Alaska Native people born in U.S. territories, but it didn’t guarantee them the same rights—far from it.)
When Elizabeth moved to Juneau with her husband, Roy, to raise their three young children, discrimination greeted her everywhere. A sign at a local general store read “No Natives Allowed.” Restaurants boasted “All-White Help.” As they made the rounds looking for a house, they met one landlord after another who refused to rent to them. Though they were American citizens, Alaska Natives were often subject to attempts to prevent them from exercising their right to vote, including by forcing them to take literacy tests and not providing voting information in native languages.
The last straw for Elizabeth came when, having finally found a place to live, she discovered that her children couldn’t go to the school a block away: It was reserved for white children only. Elizabeth decided to take matters into her own hands and went to meet with the superintendent. By the time she left his office, she had persuaded him that her children should be able to attend the school of their choice. Her son Roy Jr. became the first Alaska Native child to attend an all-white school in Juneau.
The years surrounding World War II saw even more hostility toward Alaska’s Native people—including the forced relocation to camps of thousands of men, women, children, and elders from villages in the Aleutian Islands. Elizabeth and her husband, by now leaders in their community, helped draft an anti-discrimination bill. With the support of the governor, it was presented to the legislature in 1943, but failed. Because the legislature met every other year, they had two years to prepare for their next attempt. Elizabeth, then in her early thirties, hit the road, traveling by plane and dog team to remote villages, to explain why the anti-discrimination bill was necessary and to implore Alaska Natives to vote and even run for office.
In 1945, the anti-discrimination bill passed the Alaska House. This time, it came down to a vote in the Alaska Senate. The legislative gallery was packed. Elizabeth sat in the back, knitting and watching, her young daughter at her knee. The debate was heated, with members of the legislature lobbing racist slurs and offensive comments. At one point, State Senator Allen Shattuck demanded: “Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites, with five thousand years of recorded civilization behind us?” He said this despite the fact that Native people had lived in Alaska for thousands of years before white fur traders arrived around the time of the American Revolution. White supremacy was front and center.
At the end of the discussion, per tradition, the floor was opened for anyone else who wanted to speak. One person stepped forward: Elizabeth. Her head held high, she began to speak calmly and deliberately. “I would not have expected that I, who am barely out of ‘savagery,’ would have to remind gentlemen with five thousand years of recorded civilization behind them, of our Bill of Rights.” The gallery burst into raucous applause. (When Mr. Turner read us this exchange in history, our entire class applauded, too. I love that the boys applauded this strong woman.)
“Rich and poor, strong and weak gave their help in this difficult fight. All this without hate, notoriety, or malice. Finally, Alaska pulled herself out of her deep unnecessary sleep and the laws began to change. Why? Because people were awakened to their obligation to their fellow men.”
—ELIZABETH PERATROVICH
The bill passed. Nearly twenty years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Alaska became the first state in the country to pass nondiscrimination legislation, providing for “full and equal accommodations, facilities, and privileges to all citizens in places of public accommodations within the jurisdiction of the territory of Alaska.” Decades later, the day it was signed into law, February 16, was recognized by the Alaska Legislature as Elizabeth Peratrovich Day.
As for Elizabeth, she kept going. She confronted the editor of the local newspaper over biased reporting, helped to revise the Alaska juvenile code, and fought for access to health care for Native communities. The Tlingit people treasure public speaking and storytelling, and Elizabeth drew on her talent and rich cultural traditions to argue against injustice. She believed the greatest barrier to equality was ignorance, and she dedicated her life to speaking the truth, no matter how vocal her opposition. Elizabeth’s work is far from done. As recently as 2014, it took litigation to force Alaska to provide voting information in Yup’ik, Inupiaq, and Gwich’in languages. Her son Roy Jr. has taken up the mantle of telling his mother’s story, including in a book for young readers written with Annie Boochever, the wonderfully titled Fighter in Velvet Gloves: Alaska Civil Rights Hero Elizabeth Peratrovich. I can’t wait to read it with our kids when they’re a little older.
Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin
ROSA PARKS
CLAUDETTE COLVIN
Hillary and Chelsea
We’ve all heard—we hope—about that moment on the bus on December 1, 1955: Rosa Parks finished her shift at the Montgomery Fair Department Store, where she worked as an assistant tailor. Her shoulder was bothering her, so she stopped at the drugstore and considered buying a heating pad before deciding it was too expensive. When the bus pulled up, she climbed aboard, set down the packages she was carrying, and took a seat in the middle of the bus, where she and other black passengers were allowed to sit. Soon the white section filled up; a white passenger was left standing. The driver ordered Rosa to move, and she calmly said, “No.”
What happened that day was not just an isolated moment to be honored and put on a shelf in the history books. It was the result of countless acts of courage and sacrifice by people from many walks of life, including a community of organizers in Montgomery. It was also the tip of the iceberg, just the most prominent action of Rosa Parks’s lifetime of activism.
“I got on first and paid the same fare, and I didn’t think it was right for me to have to stand so someone else who got on later could sit down.”
—ROSA PARKS
Born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Rosa Parks grew up in segregated Alabama. Her grandparents had been enslaved; at night, the KKK rode through her town. After her father left, her mother raised her on her own, teaching her about black heroes like Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. As a little girl, Rosa read voraciously. She loved Sunday services at the AME Church, especially the songs. When Rosa was eleven years old, her mother enrolled her in Miss White’s School for Girls, where teachers encouraged her and her classmates to dream big and stand up for themselves. In eleventh grade, she dropped out of Alabama State Teachers College’s High School to help take care of her grandmother. After she met her husband, Raymond, he encouraged her to go back and finish her degree—which s
he did.
Raymond was Rosa’s partner in everything she did and the love of her life. She called him “the first real activist I ever met.” With his support, she went to workshops at the famous Highlander Folk School, studied black history, and learned the principles of grassroots organizing and nonviolent social action. In 1943, she went to a meeting of the Montgomery NAACP. She was the only woman in the room; the men asked her to take notes and, eventually, to serve as branch secretary. Rosa later admitted that she was “too timid to say no.”
Despite being private and reserved by nature, Rosa was outraged by the injustice she saw all around her. The 1940s were a daunting time to be a civil rights activist. Brown v. Board of Education was years away. Rosa and her fellow NAACP members wrote letters to Congress in support of an anti-lynching bill they knew was unlikely to pass. Over two decades before the Voting Rights Act, she tried several times to vote in Montgomery and was turned away each time. Twice, she “failed” the literacy test required of black voters, with no explanation as to what she had gotten wrong. On her third try, the test administrator saw her taking notes on the questions and her answers to reference later; she suddenly passed. Before she could vote, however, she had to pay years of back poll taxes.
In addition to voting rights, Rosa’s major passion was engaging young people. The NAACP’s Youth Council met most Sundays at her apartment. She encouraged them to be civically engaged and to challenge segregation. One of the most painfully visible frontiers of segregation in Montgomery was the bus, where black people made up the majority of riders but were frequently mistreated, humiliated, and forced to give up their seats to make room for white passengers.
The Book of Gutsy Women Page 24