Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Does it mean that we, at last, may participate freely, and on the basis of equality, with our fellow citizens in working out the problems of this democracy? Does it mean that Negro students in the South will be allowed to sit down with white students and study a problem which is fundamental and mutual to both groups? Does it mean that University of North Carolina is ready to open its doors to Negro students . . . ? Or does it mean that everything you said has no meaning for us as Negroes, that we are again to be set aside and passed over for more important problems?

  Prophetically, the letter closed, “Do you feel, as we do, that the ultimate test of democracy in the United States will be the way in which it solves its Negro problem?”

  The letter stirred Eleanor deeply: “I have read the copy of the letter you sent me,” she wrote Miss Murray.

  and I understand perfectly, but great changes come slowly. I think they are coming, however, and sometimes it is better to fight hard with conciliatory methods. The South is changing, but don’t push too hard. There is a great change in youth, for instance, and that is a hopeful sign.29

  She was attracted to people, especially young people, who showed fight and indignation, and she encouraged Pauli Murray to write regularly and invited her to Hyde Park. When Miss Murray became secretary of National Sharecroppers Week, Eleanor spoke at the dinner. Eleanor also backed her in her decision to go to law school, and, as in the case of Mrs. Bethune, watched over her when she became ill.

  Pauli Murray helped her understand the mood of Negro youth. So did Richard Wright. Because Wright was “a product of the WPA writers’ enterprise,” his publisher, Harper’s, sent her Uncle Tom’s Children, his first collection of stories. “It is beautifully written,” Eleanor wrote the publisher, “and so vivid that I had a most unhappy time reading it.” In all four stories a mob goes to work, and Wright showed with great graphic power that violence was the way civilization kept the Negro in his place. Wright thanked her for the help she had given him in bringing his book to public attention, adding, “I am at present engaged upon a long novel dealing with Negro juvenile delinquency, with Chicago’s Southside as the background and locale.” He was applying for a Guggenheim grant in order to finish it, and asked if he could use her name as reference. “Certainly,” she replied. If the racial problem was to be dealt with it had to be understood, and Wright’s vivid writing helped the white community to understand what it had done to the Negro people.30

  “It is true,” she wrote a woman in Philadelphia who complained that Negroes were ruining the neighborhood,

  that it may take years to educate the great mass of colored people to be good in desirable neighborhoods; but we are largely to blame. We brought them here as slaves and we have never given them equal chances for education, even after we emancipated them. They must be given the opportunity to become the kind of people that they should, and I often marvel that they are as good as they are in view of the treatment which they have received. . . . You are suffering from a difficult situation and it is always hard on the individuals who reap the results of generations of wrong doing.31

  She refused to allow Negro “backwardness” to become a pretext for denying the Negro equality of treatment, but with Negro audiences she was equally firm in urging them not to permit white injustice to keep them from helping themselves and from putting forward their best efforts. Anyone in a minority group, she told Hampton Institute students,

  has to strive to do a better job, not just for himself as an individual, but because it is going to help the whole group that he belongs to and because it is going to have an effect on what all the others are going to be able to do. Every time we fail, every time we do not do our best, we don’t just let ourselves down, we let down all the others that we might help if we did our best and if we did succeed.32

  In February, 1936, Eleanor invited Marian Anderson, the Negro contralto, to sing at the White House. Thirty-three years later Miss Anderson, a woman of imposing majesty who had a voice that even in speech still enthralled her listeners, recalled the warmth and friendliness of the president and Mrs. Roosevelt that evening.33 She might perform in the White House but in 1939 when Howard University approached the Daughters of the American Revolution to arrange for the use of Constitution Hall, the one auditorium in Washington large enough to hold the capacity audience that was expected to come out to hear Miss Anderson, the DAR refused and its president said that no Negro artist would be permitted to appear there.

  People were aghast and Miss Anderson’s fellow-musicians were outraged, but what turned a local episode of bigotry into a world-wide cause célèbre was Eleanor Roosevelt’s decision to resign from the DAR. She did not reach it lightly. She was never sure resignations were effective. When Elinor Morgenthau had been excluded from the Colony Club because she was Jewish, Eleanor had quietly quit that group, but insisted she did so because she was no longer in New York City enough to make use of the club’s facilities. An abrasive staged resignation over anti-Semitism, she felt, would have confirmed the ladies in their prejudice rather than softened hearts. But the DAR’s ban on Negroes was a public matter from the very beginning; its openly proclaimed lily-white policy, if not challenged, was likely to set back the evolution of a more decent attitude in white America and further deepen the sense of estrangement of Negro America.

  A few weeks earlier she had attended the founding meeting in Birmingham of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, an organization which had the support of the CIO and southern New Dealers. There were a large number of Negro delegates, and the Birmingham city authorities insisted that the town’s segregation ordinance be complied with or the conference would not be allowed to proceed. The delegates decided to go ahead with the meeting rather than disband, but Eleanor, coming in with Mrs. Bethune, refused to observe the segregation order. The police told her she was violating the law, so she had her chair placed in the center aisle, which the police had insisted must separate the white from the Negro delegates. Her action electrified black America. A National Conference of Negro Youth, the most restless, impatient group in the Negro community, had little affirmative to say about Washington’s policies, but it enthusiastically passed a resolution thanking her for her moral courage in Birmingham.34

  The DAR’s defense of racism posed the same public challenge that Birmingham’s enforcement of its segregation ordinance had. Eleanor talked with Walter White and others about whether she should resign, and finally she reached her decision. “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,” she wrote in her column:

  The question is, if you belong to an organization and disapprove of an action which is typical of a policy, shall 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 in until I had at least made a fight and been defeated. Even then I have as a rule accepted my defeat and decided either that I was wrong or that I was perhaps a little too far ahead of the thinking of the majority of that time. I have often found that the thing in which I was interested was done some years later. 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 of in the press. To remain as a member implies approval of that action, and therefore I am resigning.35

  Her resignation, said Walter White, “focused world-wide attention on the episode.” It touched an awakening white conscience, and both conservative and middle-ground citizens approved. “I want you to know how proud I was of you the other day,” Cousin Corinne Alsop, a staunch Republican and anti-New Dealer, wrote Eleanor from Avon; “you are the first lady of the land in your own right!” Dr. Peabody, the aging but still alert rector of Groton, found the action of the DAR “in line with the prejudice, I might say cruelty, with which we have dealt with the negro people. Your courage in taking this definite stand called for my admiration.�
��36

  There were dissenting voices, but a poll published March 19 by the American Institute of Public Opinion, Dr. George Gallup’s organization, showed that 67 per cent of those polled approved of Mrs. Roosevelt’s resignation, while 33 per cent opposed. In the blaze of public attention generated by Eleanor’s act, Walter White and Marian Anderson’s manager, Sol Hurok, came up with the idea of a free, open-air concert by Miss Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial. White went to Washington to speak to Oscar Chapman, the assistant secretary of the Interior, who, although Virginia-born, immediately rallied to the idea† and took it in to Ickes, who, “equally excited,” hurried to the White House to catch the president before he left for Warm Springs to ask for his approval, which was given. A sponsoring committee was set up with Mrs. Caroline O’Day, the Georgia-born New York congresswoman-at-large, as chairman because White felt that Mrs. Roosevelt should not further expose herself “since reactionaries in the South were already pillorying her for her attitude on the Negro.”

  The concert took place on a Sunday afternoon. Ickes, who presided, estimated there were 75,000 people massed at the base of the memorial and extending up the Mall toward the Washington Monument, a majority of them Negro. The singer was almost overcome by the vastness of the crowd. Silencing the ovation with a slight wave of her hand, she began her recital. “America” was her opening number, and the liberty-breathing lines poured from her as if they were “a prayer.” She ended with “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” a gentle lamentation that stirred its hushed audience to its roots. “I have never heard such a voice,” Ickes wrote in his diary; “the whole setting was unique, majestic, and impressive.”38

  Eleanor thought it wise not to attend. “Thanks in large measure to you,” Walter White reported to her, “the Marian Anderson concert on Sunday was one of the most thrilling experiences of our time. Only one thing marred it—that you couldn’t be there. But I understand thoroughly the reason you could not come.”39 A new anxiety had arisen. Youthful members of the NAACP planned to picket the DAR during their annual conference in Washington, and Eleanor appealed to White to see if there were anything he could do to prevent it:

  In the first place Washington is a city where one could have serious trouble and I think it would not do any good to picket the D.A.R. It would only create bad feeling all the way around. At present the D.A.R. Society is condemned for the stand it took and if picketing is done it may result in the sympathy swinging to the other side.

  He had used almost identical language, White assured her, in urging that the plan be abandoned, and he had talked with board members of the NAACP and they agreed. The plan was abandoned.40

  The Marian Anderson concert had important political consequences. Ickes dwelt on them in his diary, noting that up to the last, “no word was received from Garner, Farley, or Henry Wallace to the invitations sent to them to permit their names to be used as sponsors.” But it was Garner, a leading conservative candidate to succeed Roosevelt, “who really got hurt,” and when a furious Garner and his friends sought to spread the word that the vice president had never received a telegraph of invitation to be a sponsor, Roosevelt outlined to Ickes what he ought to tell Pearson and Allen “in order to nail down the story. . . . There was no doubt,” wrote Ickes, that the president “enjoyed the tight hole in which the Vice President found himself. Here he is, a vigorous candidate for President, putting himself in a position of offending the Negro vote everywhere, although in several Northern states the Negro vote is likely to be the decisive vote in 1940.”41

  The politics of the racial issue interested Eleanor because she understood to what extent political considerations moved the men who held the power of decision in Washington. When Walter White invited the president to make a radio speech at the NAACP national conference to be held in June, 1940, a few weeks before the Democratic convention, Eleanor forwarded the invitation to the president, with the note, “It is a great chance to say some wise things to the Negro & to the rest of the nation!” The president declined the invitation, but Eleanor accepted the one extended to her.

  Even as she counseled her young Negro friends to exercise patience, Eleanor sensed and sympathized with their bitterness and resentment. Addressing a meeting of the National Negro Congress to commemorate the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, she called upon America to finish the job Lincoln had begun seventy-five years ago. She would not be silent, even in a campaign year, although some New Dealers were worried about a white backlash. When Will Alexander left the Farm Security Administration in June, 1940, to become vice president of the Rosenwald Fund, he went in to say good-by to his boss, Henry Wallace, who looked up and said, “Will, don’t you think the New Deal is undertaking to do too much for the Negro?”42

  Roosevelt, too, was restive under Negro pressure. A letter that was drafted for his signature on the occasion of the anniversary of Walter White’s twenty-five years of service to the Negro people was sent back with the memo, “Miss Tully brought this in. Says the President doesn’t think too much of this organization—not to be too fulsome—tone it down a bit.”43

  The collapse of France in the spring of 1940 launched the country upon a vast preparedness effort and placed at the head of the Negro community’s agenda the Negro’s role in the defense effort. Between Wendell Willkie and Roosevelt, Negro leaders were going to drive as hard a bargain as they could with the administration in return for Negro support. Eleanor was the channel through which the Negroes maintained their pressure on the president, and because she was effective in gaining consideration of Negro demands, she was also instrumental in keeping the Negro vote Democratic.

  Early in July Mrs. Bethune came to Eleanor with a bundle of papers citing chapter and verse on discrimination against Negroes in the armed forces, and the covering memorandum said there was “grave apprehension among Negroes lest the existing inadequate representation and training of colored persons in the armed forces may lead to the creation of labor battalions and other forms of discrimination against them in the event of war.” Mrs. Bethune urged that the newly appointed secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, name an outstanding Negro as his aide to insure fair treatment of Negroes in the armed services. A few days later Pa Watson called Mrs. Bethune, and, on the basis of a directive he had received from General Marshall’s office, informed her that as part of the increase in the Regular Army there were to be several new Negro units.44

  The Negro leadership bristled at this response. Walter White, accompanied by Aubrey Williams, hurried to Hyde Park to see Eleanor. They left with her a letter Thurgood Marshall had sent Stimson which listed the services that excluded Negroes and warned that when conscription was enacted, Negroes who were refused the right to serve in all branches would prefer to go to jail.

  Eleanor turned this material over to the president, who asked his staff to remind him to take it with him to the cabinet meeting on August 16 and speak to the secretaries of war and Navy about the matter. Four days later Stimson wrote the president:

  If selective service is approved, colored personnel will be inducted and trained in the Army of the United States in the ratio the available negro manpower bears the available white manpower. This personnel will be allotted to all arms and services except the Air Corps and the Signal Corps generally in proportion to the strength of those arms and services. With respect to aviation, there has been no development of colored personnel in this field. Therefore the War Department arranged with the Civil Aeronautics Administration to make a beginning by starting an aviation school at Glenview, Ill.45

  Roosevelt sent a copy of Stimson’s letter to his wife “for your information,” and she sent it on to Walter White. But the Negro agenda was broader. James B. Nabrit, Jr., of Howard University wrote to Eleanor.46 “As has usually been the case for the past seven years, whenever Negroes are unduly disturbed they have turned to you,” he began, and asked that Negroes be included in every level of the selective-service machinery. “I think this should undoubtedly be done
,” Eleanor wrote in a follow-up memo to her husband, “and you should insist that in every locality where there is an appreciable percentage of Negroes, there should be one Negro at least on the draft board or on an advisory committee.” Roosevelt’s reply was not wholly responsive: “We have just put a Negro on Fred Osborn’s Board,” he informed her.47 Meanwhile the requests of the Negro leadership for a cabinet-level meeting on integration in the armed services had not been granted. Eleanor sent her husband a pointed reminder:

  I have just heard that no meeting was ever held between colored leaders like Walter White, Mr. Hill and Mr. Randolph, with the Secretary of War and Navy on the subject of how the colored people can participate in the services.

  There is a growing feeling amongst the colored people, and they are creating a feeling among many white people. They feel they should be allowed to participate in any training that is going on, in the aviation, army, navy and have opportunities for service.

  I would suggest that a conference be held with the attitude of the gentlemen: these are our difficulties, how do you suggest that we make a beginning to change the situation?