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

carefully planned. It was “asking too much” of the South, he said, to admit Murray immediately.
    Campus polls and debate revealed bitter opposition and strong support for Murray’s application. There were rumors of alynching posse that promised to “tar and feather any ‘nigger’ who tried to” enroll. Then again, students likeJohn Alan Creedy were disturbed by the threats of violence, as well as the laurels President Roosevelt had conferred upon UNC. Creedy, editor of the campus-based Carolina Magazine , wrote in an editorial entitled “We, the Hypocrites…”: “We are a conservative University with a little surface froth of liberal foam to keep everyone fooled—even ourselves.” Then, to demonstrate “what sort of student” UNC was “missing by excluding Negroes,” he published Murray’s“Song of the Highway”poem in a special issue on black graduate education in the South.Fifty-seven years later, Creedy would still insist that UNC students missed out because the state denied Murray’s admission.
    The controversy over Murray’s application horrified heraunt Pauline. “Please be careful what you do about this,” she wrote.Still teaching in a black segregated school inDurham without benefit of a pension or tenure, she feared that school authorities would dismiss her or that angry whites would lynch her and set her home afire. Dame pleaded with daughter Pauli, “You can make it very uncomfortable for me.”
    North Carolina College for Negroes presidentJames E. Shepard, who was a “deeply respected friend” of Murray’sfamily, had a different take on the situation. Ablack conservative, he saw this as a chance to expand the programs and physical plant at his school, and he told the press exactly what legislators wanted to hear: “Negroes could do their best work only in their own schools.”
    Shepard’s political opportunism andAunt Pauline’s vulnerability troubled Murray, but it was impossible to challenge “deep-seated injustice” and accepted customs without “making people uncomfortable,” she reasoned. By the time the North Carolina legislature passed a bill enabling the creation of graduate and professional courses at black colleges, and then declined to appropriate funds for them, Murray was ready to go to court.
    · · ·
    WHEN MURRAY MET withThurgood Marshall in the winter of 1939 and he told her that the NAACP would not handle her appeal, she was flabbergasted. The association had a policy of taking only “airtight” cases, where the legal foundation for the grievance and the background of the plaintiff were flawless, he explained. Murray’sNew York State residency, notwithstanding her North Carolina roots, weakened her case. Furthermore, the loss of an expensive appeal was a risk the association could not afford. Murray countered with the argument that UNC had violated herFourteenth Amendment right to equal protection, as it did admit whites from out of state. Nevertheless, Marshall had made up his mind. If Murray wanted to go to court, she would have to proceed without NAACP backing.
    Murray left the meeting feeling as if she had been blindsided. Not only had Marshall turned down her case, hiscomment about the importance of a plaintiff’s background—“We have to be very careful about the people we select”—made her wonder if he found her undesirable. And, if so, why?
    Was it her politics? Murray was certainly to the left of NAACP leadership.Radicalized by her experiences with theWorkers’Education Project and a brief residency atBrookwoodLabor College—both of which immersed her in a community of labor and leftist activists—she had already been arrested for picketing the New York Amsterdam News in support of unionization. Booted fromCamp Tera on the charge that she was aCommunist, she set out “to educate” herself on the subject and, in the process, joined a group of“intellectual radicals” known as the CommunistParty (Opposition) in 1936. From the group’s