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 Page A

leader,Jay Lovestone, a formerCommunist Party USA official who had been expelled for criticizing party dogma and strategy,Murray received an extensive “critique” of Soviet communism. What she learned was vital for counteracting Communists who participated in liberal groups with which she worked.
    Repulsed by the Communist appeal “Self-Determination for the Black Belt,” which had the uncomfortable sound of “another form of segregation,” Murray disavowed the CPO in 1938. While she never flirted with communism again, she was still closer ideologically to the democraticsocialistNorman Thomas, for whom she voted in the1932 presidential election, than to NAACP officials who backed FDR and New Dealers in the Democratic Party.
    Was the issue her temperament?A self-described individualist with a first-class intellect, Murray found that bureaucracies tried her patience.Her assertive letters to UNC officials bothered black veteran leaders, such as NAACP assistant executive secretaryRoy Wilkins. Even friends, such as National Urban League executiveLester B. Granger, who praised Murray’s courage, and New York Post reporterTed Poston, who admired her “literary brilliance,” saw her audacity and proclivity for working to the point of exhaustion as signs of emotional instability.
    Was the problem herfamily history? If Marshall, a native Baltimorean only two years older than Murray, had not heard about her father’s institutionalization and murder at theHospital for the Negro Insane or the false rumor that her mother had committed suicide, he certainly knew Murray’s older brother,William H. Murray Jr.They had been classmates atHoward University School of Law before William, whom Marshall remembered as a talented student, dropped out with financial and emotional difficulties.
    Or was the problem Murray’spersonal life?Because the association was leery of taking on female plaintiffs, especially unmarried women, for fear that something untoward might surface and damage their reputation and the case, the fact that Murray presented herself as single and kept her marriage to Billy Wynn secret was problematic. Even the marriage, given their eight-year estrangement without divorce, would have been cause for concern. Or perhaps NAACP leaders had seen Murray’s essay and her photo as theboy Pete inNancy Cunard’s Negro anthology. WalterWhite, for example, was an award-winning author well connected to the New York literary elite. It is also possible, considering the questionable privacy of medical records in the 1930s, that Marshall got wind of Murray’s 1937 hospitalization in Amityville, New York, probably at theLong Island Home for Nervous Invalids. Although she was admitted with symptoms of anxiety and exhaustion, her conversations with the medical staff marked the beginning of a decade-long “inner conflict,” during which she acknowledged her attraction to women but rebuffed the medical diagnosis of homosexuality.Murray’s notes reveal that she was a patient for eight to ten days between the third and fourth weeks of December. Her care and treatment included a thorough physical examination, wholesome meals, psychotherapy, rest, and relaxation.
    As a practice, the NAACP regarded the most desirable plaintiffs as those with no arrest record, no prior association with radical groups, particularlyCommunists, and no confirmed or alleged family orpersonal history of mental illness, which by definition included homosexuality. (TheAmerican Psychiatric Association would not declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1973.) Even ifMarshall knew nothing of Murray’s hospitalization or sexuality, he and NAACP officials would have likely looked upon her manner, close relationships with women, and male-sounding first name with suspicion.
    Murray would never know the extent to which any of these issues might have influenced Marshall and his colleagues. What she did believe for the rest of her life was that there was more behind