'Firebrand' celebrates a friendship that made a difference

Once upon a time — and not so very long ago, really — people within the political system and those working outside it could set aside their differences long enough to bring about meaningful change, and even get together for tea.

With the grace, compassion and diligent attention to detail that characterized both its principal subjects, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship by Patricia Bell-Scott (Knopf, 360 pp., ***½ out of four stars) recreates that not-so-ordinary time. This is the story of Pauli Murray, an introspective African-American writer turned militant activist, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the most powerful and influential first lady (if not American woman) of the 20th century, who gradually established a warm, durable bond based on a mutually passionate desire for greater human rights and opportunities.

This unlikely communion of souls began with a letter Murray wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in December 1938. A speech he gave at the University of North Carolina praising the school for social progress prompted Murray, who by then was working for the WPA in Harlem, to type a blistering, impassioned letter begging to differ with his assessment. She had been denied admittance solely because she was black.

“[T]he un-Christian, un-American conditions in the South make it impossible for me and other young Negroes to live there and continue our faith in the ideals of democracy and Christianity,” Murray wrote.

A copy was forwarded to Mrs. Roosevelt — or “ER” as she is referred to throughout by author Bell-Scott — who provided the White House’s only direct reply: “I understand perfectly,” the first lady wrote back. “But great changes come slowly…The South is changing, but don’t push too fast.”

So began decades of correspondence and intermittent one-to-one meetings between “Murray, the impatient youth and ER, the cautious elder.” Over the years, as Bell-Scott chronicles, Murray’s insistence on action, which early on grated on ER’s forbearance, galvanized the first lady’s abiding sense of injustice. That in turn pressed her spirit-is-willing-but-politics-is-politics-minded husband to speak out more against lynching and racial segregation (even though the president was trying to keep most of the Southern Democratic politicians in his corner during the Depression and the Second World War).

Separately and together, Murray and ER blazed trails in their respective campaigns against race, class and gender inequality and for global human rights.

Bell-Scott, for all the compact fluency of her prose, is most effective when she lets her two protagonists speak, especially in their correspondence — which, judging from the eloquence of their rhetoric and the abiding urgency of their concerns, deserve a separate volume of their own.

Because far less is remembered today about Murray than Roosevelt, Bell-Scott’s book is most revelatory when talking about her accomplished and, at times, arduous life. Whatever stresses and indignities she faced as a black woman, her achievements were a resounding rejoinder. Besides her critically acclaimed poetry and memoirs, Murray received three law degrees and, in 1977 at age 66, she was ordained an Episcopal priest.

The “First Lady” remains a standard to which her successors, including a 2016 presidential candidate, have often aspired to meet. “The Firebrand” is someone whose inspiration is sorely needed — and not only by black women.