Q: Talk about Eleanor and the NAACP?
A: Just to be on the board of the NAACP, back then, it's not like being on the board of the NAACP in the fifties. NAACP was still considered a radical left-wing organization, which it was not. "Left-wing" then meant changing even minutely the racial equation in this country. See, when they wanted to integrate that housing development, the Sojourner Truth housing development in Detroit, they were not talking about racial mixing, getting married, and that sort of thing. Just: "We don't want you here. You're not supposed to be in our community. You ought to be glad you're living, to be in my country."
And of course, she addressed herself to that. She said, "How are you going to fight a war for democracy when people who were brought here against their will are denied access by people who came out of desperation?" See, the totality of all of these statements and where she placed her body, being there, told a great story that separated her from most Americans, white or black. Took a lot of guts for her to do this. The FBI was anti-Eleanor Roosevelt. Investigated her over and over. And she knew it. But she held her ground. I think this woman discovered something about herself that she didn't know. And the more she discovered herself, the more she became sensitized to what was happening to black people.
She expressed herself in an article in a new publication in the early forties called Negro Digest, published by a young man named John H. Johnson, who took that publication's success and developed Ebony that we all know about, on what she would do if she were a Negro. And she had to concede that if she were black, she would experience great bitterness. She used the word "bitterness" over the treatment of her people and herself. And of course, after that, people attacked Negro Digest as a communist newspaper. That was the easiest way out, you know, to call somebody a communist. And the fact is she never withered except on occasions she would buckle a little bit. And it doesn't mean that she agreed with everything that A. Philip Randolph and Walter White and Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston and all the others did. She would differ with them, as you will learn later. She did have some differences about the March on Washington. But they were not strong differences.
And now you can give her credit, too much credit now. You can give her too much credit if you're not careful, by implying that she was the cause of the Negro movements of that time, the civil rights movements. This came from black people themselves. They didn't need an Eleanor Roosevelt to protest. And when she was a bit soft on certain issues, as on the March on Washington in 1941, they went right ahead. She didn't come out blatantly, openly, and say, "It shouldn't be. I'm against it." But she let it be known in private meetings.
For an example, there are those who suspected that maybe her husband had put her up to trying to kill the March on Washington in a meeting held with Mayor LaGuardia of New York, Walter White, and A. Philip Randolph, and of course Mrs. Roosevelt. They met in his office to try to calm down the March on Washington. And she had some opposition based on what could have been her sincere appraisals of that situation. She said, "You got all these white policemen here, and you're going to bring in 100,000 people. We don't know what could happen. In the middle of a war, you could have a great tragedy here. What would they do? Where would they stay?" She had some grave doubts about the feasibility of a March on Washington. But the fact that you had an A. Philip Randolph, who was intractable on that issue, he didn't wither a bit. And they forced President Roosevelt, her husband, to issue Executive Order 8802, the first executive order dealing with anything having to do with black people since the Civil War. But he did it. And that was one of the great, great victories scored during World War II for us.
Q: Brown v. Board of Education, in the fifties, wasn't implemented. She worked hard to implement it?
A: Eleanor Roosevelt, in the wake of Brown versus Board of Education, not only supported it; she was relentless. And she wanted everybody to know where she stood. She wanted it implemented. She didn't even want black people being too cautious about the implementation of that Supreme Court decision. She made it clear to everybody that she was supporting Daisy Bates, head of the local NAACP in Little Rock, and those youngsters. She was with them all the way. And I think shortly after that she made a statement to the effect that if you don't take a stand, you've got to leave the impression that you're cowardly. She used the word "cowardly", which meant that she had been growing firmer and firmer. She had a deep resentment, the more she heard of both Southern Senators and Congressmen who would just blatantly use the word "nigger," who blatantly and unnecessarily wanted to segregate people.
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