Q: What is Eleanor's legacy?
A: She has a legacy that would apply beyond just race relations. Here is a woman who did not object to the continual discovery of self, of what she was about. I don't think she knew that she would become the Eleanor Roosevelt that she did, simply by being the president's wife. I do think that she had a body of logic and facts and what have you in her mind about the way the world ought to be. There was just no way that she could have the treatment of black people conform with what the war was all about. There was just no way she could justify the grandiose statements made, you know, the four freedoms and all of the idealism that came out of World War II, and then just sit there and see black people treated like nothing, like they were sub-human beings. She just couldn't do it. For the same reason that she took action on the 38 Jews that had been turned back just because they didn't have a passport, and sent back into what amounted to be a concentration camp.
She took individual actions too, I think, not just on the broader issues. Like somebody about to be lynched, some of the local uprisings like the thing in Tennessee. She was on a committee there to take some action on the mistreatment of black war veterans. And remember, we were still lynching black people in this country, even in post-World-War-II America. Lynchings with impunity. Nobody going to jail. People confessing. She was around when Emmett Till was killed, the Chicago teenager in Mississippi. And she saw what happened, where the lynchers were heroes. There was no way in the world that an Eleanor Roosevelt could sit quietly by and see heroism be awarded to people who lunch folks willy-nilly. Just no way. And she recognized it, and evidently she came to terms with herself and said, "I'm going to take a stand all the way." She was taking stands, you know, right before she died.
I think that she left another message -- you might say a subtle message, a message by inference, to black America as well as white Americans. And that message would say: "Don't write off all white people; that most of us too are the victims of culture, prior training, misconceptions; that you do have white friends that you don't even know, and that you will have more in years to come, once the truth is out and there are enough courageous people to represent that truth." And I think you could give herself as a candid example, her presence, her willingness to sacrifice and to put pressure on a president who didn't need any more pressure. I think that is essentially a message that maybe she wanted black people to have: "Don't write off white people as being innately racist; that this can overcome; and that we shall overcome."
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