Eleanor Roosevelt by Ilene Cooper

Author:Ilene Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams Books
Published: 2018-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

IT NEVER HURTS TO BE KIND

President Roosevelt won reelection for a second term in 1936 in a landslide, losing only two states. One element in his sweeping win was the support of the African American community. Traditionally, African Americans had voted for the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, who had freed the slaves. Herbert Hoover had received the majority of their votes in the 1932 election, but the New Deal legislation of the Roosevelt administration, as well as Eleanor’s personal advocacy for African American concerns, was swinging their votes to the Democrats.

With four more years of a Roosevelt administration ahead of her, Eleanor was again ready to use her position as First Lady to advance the cause of civil rights in ways large and small.

Moving a chair might not seem like a big deal, but it was in 1938, when Eleanor was attending the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama. On the first day of the large gathering, white and black attendees had mixed freely. When the police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor—later to become infamous for his cruel treatment of civil rights protesters—got wind of this, he sent police to the auditorium the next day to make sure segregation laws were enforced.

The police arrived at municipal auditorium and told the participants they had to segregate themselves according to race. Eleanor, who had taken a seat next to her friend, Mary Jane McLeod Bethune, was informed personally that she needed to get up and move to the white section. The First Lady had her own solution to the problem. She picked up her chair and placed it in the center aisle, on neither the black nor the white side of the room. And there she sat for the rest of the program.

At Eleanor’s suggestion, Mary had already been appointed to an important post in the Roosevelt administration. She was named director of Negro Affairs for the National Youth Administration, where she successfully oversaw programs that helped tens of thousands of young black people find jobs or be accepted in job training programs. The governmental appointment didn’t stop Mary’s other civil rights activities, and because she was friends with the First Lady, her concerns got a fair hearing at the White House.

There was, however, something about the relationship between the two women that bothered Eleanor. It was her habit to give her women friends a friendly peck on the cheek when she greeted them. Yet she didn’t kiss Mary, and she knew it was because she didn’t feel comfortable kissing a black person. One day, without thinking about it, she kissed her. Eleanor’s daughter, Anna, reported years later that this kiss was a personal milestone for her mother.

Another prominent African American woman was affected by the actions of the First Lady. The opera singer Marian Anderson was known around the world for her magnificent contralto voice. She had already sung for a small group at the White House. But in 1939, Anderson’s manager wanted to hold a concert in Washington, D.

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