[inaudible conversations] good evening, everyone. Good evening. I am the director of the roosevelt house. It is a pleasure to welcome all of you to what is essentially, i guess, the first of our evening Public Programs to mark womens History Month. March is womens History Month. Please remember that part of the celebration is the opportunity to either have another look or a first look at the exhibition of womens suffrage material we have on view upstairs. I was going to say it is only until the end of the month but we are announcing we will extend the duration. Tonight we welcome two women who will be speaking about two special women. And it is a pleasure to welcome them to the home of Eleanor Roosevelt who played a big role in pollys activism. It is a particular pleasure to welcome you to murrays alma matter. She graduated january 1933. That was one of the many milestones in the life we will hear about it. Murray played a role in roosevelts life and they had a long friendship. You will hear all about the story and i will leave the rest of the story to the guest. Patricia bellscott is professor of womens study and family science at the university of georgia and a major chronicler of black lives matter. I hope some of you saw the New York Times book review. The coauthorer had high phrase for the firegrand and the first lady and noted that nothing was easy for pauli murray was a black woman attracted to women. But her relationship with roosevelt sustained for over three centuries. It was a tremendous book that has been 20 years in the making. I think that is what we authors call the wave. The value of the time you spent shines on every page. Thank you for being here and celebrating the book. Mel irvin painter is in conversation with her and she is the professor at Princeton University and one of the most esteemed historians and written many books that helped us understand history. Her most recent book, the history of white people, was published in 2010 and its influence was immediate and only growing. I met professor painter, i thought was a few years ago, but i am told it was 19 years ago, when she and i she is still young, i am a wreck but when she delivered a fort bow lecture on lincoln at the gettys berg college. Nel has evoked a career as an acclaimed visual artist and as far as i know has been equal to a few people i can think of Winston Churchill and george w. Bush. The second act in american art. But they should know on her website, this great historian, now identifies herself as mel painter, the painter formally known as the historian mel painter. I think that is pretty good. I got it out. I rehearsed it a lot. Please welcome professors Patricia Bellscott and mel irvin painter. [applause] would you like to Say Something about pauli murray . I would like to say how pleased i am to be here at an institution that was part of her alma mater. She came here in 1928 after having graduated from a Small High School in the south that only went to 11th grade which meant she had to come to new york and earn a Second High School diploma so she could be admitted. If you read her autobiography you would know that hunter, of all institutions she approached here, was the one place she found acceptance and encouragement. So she did come to hunter. Pauli had all kinds of financial trouble. So she did drop out after her sophomore year but she did eventually return. One of the things she always remembered and would credit hunter for were her relationships with two professors here. One was a Catherine Ryan heart who was an enlish professor and encouraged pauli to write. She had always wanted to write. As i was saying to my colleague, we know pauli primarily as an activist, the first africanamerican women to be ordained as an episcopal priest, but the thing she wanted to be known as first and foremost was as a writer. It was in Catherine Ryan guards class she wrote an essay that contained the seeds of the family memior and she would always be grateful for that professor for encouraging her. She also made lifelong friends here with whom she maintained contact throughout her life. So it was a very important experience for her to come to hunter. So i am grateful that she came because it helped make pauli who she became. All right. Well, hello. Nice to see you all. Thank you. I have several questions so i will pose these questions to professor bellscott and she will talk to them or ignore them as she prefers. Then as we get toward the end, there will be time for you to ask some questions as well. This is an extroidinary book of two extraordinary women. When you think about the times we are in now and you think about those two women, we kind of want things to get better as time goes along. But i think we are in a time that asks us to keep both times in mind. Our own time, and their time, well we have three times going on. You worked on this book for a very long time. So im going to ask you about your involvement as a writer, as a scholar, as a person attracted to these women as human beings, did you have any idea of what you would be finding when you began this project . Was how is it that the daughter, the granddaughter of a mixed slave from North Carolina and a woman whose ancestry entitled her from membership in the daughters of revolution, what drew these two women together . I was very curious about this unlikely friendship. So that got me started. Once i open that door i became interested in the relationship longterm. I wanted to know what were the dynamics of this friendship . What . What did each bring to the relationship . Because it was a long relationship i wanted to know how did it change over time . Also because i was looking at time i wanted to look at the historical backdrop so what that meant was not only was i looking at what was happening with each woman individually, i was looking at them within historical context. So that the curtain behind which the story unfolds we are looking at the depression, we are are looking at world war ii, we are looking at mccarthyism, we are looking at several major historical events and historical movements, early civil rights, the beginning of modern day women, more contemporary version of the womens movement. Each of these women had a role to play in all of those movements. Each was affected as an individual by these historical moments. I was trying to look at each individual woman, i was looking at the historical context, and context, and i was looking at overtime. Then as i continued with the project it occurred to me that it would probably be useful for readers for me to try to make some assessment about the impact of this friendship for the cause of social justice which was the passion that they shared. The cause of social justice and human rights. So, i ended up with more questions, what what drew these two unlikely women together impression . What was the nature of the friendship . What was the chemistry . How did they sustain the relationship . How did it change over time . What significance did it have for the cause of social justice and human rights . Im going to ask the audience, how many of you had a chance chance to read this book yet. Okay, just one hand. So you so you are going to have to answer the questions, one of the first things that i learned was despite the fact that they came from very different background and the fact that polly was 26 junior to Eleanor Roosevelt, they had a lot in common. More more than you made have imagined. First of all, they were both child orphans. They both lost their parents when they are very young. They they were both raised by elderly kin. They had some personality characteristics in common, people are shocked to hear me say they were both innately shy. Because they sing seem bigger than life. When you think of Eleanor Roosevelt you think shes a bigger than life person and people see polly is a really brave woman. But they were both innately shy. They both had tremendous energy. They would wear out their best friends. However, they both suffered from low moods, anxiety, feelings of insecurity, they were people for who their overall sense of wellbeing depended in large measure and having what they considered meaningful work. So work was very important for their sense of wellbeing. As well as company with their cherished friends. And cherished friends included their dogs, so for eleanor that was she had a preference to scottish terriers, and there were other terriers that she had an polly had a soft spot for stray and large mutts. So dogs were really they always had dogs. So they had that in common, they were lifelong episcopalians, i think its important not to discount that commonality in terms of their faith, they were devoted lifelong episcopalians. Polly, even though she had challenges with the church and left briefly, from time, at least twice because she was upset with the treatment of women, she always came back. Polly was a six generation episcopalians so this was a generation episcopalian so this was a really important connection that they had. They were both avid readers, they love love to write, they love poetry, they loved reading poetry allowed to friends. So there is a tremendous amount of commonality in these two women that is not apparent when one thinks of them. I was really surprised and interested to learn how much they had in common. I also, the second question had to do with how did they sustain this relationship, they sustained it through letters primarily, however they supplemented both letters with candy, they would send each other flowers when one was sick or feeling low and they did get together from time to time. Polly first saw rose no roosevelt in the fall of 1934, and it was a very dramatic experience for polly because eleanor showed up behind the wheel of her convertible coupe, shes the driver, the passengers are malvina tommy thompson, her private secretary, a man polly took to be a secret service agent, though they suggested this man was probably tommys husband, he was eleanor did not like having secret service around. So she showed up at this camp which was the first camp for unemployed women. It was a female version of the ccc camp. However, eleanor was determined that unlike the ccc camps for men, this particular camp would not be segregated. That was really important to her. Since it was a project of hers and it was not located very far from her home it was in the Bear Mountain area of new york, she would go periodically, unannounced to inspect the camp to see how things were going. She drives up in this convertible coupe, gets out of the car and immediately starts going to the premises. The residents are really excited and they are following her, but polly who is shy and stunned by this unannounced appearance of the first lady, and eleanor has not been first lady for that long she is sitting in a corner in soldier hall which is the dining area of the camp and peering at eleanor behind the newspaper, she is too shy to speak and too shy to introduce herself, there is not direct interaction there but i want to believe that eleanor saw her because eleanor made a practice of counting the number of women of color that she saw. She she determined that they can be integrated. So she would periodically count and whenever she thought she saw something that was not quite right she would write to the camp director. Four years later, polly applied for the university of North Carolinas graduate school within weeks of her application the president , Franklin Roosevelt went to the campus to speak in his address was shortly after the midterm elections. It was a widely anticipated address, people were very excited. Arrangements excited. Arrangements were made to broadcast the speech internationally. Franklin roosevelts he had all kinds of praise on the university for its liberalism, for its faith in youth, for its for its progressive attitude on all fronts. An polly was beside herself because she knew they did not accept lax students but she had hoped her application would be accepted anyway and it was not. When she read the president s the transcripts of the president s speech in the new york time, she was living in harlem at the time, she just could not sit still. So she with her trusty typewriter began a three page single spaced letter. She said to the president , calling him to task for his praise of the university and the universitys policy for the admission of black it for bid hiring black professional staff in any capacity, she set this hot letter to the president but as she was getting that letter ready to go she thought well he has a maze of secretaries it may not make it through, perhaps i might send a copy of this to eleanor which is what she did. Now the president s office afforded this to the office of education and they responded about one month later. Eleanor wrote back promptly over her own signature and in that letter she said, i understand, paraphrasing because i do not have it in front of me but she said that i under stand your concern but i want you to know that great changes coming and it is best to fight in conciliatory ways. But dont push too fast, there is this caution, dont push too fast. Polly was very happy to get this letter from eleanor however, she she was not about to accept the advice that she needed to slowdown or be more patient, so this was symbolic of the relationship in the early stages. When the relationship first began, polly, the impatient youth, unwilling to compromise and very anxious for dramatic social change and Eleanor Roosevelt, first lady of the nation feeling very much that her role was to be supportive of her husbands approach to civil rights. So there is this tension of polly wanting to lets go lets get moving and eleanor saying lets not move too fast. Now this was in 1938, by the time eleanor dies and polly is also very suspicious and unwilling to ever vote for Franklin Roosevelt, by the time eleanor is in her final years, polly has moved. This tells this tells you a little bit, foreshadowing tells you little about the dramatic impact to their friendship, polly moves from someone who could never vote for Franklin Roosevelt to who is suspicious of the two party system to becoming a registered voting democrat. And eleanor moves from taking the position of one who says you dont push too fast and you need to work within the system and you must obey laws that require segregated seating and segregated accommodation until those laws are passed, she moved from that position to actively supporting civil rights activist who are disobeying segregation codes in the southern south. So what finally happens is that i cannot ever say that polly moved to the center. She moved toward the center. She is always left of center. Eleanor moves from the middle, a little to the left. We see them converging politically, so that was just one example of how the relationship changed over time. And on the question on what impact did it have on the nation, id or to say that had it not been for that relationship, i do not know and this may be too strong, but this is just my speculation, that polly would have been willing to work within the system that allowed her to work with found the National Organization for women. Polly agreed to serve on the president s commission for this status of women in 1961 where she worked for a group that was looking at question of the equal rights amendment. She became someone who decided it was worth the discomfort to learn to try to work within bureaucracys, bureaucracies always try it her, at her, she had a really hard time. The people were the mainstays of those that bureaucracies always found her difficult like for example the naacp. And i also think that is another reason why we do not know as much about her because often when people write the history of various movements they write the history of those organizations which have been at the forefront of that movement so we have nice histories of walter ray and theres even a new book about Thurgood Marshall and people who worked within bureaucracy. There is a tendency to see the institutional leaders as the most important people, so what i am hoping this will get people interested in polly because i could look at all facets of her life now that is a long response. Was going to ask you what you thought your book would contribute to American History when you began. I think you may have answered that, but let me ask anyway, youre just starting out, youre just thinking about these two women who you evidently then thought of as very different, it sounds like as you wrote you brought them closer together on personal terms perhaps, less on their sociological trappings but more on their personal, psychological likeness so im guessing that when you begin you thought this is going to be a book about activism and women working together as activists. Now that you you have finished the book after such a long time what you think this book is doing . That is an interesting question. One of the things that i think, i hope the book does is adds to the interest in the fuel to look at womens friendships i think one of the reasons why this friendship has not been explored, because the documents have been there. Its not like i found documents. Polly has a huge has a huge archive. But the roosevelt historians, even those somewhat looked at polly have only mentioned or whoever only looked at eleanor who have only mention this friendship in passing, i felt like it deserves more attention than previous historians and biographers had given it. It is also been my experience that women who are as complex and complicated as polly ray such a challenge for us to scholars. Where as historian, i wear the cap of someone who has good grounding in social psychology, and other disciplines, it has taken all of that to try to look at this relationship because polly is africanamerican, she was a political radical, she was a woman whose primary intimate affection was with women. She was a religious progressive, always a religious progressive, she was an aspiring writer and i really think her writing needs to be a late evaluated. I think she needs to get more credit there. So it was an interdisciplinary, much more much more complicated story than i had anticipated. I think that is something i would like other historians to consider. Why do you think it was more complicated than you expected . Professor bell scott is a social psychologist and has worked in womens studies, you were part of all of the give me the proper title of this, some of us are brave. So you knew at least on some level that this was going to be a complicated story yet as you are getting into it you were surprised. Was that because of the way we grow up in the United States thinking of ourselves and little boxes, is it because it is hard to think of a person who is black or who is a feminist having so much psychological, is going to say baggage but so much psychology. Yes is the answer to your question. To all of that. In addition to the fact that this is a brilliant woman polly is absolutely brilliant. In sociological terms there is data overload because she main meeting out of her life through writing. By that i mean she always kept journals so whether she was writing poetry or just writing notes about her life, there is a huge amount of data, primary sources when one is trying to access exactly where where her thinking was at a particular moment in life, so there is a huge amount of data, also for me, even though she was born in 1910 and i was born in 1950 there is a difference in historical moments, so here i am trying not to bias the work by looking only through the lens of my life, even though i have read and studied mccarthyism it wasnt because i began to read pollys journal entries about her fears that mccarthyism, i felt like i could just feel it, i remember reading a letter that she wrote to a friend where she had learned that members of the fbi had been up to her alma mater looking for information about her, had been to howard, this was in the 50s. She was petrified. But you know what she did . And she was right about this, she knew they were there frequently the information in those files was incorrect so she wrote J Edgar Hoover a letter. She sent him a a resume she sent him a recent photograph and in the letter she said, i hear ive learned from the library and at Howard University that you have been looking for information about me because i know and have learned from others that the information you have is incorrect. This may have been shortly after they have been called for the committee, these were friends of hers and she said i want you to have the right information and she described walking to the post office, buying the postage to send this return receipt signature requester, certified and she described how her needs almost buckled under when i put the package in the mail box, she was afraid but she felt this was important for her to do. I just remember mccarthyism just felt different for me, ive always been appalled and upset by but it just became personal for me, reading her personal experience. Of course director hoover wrote back and said oh no, we were not looking for you, that may have been some other agency. But i seem seen the fbi view file and they had been, they had been keeping records on polly since the days of howard so they had a nice little file, most of which was incorrect as she suspected, or one agent would write something and then a couple of years later they would say they could not verify it. So just the experiences she had that were just not accessible to me in a reallife sense because i was before my time really. It really challenged me. You spoke more about polly murray then about eleanor was about. Yes. Eleanor roosevelt is a wellknown, public figure, a woman of enormous importance in the 20th century American History. What did you learn about her that you did not know before . I know you probably knew a hold out more about roosevelt going into this project than he did about murray. I had always heard that she was a compassionate person and the depth of her compassion and the depth of her acceptance of polly really struck me, i asked pollys friends who saw them, one in particular saw polly and eleanor together more than anyone other than malvina thompson, how did eleanor deal with polly, she was impatient, she said what she thought, and they said to me you know polly could be embarrassingly direct but i credit Eleanor Roosevelt with hanging in there with her and being unwilling to allow this young woman to lie out alone crying in the wilderness. So that was one of the first interviews i did. So that gave me a window into eleanor resolute belts patients with young people, probably in particular and her willingness to listen. That was the other thing, she appears to be in social psychology with talk about making relationships work the importance of active listening, you cannot cannot find a more active listener than Eleanor Roosevelt so she was the ideal active listener, totally accepting of people wherever they were, so she really opens her home to polly, she invited polly up to overnight stay, and she would invite pollys ons on, polly took her significant other to lunch with eleanor. So her openness, i was also interested in her growth, i think about her friendship and ive been talking primarily about polly but the same is true of eleanor in the sense that this friendship was a place of growth for her so that she moved from being this cautious woman who was trained and socialized to obey the rules, you wait your turn, you work within an institution to be someone willing so i was very impressed with her growth and a couple of times there were a couple of instances where it was clear that the relationship with polly had my it was clear that discrimination was not just an abstract concept for her so that when people talk about housing discrimination because of what she had heard from polly, because of Harry Belafontes experience in new york, you could tell from eleanors response to that this had become personal for her. Later on i guess feminists talked about politics being personal it was clear that it became a personal issue. So i was very pleased about her compassion from a more personal level not just from what she did on the political front. So they related to one another as activists but also as friends. Yes it started out as a confrontation of words. Polly referred to it as confrontation by typewriter and it moved from a confrontation to one where they became allies and they began to work around issues together and then it moved particularly after fdr died in 1945 and she was no longer first lady. She was freed of the obligation of having to be careful of what she said because of her responsibility to the administration, it moved toward her friendship, genuine friendship. Im going to ask a question that i i do not speak to about before, so this is going to come out of my left field. Were there other similar relationships in either womans life . I will start with eleanor. Polly was not the only africanamerican friend that eleanor had, in fact the friendship with mary was better known, she was also very Close Friends with walter white, executive secretary of the naacp. But polly argues and i think i agree agree with her that her relationship was different, that her relationship with eleanor was different because unlike others who were age peers of eleanors polly was an young upstart. And also, they wanted things for her. These are institutional leaders, the one was president of the National Council of negro woman, Walter Wright was president of the executive secretary of the naacp. So in their dealings with eleanor, they are thinking about the constituencies, their organizations and their political constituencies. Polly represented no one other than young people like herself, she could not deliver votes, but walter white could, polly cannot deliver votes, and she was very brash, and they apparently were afraid to go very far because they were always thinking about the political consequences is also calculating. So polly believed and i think she was right that her relationship was different because in some ways that she felt like she had nothing to lose and she could speaker my. There were other young people, africanamericans that eleanor had relationships with and one is harry belafonte. They became friends. I dont know if they met at the worlds fair in brussels, may be before then. But they became friends. He still to this day speaks to her as her mentor ice heard him recently speak to her about being a mentor. And and she showed him a tremendous amount of compassion. When he wanted to buy or rent an apartment, in an Apartment Building in new york city and was denied because he was africanamerican she was so upset she wrote about it in my day and she said why dont you just come move in with me and he said well thank you for the offer but i cant, it would be like running away from the battle, i need to fight this so she had those friendship and in terms of polly i think of two friendships with white women that were really significant. One one was with the writer, william smith. Who. Do you all know who Lillian Smith is . Lillian smith was a native southerner born in georgia. She wrote killers of a dream, and perhaps one of the bestknown and important work, it was an early ally of Martin Luther king and black silver rights, that young generation of that era in the 50s and 60s, never left the south, worked there, started a literary journal which published one of pollys first journals i may not journals but first poems. She was a really important mentor and supporter to polly. Was one of the persons who read various chapters i was very encouraging. And was a lesbian. The second person who comes to mind is a professor of history, caroline ware who taught at howard, she she was a white woman, social historian and shes another person who i dont think its gotten her due. Social and culture historian. She became a friend of pollys when polly enrolled in law school and polly decided to audit her constitutional history course and they became fast friends, there also cofounder of now, they were friends until carolines death. She also read various segments in draft,. I i want to ask you one last question before we open and that is, what did you learn yourself for yourself personally. One of the things i learned is that history is always with us, polly is one of those people who carried history around with her so that whenever she was writing letters and she was forever writing letters to people, she might start the letter by staying today, 70 years ago and she will tell you what happened and why it is significant in terms of the particular moment. So i found myself taking on that habit and when i was working on this book there are several Current Events happening that reminded me of things that they had gone through. There there is a case in the book of a virginia black sharecropper who was executed and while i was working on the book in my home state, we are not texas, where they execute more than anybody else, but in georgia, there was a case, troy davis of a man who was executed and the victims that recanted, jimmy carter had appealed the pope had gotten involved, but he was still executed, i, i can remember polly writing when they were dealing with the case of how she didnt sleep the night before and i wasnt thinking about it as i was advocating and lobbying to try to get them to grant, seen. I was one of lots of people in the state and around the world, but i just had a sense of their presence and eleanor was lobbying inside the white house. She was wearing the heck out of franklin trying to get him to intervene or to establish a commission which he did not do. She got on the train and wrote down to virginia to speak to a Veterans Group and then she spoke to the governor privately trying to get him to grant clemency, so this notion of history being with us, and some of pollys letters couldve been written by some of the black lives matter young people but then because she burn candles at both ends, ive tried to learn from her life. She always struggled with this issue of activism and wanting to be an artist. By by that i mean a writer, poet, she also incidentally, i did not mention this she dabbled in photography. She she is kind of initiative photographer too. She would always say to Lillian Smith that i am a frustrated writer and i cannot get to my work because activism keeps pulling me away. So from studying her life i have worked to try to defined my activism because i was a lot like polly in terms of activism as a younger woman, redefined my activism to include writing so i learned that. She works so hard so her health suffered. So i tried to learn the lesson from that about self care. I also remember when i was trying to study how she dealt with issues of loss and grief, when the two maternal wants to raise her past, i remember going back to that passage a couple of times when i stealing with with my own fathers passing. I found comfort in that. So it has and its interesting that when i started this book i was 40 something, and now i am 65, i tell everybody have my Medicare Card now. I have watched myself age and ive looked at how she and how eleanor dealt with age. Ive learned a lot they have been my examples learn from. Good, thank you. [applause]. Now, for you. First of all, thank you very much, both of you. You have done something really special for me. I did read the book and you gave lots of nuggets to really talk about both of those women. I just want to say for one, it was about roosevelt where she bit off a little ice cream cone, you want to have fun reading this book because she throws out all these little nuggets for you. The fella in the services said he felt like a man after the first lady bit off his ice cream. Because he was now a person. But i want to test the question which i really think you have already answered, but in the book you talk about her shoulder to shoulder with every time its History Month they throw it out, all the things that he has done, but they never mention polly murray. So since they dont mention doctor murray and you do mention she is right there with this strategy, right there there shoulder to shoulder, i would like you to tell us again why she is not mentioned. I think she is not mentioned, some of it is because she is a woman, some of it is because she was one who found bureaucracies trying so that would also polly would do is make her contribution and then she would go on to the next thing. What was interesting about that is that people were quite willing to take her nuggets to take her contributions and ideas, but not always credit her. So i think that is part of it. I also think that the fact that trying to deal with polly is not easy, she is brilliant, she is complex, she, for some people seems like a conundrum in the sense that she is so radical, so brilliance, in fact i have had people say to me even some of her friends would say they were just stunned when she decided to go into the priesthood, they were just stunned. They can figure out how does this fit. But that had always been there, she had always been devout. I tried to show that some in the book, for example when she was working with a case and she wrote him regularly she would talk to him about well remember what paul wrote. She would talk about scripture, as a child she would accompany her uncle who was an episcopal priest and he would visit church and she would go with him and when the Church Pianist was not available she would play the organ, so that had always been there but people tend not to see that part of her. So i think some of it is pollys personality, some of it is sexism, some of it is prejudiced against her sexuality. So it is a combination of things. What is interesting and we bring up biased is that he and polly, polly had planned and help plan that bus ride into the south we hear about it and we hear about the work as the leader of that, but polly may not get mentioned. You mentioned mary mcleod the student who first came to roosevelt house in 1924 and then all of the roosevelts, and obviously the generation before polly, would you say that she, in a way laid the groundwork of a friendship between an africanamerican women and oh white, elite families such as the roosevelts so that when polly came along eleanor was out already well along that path and because she loved young people, she was the tories so to speak for young people and certainly encouraging the Higher Education of women that the friendship really pave the way for polly and eleanors relationship . I would definitely think so, because eleanor did stay at marys home. And polly who circumstances were always precarious, during eleanors lifetime she never owned a home. So there is never an invitation for eleanor to go visit pollys home, polly always went to eleanors place. There is never that invitation. I have no doubt that eleanor would have gone had polly invited her no matter what the condition was but polly was a very proud person. But walter white had a different standard of living. It was very important, i cant remember where it is that eleanor writes about how it was a Major Development for her in terms of her ability to see her as a real or when she hugged her and kissed her. She crossed a barrier there. Im sure that made it possible for her to have intimate friendships with other young, black people. To polly challenge Eleanor Roosevelt to confront Franklin Roosevelt on any other issues that were important to the africanamerican population . Do you have documents or letters that show that there is a direct connection between eleanors activism in her confrontation of franklin on these africanamerican issues . Probably did challenge him on silence on the issue of lynching. Eleanor eventually made a statement of how she was against lynching when polly graduated from howard at the top of her class like her male peers had expected, all her male peers had all those decorated as she. But she she was not allowed to go because she was female. She asked, should it really directly ask eleanor she just told her of how unfair this was eleanor leaned on franklin which was a graduate to inquire. And he did and he wrote its not clear that franklin cared about this in fact his letter is facetious. I think you said Something Like i dont think that you have to build a new dorm for this young color lady for that but when you get a chance would you get one of your dienst write me about the situation . Well, he was going through the motions because eleanor was leaning on him on pollys behalf. So she did not get to go. She she ended up going to the university of california berkeley. She did ask. She tried to move things where she could. There is another case and i will just mention it because of 50 soldiers who are courtmartialed she was feeding eleanor material about it and she was encouraging fdr to do something. Whether another place they interact with one another had to do with crossing between civilrights and human rights. Dish you really straight shape it legally and likewise on the human rights struggle yet both of them use the mothers language and often talked about getting at home. And at the same way, i think polly was the first person within the government to ever do assessment of u. S. Human rights compliance domestically. That was was like 1947 or Something Like that. I wonder did you find the space where theyre both working in between everybody that gave them away . I can remember it was probably second year of law school, your your question makes me think of this, i dont know if this is an answer but this is the second year of pollys law School School and this is like 1941 and there is this International School assembly other students, from all over the world we have students from allied nation there. Polly and some young and eleanor is determined are students who are from the allied nations feel welcome and supported, they get special treatment. They get to spend the night in the white house, but polly and her group and it is not just the students from howard, there are other students working with them to raise issues about the allies behavior in other places in the world. Polly and her groups et cetera upset about what is happening in india, they they are worried about what the russians are doing and they want to raise these questions. It is so interesting to me because they develop and this is in the book, they develop a list of resolutions that mirror the language ucl and or speak years later. But at this particular moment eleanor is rounding up, she quarters polly white house picnic to try to convince her not to move forward with these resolutions because they will upset the allies. About the polly does not back down, the resolutions go forward, they are not approved, but the group stays together, this simply does not fracture because eleanor tells her one thing that were worried about is this will make the allies upset and the students will even these simply will fracture. It doesnt. Thats a really important moment for polly to and this. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] before i invite you all to come upstairs and buy this book and join us for a reception, i dont want to say it sound presumption but when eleanor been proud and we think Patricia Bell scott for a really enriching discussion. Wednesday night on big tv at primetime books about labor and economics. At 8 00 p. M. Eastern, discussion about Public Housing and matthew desmonds health. Then fill harvey and lisa discuss the welfare system in their book, the human cost of welfare. At 10, former correspondence of the economist Charles Welland making money about how banking and monetary systems work at 1110 p. M. , a, a discussion about the global hotspots with the authors of the smartest places on earth. All part of this weeks book tv in primetime. Next in book to be in primetime, writer tj stiles discusses his new biography on general custer. Npr host diane writes about her husbands death in on my own. Former hhs secretary Louis Sullivan speaks until the public library. In the firebrand and the first lady Patricia Bell scott writes about the relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and polly murray. In both iraq and afghanistan i help both countries with their constitutions being the sort of a facilitator of agreement on key issues among iraqis or afghans. The influence is considerable, and the state of government to meet with you when theyre meeting. Sunday night former pastor of discusses his memoir, the envoy from kabul to the white house, my journey through turbulent world. We saw extremist such as exploded and even though we corrected it towards the end of the period that i was there, by the search, by reaching out to the sunnis, by building up iraqi forces, by establishing a unity government, killing zarqawi, then to bring about security violence was way down. Unfortunately when we left in the vacuum was misspelled by rival regional powers pulling i rack up parts of violence escalated and we have isis now. Sunday night on 80 string on
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