Books
The friendship between a first lady and a ‘Firebrand’
Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt bonded during civil rights movement
Patricia Bell-Scott explores the friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Pauli Murray in her new book.
Most of us would be proud to have earned a degree, written an acclaimed book of poetry or memoir, worked tirelessly for civil rights and have been part of a friendship that fostered human rights.
Pauli Murray, the groundbreaking African-American activist, lawyer, writer and priest, who lived from 1910-1985 and was attracted to women, did all this and much more. For nearly 25 years, Murray the granddaughter of a mixed-race slave, was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, whose privileged background entitled her to belong to the Daughters of the American Revolution. (Roosevelt resigned from the DAR in 1939 when the group prohibited the renowned African-American singer Marian Anderson from performing at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C.)
In her compelling new book “The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice,” Patricia Bell-Scott, editor of the anthology “All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave,” tells the story of this extraordinary relationship. Bell-Scott is professor emerita of women’s studies and human development and family science at the University of Georgia. Her previous books include: “Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women” and “Double Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters,” which won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize.
From 1938-1962, their friendship was sustained by some 300 postcards and letters as well as personal visits. The relationship began when Murray, 27, working for the WPA, a New Deal agency, sent Eleanor Roosevelt a letter protesting a speech Franklin Delano Roosevelt had made at the University of North Carolina. (The university had refused to admit Murray as a student because she was black.) The friendship continued until Roosevelt, 26 years older than Murray, died in 1962.
Murray earned three law degrees, organized sit-ins in the 1940s while a student at Howard University against eateries that discriminated against people of color, participated in bus boycotts 15 years before Rosa Parks and created the legal strategy that ensured that sex discrimination was included in the Civil Rights Act.
A co-founder of the National Organization for Women, Murray wrote the memoir “Proud Shoes,” the well-regarded poetry collection “Dark Testament” as well as numerous essays and books. In 1977, she became one of the first women to be ordained as a priest by the Episcopal Church. Though Murray hadn’t been involved in writing it, in 1971 Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in an homage to Murray’s work, listed her as a co-author in her first brief before the Supreme Court.
Born in Baltimore, Murray didn’t use her given name “Anna Pauline.” Her father was a teacher and her mother was a nurse. At age three, after her mother died, Murray went to Durham, N.C., where she lived with her grandparents and two of her aunts, one of whom became her adoptive mother. In her childhood, Murray’s father, after contracting what was thought to be encephalitis, suffered from “unpredictable attacks of depression and violent moods.” Murray wasn’t ashamed of her sexual orientation and was in a long-term relationship with Irene, “Renee” Barlow. Yet, because of homophobia and her race, she was often denied employment in the government and the private sector.
It’s no wonder that it took Bell-Scott 20 years to write “Firebrand.” Recently, she talked with the Blade about the book and the friendship between Murray and the woman, who Murray called “Mrs. R.”
“This was not something I intended to do,” Bell-Scott said of “Firebrand.” “I was working on another project at the time.”
Then in 1983, Bell-Scott asked Murray to serve as a consulting editor to “SAGE: A Scholarly Journal of Black Women,” of which she was a co-founding editor. Though Murray couldn’t do SAGE, she wrote a letter of “encouragement” to Bell-Scott. “Pauli wanted to work on her autobiography,” she said.
In a follow-up to this letter, Murray wrote to Bell-Scott, “You need to know some of the veterans of the battle whose shoulders you now stand on.”
She didn’t say, “know me better,” Bell-Scott said, “but she did say she took great pride in her work as a member of the subcommittee on legal rights of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. (President John F. Kennedy appointed Eleanor Roosevelt chair of the commission.)
Bell-Scott made notes of what she wanted to talk about with Murray when her writing project was finished. “But I didn’t get the chance —18 months later, she died of pancreatic cancer,” she said. “Her letter haunted me. Quite a few years later, I decided I was still so haunted by her comment about knowing the veterans on whose shoulders you’re standing on.”
After examining the collection of Murray’s letters at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University and the collection of Roosevelt’s letters at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Bell-Scott said, she “immediately recognized that their relationship deserved attention.” Their friendship is mentioned only briefly by historians and biographers.
Despite the fact that Murray and Roosevelt came from very different backgrounds, they had a lot in common, Bell-Scott said. “To begin with, Anna was the given name for both of them and they never used it,” she said. “They both lost their parents before their teens and were sent to live with elderly kin.”
They were sensitive kids who grew up to be compassionate women with a thirst for justice, Bell-Scott said. “Even though she was first lady, people made fun of Eleanor’s appearance and ridiculed her teeth,” she added. “Pauli was boyish looking. People poked fun at how she looked.”
Murray and Roosevelt loved their fathers who suffered from mood disorders and alcoholism respectively. Though they were outspoken and highly energetic in their quest for social justice, “people were often surprised to learn that Pauli and Eleanor were both shy,” Bell-Scott said. “It took them tremendous psychic energy to overcome their shyness.”
Both were voracious readers and avid writers. Though she was a committed social justice activist, lawyer and priest, writing was what was closest to Murray’s heart, Bell-Scott said. “Pauli couldn’t turn away from activism,” she said, “but if there were any regrets – she would have liked to have written more.”
Roosevelt, too, was committed to her writing, Bell-Scott said. “Eleanor wrote her ‘My Day’ column even when she was first lady,” she said. “After FDR’s death, she reported on Russia and pursued other writing projects.”
Their sense of well being was dependent on having meaningful work and exercise, Bell-Scott said. “They had a talent for friendship. And they loved dogs. Eleanor liked Scotties and Pauli liked mutts and strays.”
Murray would work herself into exhaustion and crash, Bell-Scott said. “She suffered from mood swings which weren’t properly diagnosed as a thyroid disorder until Pauli was in her 40s,” she said. “Eleanor suffered episodes of depression.”
Their friendship was the context that allowed Murray and Roosevelt to grow into the “transformative leaders that we know them as,” Bell-Scott said. “When they first met, Pauli was an impatient young radical … Eleanor felt it was important to always consider taking social justice action with great caution – to always follow the muted action on civil rights of the Roosevelt administration.” (FDR never publicly pushed Congress to speak out against lynching, Bell-Scott said.)
Later in their lives, Bell-Scott said, Murray had moved from radical left to left of center – voting for Lyndon Johnson as a registered Democrat after decades of voting for Socialist candidates. By the 1960s, Roosevelt had put her life on the line at civil rights workshops and demonstrations.
“When I look at the issue of Pauli’s sexuality, I think of the social context of the time. Here is a woman coming to adulthood in the 1920s, 30s and 40s,” she said. “Homosexuality is defined as a mental disorder until the 1970s. Pauli, a very bright woman, reads the scientific literature.”
Added to this, Bell-Scott said, was the homophobia of McCarthyism, which considered LGBT people to be a security threat. “Pauli was a black woman lawyer,” she said, “ that’s an unconventional career for a woman. There are rumors about her sexuality and her mental health. She is living with discrimination on so many fronts.”
But Murray wasn’t ashamed of who she was, Bell-Scott said. “She was raised as a child by elder kin with Victorian values. You didn’t talk about sexuality.”
From reading Murray’s letters and sermons from later in her life, “it seems to me that Pauli began to publicly embrace herself,” Bell-Scott said.
Books
Something’s off about Dad. When is it time to step in?
‘When Memory Fades’ can help when families face dementia
‘When Memory Fades’
By Nathaniel Chin, MD
c.2026, St. Martin’s Essentials
$30/422 pages
Mom called you in a panic the other day.
She’d lost her keys and by the time you arrived to help, she’d found them. In the refrigerator.
These kinds of things keep happening, not often but often enough, and you don’t know quite what to worry about. But in the new book “When Memory Fades” by Nathaniel Chin, MD, you’ll learn about the journey ahead, for both of you.
You can’t remember why you walked into a room. You got lost last week, going to the bank. Popular wisdom says that things like that are normal as we age, but Chin says that’s not true – although the answer may not be a worst-case scenario, either. Yes, memory problems could just be signs of stress, dehydration, or lack of sleep – or is it time to see a doctor?
Chin says maybe, yes.
He was working his way through medical residency when his father, a geriatrician in Madison, Wisc., was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Chin, now a geriatrician, was blindsided, but that diagnosis also changed his life.
Here, he writes about the brain, and how Alzheimer’s and dementia are diagnosed, explaining that dementia has many faces and, depending on a doctor’s evaluation, memory problems might be slowed or improved. He shares his father’s illness with readers, but he also writes about his mother, a steadfast, steady caretaker.
Her story reminds reader-guardians to care for themselves, too.
Know how to talk the talk, so that you can have “a more productive” conversation with your doctor. Understand that there’s nothing “normal” about dementia or Alzheimer’s. Know the statistics – African Americans are affected with dementia twice as much as whites – and know how to lower your risks. Learn here what questions to ask, how to break the news to everyone, and any legal matters that will be important soon. And know how to tend to you.
Says Chin, “The best action you can take is to educate yourself… The more you understand, the better equipped you are to make sound judgments.”
Something’s off about Dad, just a lot of little things that don’t add up. When is it time to step in? “When Memory Fades” can help you decide.
Wise, wide-spread, comprehensive, and compassionately helpful, this is a book you can read and then take it to the doctor with your loved one. It’s a book that makes sense when nothing else does, and its biggest feature is that it smoothly transitions from easy-to-grasp science and charts, to gentle coaching for caregivers. Author Nathaniel Chin, MD writes with storytelling, humility, grace, and experience from both sides of the Alzheimer’s/dementia issue, and his words are reassuring but also urgent. Learn, but don’t wait, he says. Know how to safeguard yourself. See your doctor, and don’t fear testing. Watch for signs of depression. And never, ever stop asking for help.
Read those last seven words, and find “When Memory Fades” now. It’s a book to have on your shelf, whether you’re 45 or 95 because, as you’ll see, dementia happens and knowledge is key.
Books
New book chronicles gay man’s life in hippie commune
Vietnam War-era tale a serious, sexy, joyous memoir
‘Qtopia: A Memoir of Love, Land and Liberation’
2026, University of Wisconsin Press
By Juda Bennett
Duffel packed, the new high school graduate could not fall asleep. “On the night before my departure, I stared at the duffel bag as if it were a body bag. We lived close to Dover, where the dead from Vietnam were shipped.”
It is 1971, and Charles was leaving home to join a hippie commune in rural Virginia. “I kept imagining bodies fitting into the bag and popping out in the middle of the night,” Juda Bennett writes in his memoir, “Qtopia: A Memoir of Love, Land and Liberation.” During Bennett’s high school years from 1968-1971 some 35,000 U.S. soldiers were killed in the Vietnam War, the vast majority processed at Dover Air Force Base.
Young Bennett was clueless about what lay ahead but he had a commune’s brochure in his pocket, certain his destiny was not in the military. “My father was a walking recruitment center, and my mother could have worked for the USO. Uncle Sam and the Andrews Sisters had nothing on them.” Inspired to find his way out of suburban Wilmington, Del., he boarded a Greyhound bus to Lexington, Va., and communes yet unknown. “Qtopia” is a serious, sexy and joyous memoir about a young man who knows he’s different in search of chosen family and, over coming decades, his own queer Utopia.
“We are leaving; you don’t need us,” was the popular refrain in the day from the Crosby, Stills & Nash song “Wooden Ships.” Communards like young Charles (going by the moniker C.B. with a full beard covering his handsome, androgynous features) were living it. How far this is from urban queer stories of the ‘70s. For this reason alone, it is marvelous reading about hot naked hippies farming together in the country, living and loving in secluded teepees when everything seemed possible. Novels like “Drop City” by T.C. Boyle (2003) and “Arcadia” (2012) by Lauren Groff set in hippie communes had no gay characters, only free-love for straights. When C.B.’s parents arrive to visit his back-to-the-land commune North Mountain bearing gifts like the orange powder Tang and Frosted Flakes, he “maintained” as the saying went. “It was a great time for visitors to see how hard we had worked—fields of sorghum swaying in the breeze, acres of vegetables in neat rows with beans, tomatoes and peppers hanging down….I was still thin as a matchstick, but I was a strong and muscular matchstick,” he tells the story of his development. By contrast, he had considered suicide before leaving home; this memoir fills in the pain, too.
There are times when C.B.’s voice as a teen communard with a secret is so authentic and rich, it is like reading fictional stories of American innocents on journeys of their own like J.D. Salinger’s character Holden Caulfield or Demon Copperhead from rural Virginia by Barbara Kingsolver. He tells us there was this guy Mark at North Mountain who had been pressuring him to sleep on the mattress next to his. C.B. was known as the only gay at North Mountain. One of the hippie women warned him Mark is “a square, the biggest downer.” Stepping out of the memoir, C.B. directly addresses the reader about the Mark issue, “I don’t want to write about Mark anymore because he’s not important to my story, and I didn’t even like him.” Got it. Hitchhiking with C.B. is like that, too.
“I got my best ride of the whole hike from a truck driver named TJ….If an eighteen wheeler…is willing to stop for you, it is because the driver wants something from you…I will forever remember this trucker as the most beautiful man I could have had sex with if I weren’t so innocent.”
North Mountain required the hippies work one week a month in Richmond to earn cash for the commune. For C.B., this translated into seven communards living in one small apartment on this cultish mission. It was in a Richmond park where he meets a stranger who would sexually abuse him over a month until C.B. ends it. Furious, the man threatens to shut down the commune if he does not obey. In a state of panic, C.B. attempts suicide by overdosing on every pill he can get his hands on. The memoir takes the reader through the author’s horror by deepening the shadows. What was the specific nature of the abuse? How did this stranger have credible power to threaten the commune? Entitled “What It’s Like to Die,” the chapter is a skillfully told, expressionistic turning point from an innocent’s hell to salvation at the intentional queer Lavender Hill commune in Central New York. C.B. desperately needed to “find my people.”
He’s a resilient young man after living in three communes by the time he hit San Francisco. His two gay neighbors on Ashbury Street—Crow and Moonsnake—pressure him to get a new “hippie name.” Walking home from Golden Gate Park he zeroes in on a passing streetcar, “North Judah.” Goodbye “Charles,” Judah will be his new hippie name. Crow and Moonsnake, approve: “If that’s what the Universe called out to you.” If you remember the Sixties…
“Too often,” Bennett writes, “we think of dropouts as withdrawing from life, but in truth, I think they are in a heightened state of seeking their rightful path and purpose. Nothing stays the same.” Juda Bennett remains a believer to this day, “Always putting my faith in my journey to Utopia”.
(Charles Francis is president of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., and author of “Archive Activism: Memoir of a ‘Uniquely Nasty’ Journey.”)
Books
Liza’s book a tale that’s better than most celebrity memoirs
‘Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!’ dishes on marriages, heartbreak
‘Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! My Memoir’
By Liza Minnelli, as told to Michael Feinstein
c.2026, Grand Central
$36/ 421 pages
Twenty feet In front of you, and you can’t see a thing.
Even the closest faces are in shadow – lit, but not quite enough for you to see for sure what the people there are thinking. Still, you can hear them, their gasps, their laughter, and applause. Such is life, on-stage. Now read “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! My Memoir” by Liza Minnelli, as told to Michael Feinstein, and read about it beyond the spotlight.
Almost from the moment she was born, Liza Minnelli was famous.
It was inevitable: her mother was Judy Garland. Her father was director Vincente Minnelli. Her godparents were Hollywood glitterati, her neighbors were famous, her playmates would be famous someday, too.
But her life wasn’t all starlight and happiness.
She made her stage debut as a toddler. She became her “mother’s caretaker” at age 13.
At 16, she had a growing career of her own – one that her mother tried to stop. But, she says, “In her own way, Mama was wonderful to me. Try understanding – she was my mother, not a movie star…. I knew her as the person who loved me and always would.”
At 19, Minnelli was working, happy, and madly in love with the man who’d become her first husband, and life was wonderful – until she came home one day to find him in their bed with another man. Before they were divorced, she lost her beloved mother, and became “engaged” to two other men simultaneously, neither of which made it to the altar with her.
She married her second husband, the son of one of her mother’s former co-stars, in 1974 but her love affairs and addictions led to a second divorce.
Her third husband was a stage manager.
She doesn’t have much good to say about her fourth, and last, husband.
Overall, she says, “You gotta play the comedy for all it’s worth and leave ‘em laughing. Even when your heart is breaking.”
Are you expecting bluntness, sass, or attitude here? Good, because that’s what you get inside “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!” It’s strong on honesty and don’t-give-a-flip. It’s wonderfully edited, so it moves fast. It’s eye-opening and funny and a pleasant surprise for a first, and only (so far), memoir.
Even better, author Liza Minnelli (with best friend, Michael Feinstein) is really quite candid and nicely gossipy, starting from the beginning. There are some Hollywood folks, in fact, who are feeling edgy because of what’s inside this book and the secrets spilled. Minnelli and Feinstein seemed to have fun telling her story, and they comfortably lure readers in.
That’s not to say that it’s all a cabaret. Minnelli tells about her addictions and recoveries, her marriages and why she wed two gay men, and the losses she endured, including miscarriages, deaths, and broken relationships. The bad balances well with the good for a tale that’s several notches above most celebrity memoirs. “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!” is, in fact, a real joy to read, a genuine bright spot.
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Calendar: August 7-13
