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
New book examines Trump cuts to LGBTQ healthcare
‘Aftershocks’ details impact of policy shifts on HIV response, broader public health
As LGBTQ and HIV advocates continue to grapple with the Trump administration’s attacks on healthcare, a new book offers a timely look at what happens when public health systems — and the democratic institutions that sustain them — are pushed to their limits.
The book, “Aftershocks: Trump 2.0, Public Health, and Our Better Angels,” was written by Dr. José M. Zuniga, president/CEO of Fast-Track Health. Zuniga is a globally recognized public health leader with more than three decades of experience advancing responses to HIV, communicable and non-communicable diseases, and the health impacts of climate change. He is also editor-in-chief of the Journal of Fast-Track Health.
The book covers the first year of the second Trump administration. It chronicles the impact of federal policy shifts and budget cuts on the HIV response and public health more broadly, including for LGBTQ communities. Drawing from policy analysis, frontline insight, and lived experience, the author reveal how decades of hard-won progress became vulnerable through Project 2025 and DOGE, but also a paralysis in the HIV and public health communities following the outcome of the 2024 elections.
“In other words, we were caught flat-footed when our opposition had a detailed plan to create chaos and disruption,” Zuniga says. “Thus, the book also offers Horizons 2028 as an antidote to Project 2025 as a starting point for a wide-ranging conversation about how we will build back better given the baseline pre-Trump 2.0 was already imperfect.”
Below is an excerpt from the book.
What Could Not Be Left Unsaid
Let me begin with a simple truth: I did not set out to write this book. Like many in the public health community, I set out daily to do the work of scaling prevention, expanding access to care, strengthening health systems, and ensuring that dignity, equity, and justice are operational realities. Writing, for me, has always been in service of action: policy briefs to shape decisions, editorials to provoke accountability, reports to document progress or failure, and books to synthesize experience into insight that can guide public health action. But Aftershocks is something different; it is not merely an analysis. Instead, it is a record of rupture, of response, and of what it means to continue when the ground beneath your work begins to shift.
This book was written because something changed, and that change came into sharp relief during the beginning days of the second Trump administration, including the erosion of norms, the weaponization of rhetoric, and the recalibration of governance itself. The change was not limited to policy reversals or budget cuts, though there were many. Moreover, it was not confined to rhetoric, though language played a central role. The change was structural and moral: a redefinition of how power understood its obligations to people, to evidence, and to truth itself. And for those of us working in public health, the effects were immediate and personal. We experienced a purposeful disruption of the public health ecosystem and a direct repudiation of the “health for all” principle that guides our work….
Writing this book was, unexpectedly, an act of catharsis. Not because it resolved anything, but because it created space to process what would otherwise have been overwhelming… Amid what many in the public health community experienced as both individual and collective trauma, documenting itself was stabilizing, allowing reflection without detachment and critique without disengagement. But catharsis alone is insufficient. This book is not an exercise in lament; it is also a response. If the period it chronicles is defined by disruption, then its purpose is to offer direction. Where Project 2025 represented a blueprint for ideological capture of institutions, language, and governance, this book offers a counterpoint: Horizons 2028…
Horizons 2028 is grounded in a simple premise: that the future of public health – and of democratic governance more broadly – depends on rebuilding systems that are resilient to political volatility. That means strengthening not only federal capacity, but subnational leadership. It means embedding community-led accountability into data systems. It means aligning health outcomes with social determinants and recognizing that equity is not an endpoint but a continuous process of adjustment and correction. It means treating global engagement not as optional, but as essential to national well-being. In other words, it is a roadmap not for returning to what was, but for building what is required…
I write as an Independent. Not in the sense of detachment, but in the sense of accountability to evidence, to outcomes, and to the people whose lives depend on both… Independence does not mean neutrality in the face of harm; it means refusing to filter reality through partisan allegiance. Importantly, it also means being guided by a consistent commitment to equity, dignity, and justice. These are not abstract values… They are tested in moments of crisis, when the gap between principle and practice becomes most apparent. They demand accountability not only for what is said, but for what is done – and for what is allowed to persist unchallenged. And they require the courage to name harm clearly, even when doing so is inconvenient or politically unwelcome.
That commitment shapes the analysis that follows, but it is also what makes the writing difficult. Because to document harm is to confront it. To trace its origins is to name decisions and their consequences. And to do so honestly is to risk being read as partisan in a landscape where truth itself has become politicized. But the alternative – silence, or false equivalence – is not acceptable. Not when the stakes are as high as they are. There is, however, a thread that runs through this book that resists cynicism, is not optimism, at least not in the conventional sense, but is something quieter and more durable: a belief that even in moments of rupture, there remains a capacity – within institutions, within communities, within individuals – to reorient toward something better.
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Books
Exploring Renée Richards’s life through lens of a trans author
Surprises await in new book about pioneering tennis star
‘Finding Renée Richards’
By Julie Kliegman
c.2026, HarperOne
$28.99/272 pages
Come on in, the water’s fine.
Wade into it up to your ankles, your calves, your waist, you’ll be OK. You’ll adjust to the waves that swirl around you so come on, dive in, it’s all good. As in the new book “Finding Renée Richards” by Julie Kliegman, that goes for swimming, and for controversy.
Assigned to do a story on books written by trans tennis great Renée Richards, Julie Kleigman read the books and became “transfixed by a woman who had fought so hard to simply live as who she had long known she was….”. Their editor had figured that, as a nonbinary and trans individual, Kleigman would have “something incisive to say…” in an article. Instead, once they met and began interviewing Richards, Kliegman was left frustrated.
Born in the late summer of 1934, Richard Henry Raskind seemed to have arrived with a tennis racket in his hand. His mother was a psychiatrist; his father was an orthopedic surgeon who hoped “Dick” would follow his footsteps but Raskind was drawn instead to ophthalmology and tennis. He was also irresistibly drawn to wearing women’s clothing.
His sister knew of this pull and Raskind eventually came out to both parents, but few others on the tennis circuit were aware. When Raskind visited his hometown of New York City, however, he enjoyed furtively going out in women’s clothing but he also tried to squash the desire; in the meantime, he fell in love, married, fathered a son, and eventually learned that it was possible to become the woman he knew he really was.
To continue playing tennis professionally was a bonus.
And right there were the disagreements Kleigman had with Richards.
Richards, “To this day… [makes] a point of describing herself as a woman, period,” says Kleigman, but she firmly acknowledged Richard, almost as a separate individual, insisting that Kleigman use “him/his” pronouns when describing her earlier life.
And as for tennis and trans women’s participation in the sport, Richards had something even more frustrating to say.
Take that as a fair warning: you might be equally surprised at what author Julie Kliegman uncovered in “Finding Renée Richards,” and you may be truly gobsmacked by reading opinions from other women about the topic of trans women in sports.
That’s the main, huge point of interest in this fascinating book; the other is Richards’s life as seen through the lens of a trans individual. Kleigman’s wrestling with the 90-year-old Richards’ firmly dug-in heels is, in itself, worth your time as a study of highly varying viewpoints. That Kleigman and Richards have both lived at least a part of trans history is somewhat of a key to understanding how this book unfolds, as Kleigman offers up Richards’s tale. Readers who are able to read between the lines will be riveted.
If you’re a sports fan and you have opinions, you must read this book – and that goes double if it’s tennis you love. Also check out “Finding Renée Richards” if you just want a raucously good and very fine read.
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Books
Bros + romance + fantasy = ‘Bromantasy.’
New book a romp full of humor, dragons, kings, and adventure
‘Bromantasy’
By Maire Roche
c.2026, G.P. Putnam’s Sons
$20/339 pages
“Danger” just happens to be your middle name.
Any fray, any tussle, anytime anybody needs help, they count on you to step in and save the day. You’re brave, smart and strategic, kind to old people, children, and small animals and, as in the new book “Bromantasy” by Maire Roche, dragons.
Of all the things there were to do – preserving food, keeping house for himself and his best friend Morningthall “Mo” Elmthorn, advanced skincare, and drinking at the local tavern down the road – the one thing Juniper O’Reilly couldn’t resist was a good brawl. It happened so often that Juniper honestly looked forward to it, though Mo wasn’t a fan.
Mo was more grown-up, calm, thoughtful, able, and Juniper loved him for it. He loved Mo, in fact, since they were little boys. He loved Mo in ways that they didn’t talk about, so they kept a wall between their bedrooms in their cottage.
Except for that one time.
They didn’t talk about that, either.
Instead, as they did often, on a warm fall night, Juniper and Mo went to the tavern, where mead was served and they could learn about the king’s weekly quests. There, Juniper could also find a good brawl, which is how he and Mo accidentally got into trouble: Juniper trounced one of the king’s men and was forced into a quest.
He didn’t want to fight dragons and he felt bad that Mo had been dragged along. He felt even worse leaving their farm, sleeping on the ground, wearing the same clothes every day, and not having enough skincare product along. A campfire added to the problem. A roving, lying prince, also in search of dragons, didn’t help. And though a quest was no place for a child, Juniper and Mo found a frightened little girl they had no choice but to protect.
A child with strange eyes, sharp teeth, and fire on her breath.
“And just like that, Juniper and Mo had a dragon.”
Bros + romance + fantasy = “Bromantasy.” It also could equal one of two other things: a romp full of humor, dragons, kings, princes, and adventure.
Or it could equal a whole lot of eye-rolling.
It’s a fact that this book is funny, in the way that a 1980s high school comedy movie is funny – meaning that it’s dippy, giddy, and very caricaturish but you’ll laugh quite often. The story contains everything you want in a fantasy romance (a “romantasy”), including human-like alternate species, a life-changing journey, and plenty of nudge-nudge-wink skirting around the attraction the two main characters have for one another. It’s a decent story, convoluted in just the right way. Purely, it’s an escape.
So why wouldn’t you want to read it? See above, and depending on your favorite reading genre. High-brow literature, this ain’t.
For the right reader, “Bromantasy” is a decent-enough vacation read, something not too taxing or hard on the brain. It’s for novel lovers, dragon hunters, king’s questers, princes, and romantics. For everyone else, this tale is just middling.
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