The firebrand and the first lady: portrait of a friendship ; Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the struggle for social justice

Description

An important, groundbreaking book--two decades in work--that tells the story of the unlikely but history-changing twenty-eight-year bond forged between Pauli Murray (granddaughter of a mulatto slave, who, against all odds, as a lesbian black woman, became a lawyer, civil rights pioneer, Episcopal priest, poet, and activist) and Eleanor Roosevelt (First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1948 and human rights internationalist) that critically shaped Eleanor Roosevelt's, and therefore FDR's, view of race and racism in America. It was a decades-long friendship--tender, moving, prodding, inspiring--sustained primarily through correspondence and characterized by brutal honesty, mutual admiration, and respect, revealing the generational and political differences each had to overcome in order to support one another's life. Of the two extraordinary women, one was at the center of world power; the other, an outsider ostracized by the color of her skin, fighting...