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Lot 173
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Eleanor Roosevelt TLS championing Civil Rights
Eleanor Roosevelt TLS championing Civil Rights
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Description:

Roosevelt Eleanor

Single page TLS, 6" x 7" on Eleanor Roosevelt's personal stationery letterhead of 211 East 62nd Street, New York 21, N.Y. (although she wrote "Bellingham, Wash"). Dated "January 10, 1956", and signed by her as "Eleanor Roosevelt". Near fine with center fold.

A lovely letter thanking Mr. Stern for his interest in "the work of the committee against discrimination in housing", and continues to show her appreciation for his "generous contribution".

By the early forties, ER firmly believed Civil Rights to be the real litmus test for American democracy. Thus, she declared over and over again throughout the war, there could be no democracy in the United States that did not include democracy for blacks. In "The Moral Basis of Democracy", she asserted that people of all races have inviolate rights to "some property." Repeatedly ER insisted that education, housing, and employment were basic human rights which society had both a moral and political obligation to provide its citizens. The government must not only provide protection against discrimination, but develop policies which create a level economic playing field. In making clear exactly what she meant, ER explained: "This means achieving an economic level below which no one is permitted to fall, and keeping a fairly stable balance between that level and the standard of living," and "one of the main destroyers of freedom is our attitude toward the colored race."

Eleanor embraced a Civil Rights agenda which accepted segregation and championed equal opportunity. Quality education became her top public priority. As she told the Conference on Negro Education, "wherever the standard of education is low, the standard of living is low" and urged states to address the inequities in public school funding. Her symbolic outreach generated a strong response from African Americans. The African American press and a strong communication network extolled her efforts. By January 1934, she received thousands of letters describing racial violence, poverty and homelessness exacerbated by racial discrimination, and pleading for some type of assistance.

Rumors circulated throughout the South of Eleanor Clubs, an ER inspired organization of black domestics urging them not to work for white women, so frequently that they became treated as fact. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was so offended by her actions that he became convinced that she had black blood. Other Americans did as well and wrote to ask if this was true only to receive a reply from Eleanor which said that her family had lived so long in the nation that she could not answer the question with certainty.

FDR's death freed Eleanor Roosevelt from the constraints the White House wanted to impose on her activities.

The 1954 Brown decision thrilled her.(A watershed moment in the modern Civil Rights movement came on 17 May 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, unanimously ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional). Yet ER knew that integrating the schools would not be a swift or temperate exercise. The Montgomery Bus Boycott reinforced her fears and her determination. She worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks to raise money for the boycott and introduced Autherine Lucy, who had tried to integrate the University of Alabama, to a Madison Square Garden fund-raiser. She, despite the caution of some of her advisors, supported the Southern Conference Education Fund's efforts to desegregate hospitals and protect voting rights.

By 1957, ER had become impatient with the Democratic Party's commitment to Civil Rights and began to identify more strongly with activists who wanted to change the system rather than with political officials. "Some of my best friends are Negro," she wrote in a cover story of "Ebony Magazine".

As Congress began to debate the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, Eleanor used her column to critique those Democrats who tried to evade the issue and bitterly condemned the decision to include the jury trial amendment, which placed voting rights obstructionists in front of an all white jury instead of a federal judge. She wrote to activists that she understood their frustration and struggled against despair. She opposed John Kennedy's nomination as much for his non-existent support of civil rights as she did for his silence on McCarthy. And she chaired a Highlander Folk School workshop on non-violent civil disobedience for civil rights activists and wrote the introduction for CORE's pamphlet "Cracking the Color Line" concluding that "advocating civil rights does not constitute anarchy." But it was the violent treatment the Freedom Riders received that provoked Eleanor's harshest comments.

She told readers of "Tomorrow is Now" that this sickened her, compared it to the conduct the Nazis pursued, and wondered if the nation had learned anything from its war against Aryanism. For the United States to reclaim its true position as moral leader of the world, it must have "a social revolution." It could not be a nation with signs reading whites only. It must be done with "practical application of democratic principles."

An excellent TLS example depicting Eleanor Roosevelt's unwavering passion for the cause of Civil Rights.

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