The Firebrand and the First Lady Portrait of a Friendship : Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice

"In 1938, the twenty-eight-year-old Pauli Murray wrote a letter to the president and first lady, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, protesting racial segregation in the South. Eleanor wrote back. So began a friendship that would last for a quarter-century, as Pauli became a lawyer, a principal strategist in the fight to protect Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and a cofounder of the National Organization for Women, and Eleanor became a diplomat and first chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Two decades in the making, and drawing on letters, journals, diaries, and interviews, this monumental work shows how the relationship between a writer-turned-activist and the first lady not only had a profound effect on each of their lives, but also impacted the struggle for social justice."--Page 4 of cover.