Profiles in Character #14: Eleanor Roosevelt Resigns in Protest
At Arlington Cemetery gravesite ceremonies during World War I, Eleanor Roosevelt would stand with flowers, in respectful silence. She came to ensure no soldier was buried alone. Wife of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, her vigil exemplified the comment of her headmistress at London’s Allenswood Academy, where Eleanor spent three teenage years: “Eleanor has the warmest heart that I ever encountered,” said Mademoiselle Souvestre.
Born into New York’s upper class and the niece of Theodore Roosevelt, she was expected to “come out” and assume the role of a traditional society wife, but she was drawn instead to a life of service with a fierce determination to help others. She was, by her admission, moved “by the plight of a single person whom I have seen with my own eyes,” though her work would in time aid unseen millions.
Eventually surmounting the racial attitudes of her upbringing, she became a staunch advocate for the plight of African Americans. Neither a legislator nor a government appointee, her contributions came from force of character, a will that pushed her husband and president, FDR, even when he did not want to be pushed. She understood her actions and words sent messages to the nation and beyond.
In early 1939, Howard University had invited the world-renowned contralto, Marian Anderson, to give a concert in Washington, DC on Easter weekend. Its request to use Constitution Hall, the only site large enough for the expected crowd, was denied by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) because their policy allowed only whites to perform there.
Given a DAR membership after FDR’s election in 1932, Eleanor initially responded by agreeing to present the NAACP’s highest honor, the Springarn Medal, to Anderson at its upcoming convention. Then she invited Anderson to perform at the White House for the King and Queen of England. But her frustration continued.
On February 26th, she informed the DAR’s president she was resigning. “You had the opportunity to lead in an enlightened way and it seems to me that your organization failed,” she said. The next day, in her My Day newspaper column, she explained to her readers:
“Usually I have decided differently from the way in which I am deciding now. The question is, if you belong to an organization and disapprove of an action which is typical of a policy, should you resign or is it better to work for a changed point of view within the organization? In the past when I was able to work actively in any organization to which I belonged, I have usually stayed in until I had at least made a fight and been defeated. Even then I have as a rule accepted my defeat and decided either that I was wrong or that I was perhaps a little too far ahead of the thinking of the majority at that time. … But, in this case I belong to an organization in which I can do no active work. They have taken an action which has been widely talked of in the press. To remain a member implies approval of that action, and therefore I am resigning.”
Eleanor then worked with NAACP President Walter White, Anderson’s business manager and the Department of Interior to have the concert moved to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Fearing her presence might distract from the event, she did not attend. She did, however, ensure that the radio stations that carried her own broadcasts carried the event live.
On Easter Sunday, April 9th, Anderson’s one-hour concert drew a crowd of 75,000, extending all the way past the Washington Monument. She opened with the National Anthem, sang a beautiful rendition of America and, for an encore, sang “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” At the end, she received a bow and kiss from her Finnish accompanist Kosti Vehanen, and walked arm in arm with him off the stage. Billed as the “Freedom Concert,” some in retrospect saw this as the first mass demonstration of the civil rights era.
This was not the first, nor would it be the last, act of defiance against racism by Eleanor Roosevelt. The previous November, as a participant in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare held in Birmingham, Alabama, she campaigned for, among other actions, abolishment of the poll tax, equal pay for black teachers, and a federal anti-lynching law. As the delegates met in the Municipal Auditorium, Commissioner of Public Safety “Bull” Connor (whose notoriety would gain national disdain when he unleashed police dogs and fire hoses on black children in May 1963) put a rope down the center aisle to force blacks and whites to sit on opposite sides of it. Eleanor, who had been sitting with the noted black activist Mary McLeod Bethune, was told to move to the white section. Defiantly, she folded her chair, marched to the aisle, then unfolded it and sat directly over the rope line.
Eleanor Roosevelt may have lacked the political authority to order things done, but she exemplified the power of character in leadership that motivates others to do them.
Photo Credit: National Portrait Gallery
