A very different Eleanor Roosevelt came to Washington, D.C., in 1933 than the one who had lived there when her husband was the assistant secretary of the navy during World War I, almost twenty years before. This Eleanor realistically understood her shortcomings, but she had also developed many strengths. Two of the most important were her ability to spot inequalities and a willingness to do something about them.
One of the first things she did after her husband’s inauguration was to visit the slums of Washington, D.C. The crusade to dismantle the filthy alley slums of D.C., home to mostly African Americans, had been led by another First Lady, Ellen Wilson, the first wife of President Woodrow Wilson. The housing, constructed in hidden alleys behind the stately homes and public buildings of Washington, had long been declared a health hazard because the horrendous conditions there bred disease.
Eleanor, during her first stay in Washington, knew of Mrs. Wilson’s efforts but hadn’t done much to support them. Now, the new First Lady learned that things had not changed since Mrs. Wilson died in 1914. (On her deathbed, Ellen Wilson was told a law had been passed that would clear the slums, but World War I intervened and nothing was done.)
On a blustery March day in 1933, Eleanor, in one of her first acts as First Lady, toured the alley slums. Accompanied by a longtime crusader for better housing, Charlotte Everett Hopkins, who had urged the visit, she was driven through a small crevice opening into a rotten world of crumbling wooden tenements, home to twelve thousand blacks and one thousand whites. There was no running water and only outdoor bathrooms. The rarely collected garbage was a magnet for well-fed rats that darted everywhere.
Eleanor didn’t just look on this visit, she listened. The residents described the horrors of life in the dirty tenements, the indignities, the disease, the desperation. These shocking sights and conversations convinced the First Lady to take on the crusade of decent housing. She talked about it, wrote about it, and a year later she spoke at the first National Housing Conference, calling out slumlords as “thoughtless people” who would force others to live in squalid conditions “just to make a little more money.” She took her post of honorary chairman of the Washington Committee on Housing seriously, helping to pass legislation that created the Alley Dwelling Authority of 1934, which tore down and rebuilt or renovated the inadequate housing.
Eleanor’s concern with decent housing led to one of her pet projects, a planned community in West Virginia called Arthurdale. The Appalachia area was one of the poorest in a country that was almost drowning in poverty. Lorena Hickok, Eleanor’s close friend and a newspaper reporter now working for the Roosevelt administration, had been sent to inspect conditions in various parts of the United States. The worst she had seen was a coal mining area called Scott’s Run in West Virginia. The name “Run” came from the stinking waste that trickled down the side of the hills. Hickok reported, “Along the main street through the town, there was stagnant, filthy water, which the inhabitants used for drinking, cooking, washing, and everything else imaginable.”
A coal mining family in West Virginia
Eleanor came to see for herself. She met a community of starving people who talked to her about what it was like to live in abject poverty. Despite different settings, the problems of poor people in rural West Virginia and urban Washington, D.C., were very similar.
In one shack she saw a little boy who held a white rabbit close in his arms, obviously his pet. Eleanor recounted how his sister told her, “He thinks we are not going to eat his rabbit. But we are.” Hearing that, the boy fled down the hill, still clutching the rabbit to his chest.
Eleanor used this story to help raise money for the new community of Arthurdale. What began as an idea to move out-of-work coal miners to West Virginia farmland became a planned community, where the residents could farm as well as work in light industries. Franklin got behind the program, and Congress approved twenty-five million dollars for the project, with hopes it might possibly serve as a prototype for other such communities. Still, there were critics aplenty who disapproved of why and how so much money was being spent.
Eleanor meets with the residents of the new Arthurdale community in 1935.
The first prefabricated homes in Arthurdale were ready for occupancy in 1934. Thanks in part to Eleanor’s fundraising efforts among her wealthy friends, Arthurdale became a true community, with a clinic and good schools. She used her connections to bring a furniture factory and a vacuum cleaner assembly plant to the area.
In the end individual families benefited from Arthurdale, but the area as a whole did not. Congress turned against the project, finding it too expensive to continue financing. By 1941, Eleanor herself conceded that money had been wasted, but, she thought, money had also been saved: “I have always felt that many human beings who might have cost us thousands of dollars in tuberculosis sanitariums, insane asylums, and jails were restored to usefulness and given confidence in themselves.”
There was one aspect of the Arthurdale experience, however, that shocked her. Even though whites and blacks had been living together in poverty in the region for decades, white residents of Arthurdale refused to allow African Americans to join them in their new community. Six hundred families, including two hundred black families, originally applied for housing, but the first fifty families, chosen by a committee from the University of West Virginia, were all white.
These first families formed the Arthurdale Homesteaders Club, which was allowed to make its own rules for their community. The First Lady requested that the next group of residents be more diverse, but the Homesteaders Club refused, writing her that they were “thoroughly opposed to Negroes as residents, and we feel that we should not risk the loss of respect we have gained in the community by admitting Negroes.” They also made the point that the community would need separate schools, since West Virginia law forbade integrated schools.
This was an eye-opening turn of events for Eleanor. She was now starting to understand just how corrosive the systematic segregation of African Americans was. Unlike many Americans, even liberals and progressives who preferred not to look at the problem, she saw racism for what it was: a disease to the body of the United States that needed to be examined and cured.
To that end, Eleanor began to surround herself with people who were already working on the cause of civil rights, though that name had yet to be commonly given to the movement. One of those people was a woman she had met in 1927, an African American educator named Mary Jane McLeod Bethune.
Eleanor came to regard Mary Jane McLeod Bethune as one of her closest friends.
Mary was the fifteenth of seventeen children born to a pair of former slaves in South Carolina. The only child in her family to attend her local one-room schoolhouse, she’d come home, after walking five miles back and forth, to teach her family what she’d learned each day. Her teacher helped her get scholarships to continue her learning. As an adult, she dedicated herself to education and starting schools for blacks.
Now married to another educator, Mary first encountered Eleanor at a meeting of the National Council of Women in 1927. She was the last to arrive in a room filled with white women, and she wasn’t sure where she should sit. Later she remembered how Sara Roosevelt got up from her seat, took her arm, and led her to a chair between her and Eleanor. “I can remember, too, how the faces of the Negro servants lit up with pride when they saw me seated at the center of that imposing gathering.” Whatever Sara’s other faults, she was not a racist, mostly because her father, an educator, taught tolerance rather than prejudice. This encounter over time led to a fast friendship between the Roosevelt women and Mary Jane McLeod Bethune.
Another person who came into the First Lady’s orbit was Walter Francis White, the head of the the NAACP. Walter, of mixed European and African heritage, had blue eyes and light hair and could easily have passed for white. Instead, he spent his life fighting injustice against African Americans.
Walter was among a small group of notable black leaders and educators who were invited by Eleanor to a dinner meeting at the White House in January 1934. She wanted it known that the Roosevelt administration was interested in their concerns. For over four hours in a no-holds-barred conversation, the participants discussed and debated the problems facing their race. As one historian put it, “Never before had black leaders been invited to discuss unemployment, lynching, unequal expenditures to educate children, and the failure to provide housing, sanitation, and running water.”
The group decided that as much as they would like to tackle the huge issue of segregation, there was a more immediate problem to focus on—making sure that blacks got their fair share of the New Deal programs, which at the moment was not happening.
Franklin was wheeled in after midnight to say hello to the group and offer his support. But in the coming years, it would be Eleanor, not Franklin, who kept the issue of civil rights front and center in the Roosevelt administration. As one participant in that unprecedented evening meeting put it, Eleanor “set before all of us a new standard for understanding and cooperation in the field of race.”
There was one more person who came along a few years later and helped the First Lady open her eyes. She was one of Eleanor’s many correspondents, a young African American woman named Pauli Murray.
Pauli first saw Eleanor in 1933, when the First Lady was visiting a camp for unemployed women in upstate New York. Shy and nervous about meeting the president’s wife, she hid behind a book she was reading. After the visit, Pauli was called out by the camp’s director for her disrespect. When she wrote to Eleanor in 1938, she used this incident to remind the First Lady that she was “the girl who did not stand up” at Camp Tera.
A young Pauli Murray, who would become a lifelong friend
Her note to Eleanor was attached to a copy of a letter she’d sent to President Roosevelt about being denied admission to her state school, the University of North Carolina, because of her race. In it, she wrote with eloquence, passion, and sadness about what it felt like to be black in America. “Twelve millions of your citizens have to endure insults, injustice, and such degradation of spirit that you believe impossible as a human being . . . Can you, for one moment, put yourself in our place and imagine the feelings of resentment, the protest, the indignation, the outrage that would rise within you to realize that you, a human being, with the keen sensitivities of other human beings, were being set off in a corner, marked apart from your fellow human beings?”
Pauli, who had copied Eleanor because she thought there was better chance of the First Lady reading the letter than her husband, closed by noting that segregation “isn’t my problem alone, it is the problem of my people, and in these trying days, it will not let me or any other thinking Negro rest.”
This letter, the first in series of letters between the two women that would last until the end of Eleanor’s life, was yet another thread in the tapestry of anger and despair that she now saw as the plight of African Americans. As the First Lady of the United States, she decided to use her position to work side by side with black leaders who were leading the charge for their equal rights.
Eleanor Roosevelt now firmly believed that by making the country a better place for its African American citizens, it would become a better place for all its citizens.
