But the story was not over. A sixty-year-old woman as engaged and vital as Eleanor Roosevelt was not going to stay at home with her beloved knitting. A new chapter of her life was just beginning.
In December of 1945, President Truman asked Eleanor to be one of the United States delegates to the newly formed United Nations, which was about to hold its first meeting in London. At first, Eleanor said no. Then, after prodding from the president, she said she would think about it. Finally, “with fear and trembling,” she said yes. She realized that, as someone who hated war and loved peace and who felt strongly that the countries of the world should function as neighbors not adversaries, she had much to bring to the table.
Her male counterparts on the delegation—and they were all males—saw it differently. Some of them disagreed with her politically, and some of them didn’t like her personally. Eleanor was fully aware that sexism was also part of the equation. She knew “that as the only woman, I had better be better than anybody else . . . I knew that if I in any way failed, that it would not just be my failure. It would be the failure of all women. . . .”
The hostility against Eleanor was evident from the first. The men on the committee made snide comments, and in meetings, they often ignored her opinion. But Eleanor wasn’t one to be ignored. She continued to speak up and make her points.
As one of her UN assignments, she was the U.S. representative tasked with tackling the massive worldwide refugee problem. Close to a million people had been displaced during the war. The Soviet Union demanded that Soviet refugees and refugees from countries that were now in their sphere of influence, like Poland and Hungary, be returned to their home countries. But many of those refugees did not want to live under those repressive Soviet regimes. Others, who had spoken against the Soviet Union or communism, feared they would be imprisoned or killed.
Eleanor addressing the General Assembly at the United Nations in July 1947
Eleanor’s Soviet counterpart on the committee insisted these refugees be returned, but thanks to her ability to debate and persuade, the United Nations General Assembly voted to allow refugees to live where they preferred. This was a big victory for refugees’ freedom of movement and for Eleanor herself. Her biggest critic in her delegation, U.S. senator Arthur Vandenberg, was finally persuaded as well. He now saw Eleanor’s talent and value. “I want to take back everything I ever said about her,” he declared, “and believe me it’s been plenty!”
The UN delegation, on which she served for six years, wasn’t Eleanor’s only area of activity. As always, her concerns were wide and varied. She took great interest in the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and lobbied for the Jewish people to have their own state. Israel was recognized by the United States in 1948.
Although a supporter of Israel, Eleanor also spoke of and wrote about her concerns for the country's Arab population. Here she visits with a Bedouin boy in Beersheba, Israel, in 1959.
She also traveled the world to see the living conditions of women and offer her support for women’s rights. She visited with heads of states. At home she joined a board that oversaw Wiltwyck, a school for abused boys. After so many years in the public eye, she knew how to gather support for the causes she believed in, through her writings, her speeches, and media appearances.
One of the posts Eleanor took on after Franklin’s death was board member of the Wiltwyck School for Boys. In 1947, she brought a group of boys to Val-Kill for a picnic.
But despite her many concerns and interests, she never neglected the fight for civil rights. After their contributions to winning World War II, African Americans were unwilling to go backward. The issue heated up during the 1950s and ’60s. African Americans were sick and tired of segregation. They wanted full voting rights, educational and employment equality, and the same access to public facilities that was available to whites. Black citizens were entitled to the Declaration of Independence’s promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It was time—past time.
Eleanor Roosevelt remained active in the cause she had taken up while she was First Lady. And with Franklin gone, she no longer had to worry about political concerns. She joined the boards of the NAACP and CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) to help the progress of the civil rights movement. She used her influence with Harry Truman in 1948 to have him become the first president to speak at the NAACP convention. He made his speech, joined by Eleanor, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Eleanor continued her “My Day” newspaper column, which she had begun writing in 1935, along with a question-and-answer column in the Ladies Home Journal called “If You Ask Me.” She used these columns, her other writings, and her speeches to discuss civil rights, trying to explain how discrimination, segregated schools, and efforts to repress the black vote through roadblocks like poll taxes were the opposite of what America should stand for.
During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when the black citizens of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to ride public transit until it was integrated, she met with Rosa Parks. Parks had sparked the boycott in December 1955 by refusing to move to the back of the bus. Eleanor also worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to raise money for the boycott.
Dr. King was her first guest on her 1959 television show, Prospects of Mankind. And when he was arrested during a protest march and thrown into a Georgia jail in 1960, she defended him in her columns, noting this action would lose the United States respect in the eyes of the world.
In 1958, along with singer and activist Harry Belafonte, Eleanor looks at one of Franklin’s quotes memorialized in Brussels, Belgium.
Dr. King admired Eleanor greatly, and she admired him. King’s “insistence that there be no hatred in this struggle” was, in her view, “almost more than human beings can achieve.” As for his part, he wrote to her in 1962, “Once again, for all you have done, and I’m sure will continue to do to help extend the fruits of Democracy . . . please accept my deep and lasting gratitude.”
As the fight for civil rights grew more intense during the early 1960s, Eleanor seesawed between feeling buoyed about the progress that had been made and distressed at the increasing violence against the protesters.
But her own struggle was almost over. In 1960, Eleanor was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, a blood disease. In 1962, she was given a course of steroid drugs that led to her heart failing. She died that year at her home in New York City on November 7, at the age of seventy-eight. The world mourned her death, and Dr. King eulogized her by saying, “The impact of her personality and its unwavering devotion to high principle and purpose cannot be contained in a single day or era.”
Three months after her death, her last book, Tomorrow Is Now, was published. In it she made her final call to get involved in the civil rights movement: “Staying aloof is not a solution, but a cowardly evasion.”
Eleanor Roosevelt was no coward. When the FBI informed her in 1958 that the Ku Klux Klan had placed that $25,000 bounty on her head, they told her it would be best if she canceled her appearance at the Highlander Folk School. She thanked them for the information and then made plans to go anyway.
Eleanor conducts a class at the Highlander Folk School and chats with the attendees.
Eleanor flew to the Nashville airport where she was met by another older woman, and they drove to the Highlander Folk School in rural Tennessee, her pistol on the seat between them. As one historian put it, “And here they are. They are going to go through the Klan. They’re going to stand down the Klan . . . they drive up at night through the mountains to this tiny labor school to conduct a workshop on how to break the law.”
Fortunately, the Klan didn’t confront them. Maybe they knew who they were dealing with.
Until her death, Eleanor Roosevelt probably did more than any other white person to change the course of race relations in the United States. In part, that was because she had access to presidents—not just Franklin, but also Harry Truman and later John F. Kennedy—who had the power to make things happen. But it was also because she was able to explain to everyday citizens, through her speeches, columns, books, radio and television appearances, and even personal letters, how corrosive segregation was, not just to African Americans, but to the country as a whole.
On a more personal note, her friend Pauli Murray said after Eleanor’s death, “The great lesson Mrs. R. taught all of us by example was largesse, generosity—her heart seemed to me as big as all the world.”
As a child, Eleanor lived in her own world of dreams and terrors. As an adult she fought for what she believed in, overcame her fears and prejudices, and helped others do the same. Perhaps she described her life best: “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.”
Again and again, Eleanor Roosevelt did just that.
Eleanor leaving LaGuardia Airport in 1960, suitcase in hand, still on the go
