In June 1958, seventy-three-year-old Eleanor Roosevelt, a former First Lady of the United States, was driving through the hills of Tennessee. She was on her way to speak at the Highlander Folk School, an acquaintance at her side, a pistol near her hand. The gun was for protection. The Ku Klux Klan, one of the most dangerous hate groups in the United States, had placed a bounty on her head: $25,000 to kill Eleanor Roosevelt.
Eleanor, the widow of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was one of the most admired women in the world. She had earned that popularity by championing the causes of those who needed help getting the rights they deserved: the poor, women, immigrants, refugees. Eleanor’s background was one of wealth and entitlement, yet emotionally, she knew what it was like to struggle. Her own insecurities translated into a desire to help others, but to turn her good intentions into action, she had to dig deep inside herself.
Perhaps her most controversial stand was her strong support of African Americans and their fight for civil rights. Many people in the United States turned their heads from the injustices—and the dangers—black people faced. Once she committed herself to the cause, Eleanor Roosevelt did not turn away. Turning away was not her style.
But as much as Eleanor was admired in some quarters, in others she was despised. From 1933 to 1945, when President Roosevelt died in office, Eleanor was a First Lady like no other. She didn’t like staying at the White House presiding over luncheons and teas—although she did plenty of that, too—she had things to see, do, and fix. Those who disliked the president and his programs were also appalled that Eleanor had a life of her own—and one that involved being an outspoken advocate for the underdog at a time when prejudices were everywhere. After President Roosevelt died, during an unprecedented fourth term of the presidency, Mrs. Roosevelt kept on fighting injustice.
The Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, where Mrs. Roosevelt was headed that June day, had a decades-long history of working for social change in the country. During the 1950s, activists like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. attended sessions on nonviolent protest there. The school had invited Mrs. Roosevelt to speak as part of a civil rights program about ways to protest unfair and immoral social conditions. She probably thought her visit to the Highlander School would just be another of the dozens of speaking engagements she made every year. But then the FBI advised her that a secret informant had told the agency that the Klan intended to stop the speech “even if they had to blow the place up.”
The longtime head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, was no friend of Mrs. Roosevelt. He thought she was a dangerous liberal, and he ordered the FBI to follow her activities, bug her phone conversations, and keep a file on what she said and what was written about her. This dossier was begun in 1940, and by the time of her death in 1962, it was more than three thousand pages long!
When the FBI gave Mrs. Roosevelt the news of the threat against her life, they also informed her that if she decided to speak at the Highlander Folk School they could not protect her. Whether they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—Eleanor Roosevelt understood that if she made the trip to rural Tennessee, she would be on her own. The situation was dangerous, but she believed in the Highlander Folk School’s mission and the cause of the civil rights movement.
So to Tennessee she went, determined as usual, but this time with a gun at her side.