Product Description

Longlisted for the National Book Award

A groundbreaking booktwo decades in the worksthat tells the story of how a brilliant writer-turned-activist granddaughter of a mulatto slave and the first lady of the United States whose ancestry gave her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution forged an enduring friendship that changed each of their lives and helped to alter the course of race and racism in America.

Pauli Murray first saw Eleanor Roosevelt in 1933 at the height of the Depression at a government-sponsored two-hundred-acre camp for unemployed women where Murray was living something the first lady had pushed her husband to set up in her effort to do what she could for working women and the poor. The first lady appeared one day unannounced behind the wheel of her car her secretary and a Secret Service agent her passengers. To Murray then aged twenty-three Roosevelts self-assurance was a symbol of womens independence a symbol that endured throughout Murrays life.?

Five years later Pauli Murray a twenty-eight-year-old aspiring writer?? wrote a letter to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt protesting racial segregation in t