Courageous Eleanor Roosevelt Asserted Human Rights in a Dark, Dangerous Time

The UN tasked the closeted former First Lady with helping heal the devastation of World War II

For the first time in 77 years, the United States failed to recognize Human Rights Day on Dec. 10 - the international commemoration of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights – despite America’s leadership role in developing the fundamental standard of freedom and rights for all human beings.

Instead Donald Trump’s administration threatened new sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC), unless the world’s permanent war crimes tribunal in The Hague amends its founding document “to ensure it does not investigate the Republican president and his top officials,” according to a Reuters report.

“There is growing concern ... that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” a Trump administration official told Reuters. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”

The juxtaposition between what the Trump administration and the international community consider “unacceptable” could not be more starkly different.

Determining the definition of “unacceptable” was precisely the goal undertaken by the newly created United Nations after the World War II devastation caused by Hitler’s Nazi regime and the rise of fascism in Europe. Founded in 1945, Article 1 in the UN’s Charter underscores “respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” and “promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.”

In early 1946, the UN’s 51 Member States created a commission to “construct the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission,” according to America’s historian Heather Cox Richardson, with members selected based on personal merit. President Harry S. Truman appointed beloved former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who was asked to serve as chair.

“‘[T]he free peoples’ and ‘all of the people liberated from slavery, put in you their confidence and their hope, so that everywhere the authority of these rights, respect of which is the essential condition of the dignity of the person, be respected,’ a U.N. official told the commission at its first meeting on April 29, 1946,” Richardson wrote on Facebook.

Roosevelt was uniquely qualified to assume the commission’s responsibility to figure out “how to define the violation of human rights” and “suggest how to protect ‘the rights of man all over the world.’”

Having traveled throughout America and to the wartime frontlines in Europe and the Pacific, Roosevelt was keenly aware of the similarities between blatant racism at home and Jewish antisemitism and hostility towards minorities abroad. There was an ugly throughline: just 20 years earlier, 40,000 of the racist Ku Klux Klan’s four million-members marched proudly down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C.

Offstage, the KKK was actually in decline. But strains of their original America First nativism and economic conservatism, violent White Supremacy, and coercive Christian religious bigotry persisted through terrorist lynchings, Jim Crow laws, and ubiquitous racial segregation throughout all aspects of the military and civil society.

“As the egalitarian spirit of post-Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, Black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings,” wrote The 1619 Project author Nikole Hannah-Jones in 2019. “White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from mainstream American life – a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.”

Eleanor married Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1905 and stuck by him through his polio, his affairs with two other women, and his four terms as President of the United States from 1933 to 1945. Eleanor Roosevelt both obeyed and bucked mainstream expectations while developing her own sensibilities, including strong public advocacy for civil rights.

Roosevelt became politicized in the 1920s, hanging out with independent women journalists and lesbian and feminist activists connected to the Greenwich Village-based League of Women Voters. In 1924, she was a popular leader in the New York State Democratic Committee’s Women’s Division, where she demanded equal space for women and the right to name women delegates. She was put in charge of the platform committee where she worked hard to create what would eventually become her husband’s New Deal platform. But the men locked her out of the platform meeting, an insulting lesson the outraged politico vowed never to forget.

The 1924 Democratic National Convention was a political turning point for the couple, with FDR nominating New York Gov. Al Smith for President. Eight years later, during the lowest point of the Great Depression in 1932, FDR campaigned as a “Progressive Candidate” who would be a “Man of Action” in fighting the economic disaster. After his election, Eleanor redefined the role of First Lady, becoming FDR’s “eyes and ears” during extensive trips to learn about conditions throughout the nation.

“Eleanor Roosevelt visited Blacks when she toured poverty-stricken areas the summer after she became First Lady. She did not respond to the depth of institutional racism until she pressured the Subsistence Homestead Administration to admit Blacks to Arthurdale, West Virginia,” reports the African American Registry. “Her intervention failed, and she invited NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White and the presidents of Historically Black Colleges and Universities to the White House to discuss the situation. This unprecedented meeting quickly became a tutorial on racial discrimination and lasted until midnight.”

Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickock (Screen shot from book Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady)

It was during FDR’s 1932 campaign that Eleanor Roosevelt developed a close, intimate relationship with AP political reporter, Lorena Hickok. “I think that Hick was in love with Eleanor, and Eleanor was in love with Hick,” Eleanor Roosevelt biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook told PBS in 1999, citing numerous detailed love letters between the two. “They’re political letters. They’re ardent letters. They’re love letters, but they’re politically driven. And their relationship is a very full relationship.”

Mary McLeod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt (Photo National Park Service)

FDR’s people put up with Eleanor – until she joined the NAACP in early 1934 and supported her close personal friend Mary McLeod Bethune – educator and founder of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) - and NAACP’s Walter White in their tireless pursuit of administration backing for the Costigan-Wagner anti-lynching bill. FDR might have agreed with the bill’s intent, but he refused to budge for fear of a backlash from senior Southern Senators who “threatened a long filibuster that would effectively block everything on the calendar, including the Social Security Act, which was FDR’s most cherished accomplishment.”

Eleanor was deeply disappointed. She accepted White’s invitation to attend the NAACP-hosted art exhibit “A Commentary on Lynching“ that depicted white mob savagery. FDR and Eleanor’s Southern critics relished the controversy.

But for Eleanor, it was another lesson in the immorality of remaining silent in the presence of evil, though she was more vocal on some issues than others. She disagreed with FDR’s forced internment of Japanese-Americans during the war, for instance, but only worked privately to assist groups trying to ameliorate conditions.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover considered Eleanor Roosevelt to be a threat to America. “The 3,000-page FBI file contains charges against her for suspected Communist activities, threats to her life on the grounds of her disloyalty to the country, close monitoring of her activities and writings, and a record of possible insurrectionary groups that she may have influenced,” PBS reported. Hoover wondered if Eleanor had “Black blood.”

Eleanor responded in her syndicated “My Day” column, citing an anonymous postcard from Alabama that said: “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: You have not answered my question, the amount of Negro blood you have in your veins, if any.”

Eleanor replied: “I am afraid none of us know how much nor what kind of blood we have in our veins, since chemically it is all the same. And most of us cannot trace our ancestry more than a few generations. As far as I know, I have no Negro blood, but, of course, I do have some Southern blood in my veins, for my Grandmother Roosevelt came from Georgia.”

Eleanor Roosevelt and Marion Anderson (Photo FDR Library)

Perhaps Roosevelt’s best-known response to racism was standing up for contralto opera singer Marian Anderson, who she met when the singer performed at the White House in 1935. By 1939, Anderson’s concerts were so successful, Howard University asked the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) to use their huge Constitution Hall for an Easter concert. The all-white DAR said No. Eleanor, who had been gifted a DAR membership as First Lady, resigned. In her Feb. 27, 1939 syndicated My Day column, Eleanor simplified the issue: “To remain as a member implies approval of that action, therefore I am resigning.”

Quietly, Eleanor floated the idea of an outdoor concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes - a past Chicago NAACP president – secured FDR’s assent. Not wanting to overshadow Anderson, Eleanor stayed in the background, orchestrating radio coverage to the nation.

“Genius draws no color line,” Ickes said on April 9, 1939, introducing Anderson to 75,000 people on the National Mall and hundreds of thousands listening on radio. Anderson opened with “America,” segued into opera, including “Ave Maria,” followed by familiar spirituals. She concluded the concert with tears in her eyes, singing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

On Dec. 12, 1945, seven months after the end of World War II in Europe, Eleanor Roosevelt saw the Broadway play “Strange Fruit.” She wrote in her My Day column: “We need to understand these circumstances in the North as well as in the South. There are mental and spiritual lynchings as well as physical ones, and few of us in this nation can claim immunity from responsibility for some of the frustrations and injustices which face not only our colored people, but other groups, who for racial, religious or economic reasons, are at a disadvantage and face a constant struggle for justice and equality of opportunity.”

Vanity Fair feature on “Strange Fruit” (screen shot)

Three years later, on Sept. 28, 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt explained the Universal Declaration of Human Rights she helped create.

“We must not be confused about what freedom is. Basic human rights are simple and easily understood: freedom of speech and a free press; freedom of religion and worship; freedom of assembly and the right of petition; the right of men to be secure in their homes and free from unreasonable search and seizure and from arbitrary arrest and punishment,” Eleanor Roosevelt said in her speech “The Struggles for the Rights of Man.”

“We must not be deluded by the efforts of the forces of reaction to prostitute the great words of our free tradition and thereby to confuse the struggle,” Roosevelt said. “The basic problem confronting the world today…is the preservation of human freedom for the individual and consequently for the society of which he is a part. We are fighting this battle again today as it was fought at the time of the French Revolution and at the time of the American Revolution. The issue of human liberty is as decisive now as it was then.”

Additionally, Eleanor Roosevelt warned: “People who continue to be denied the respect to which they are entitled as human beings will not acquiesce forever in such denial.”

Eleanor Roosevelt set an example, lighting a candle against the darkness. Donald Trump wants to blow it out.

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