Rather than offering yet another celebration of Dr. The development of the Civil Rights movement, of which Murray was a major figure, is told with a cast of women like Maida Springer, Lillian Smith, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Although the text is formatted for a lay readership (e.g., footnotes are absent within the text and they are awkwardly listed by quotation at the end of the book), Bell-Scott provides a rigorous historical backdrop told from a distinctly intersectional perspective. The Firebrand and the First Lady introduces Murray to a wide readership, addressing both popular and academic audiences. Undergraduates may find entre into these topics through the personal mediums of correspondence and biography, and there are plenty of full-length letters instructors could utilize as primary source teaching materials. Thus, this text would be a helpful secondary source for any historian of mid-century African America.
Bell-Scott, an eminent Murray scholar, adeptly anchors the correspondence in the historical context of African American activism and American race relations, drawing on a vast array of archival sources including black and mainstream media, organizational papers, court cases, and works published by Murray and Roosevelt themselves.
This book would appeal to anyone interested in history portrayed through correspondence or Murray or Roosevelt as historical figures. Their relationship is the subject of Patricia Bell-Scott’s The Firebrand and the First Lady, which takes as its primary source the hundreds of letters exchanged between Murray and Roosevelt between 1938 and the latter’s death in 1962. Despite their differences, the two found common cause in their shared dedication to social justice and racial equality at a time when interracial political contacts were fraught and public interracial friendships were rare. Pauli Murray was a working-class African-American civil rights and feminist activist from the south, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the longest-serving First Lady in American history, was born into the northern white political elite.
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