The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice

A finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and longlisted for the National Book Award, The Firebrand and the First Lady is the riveting history, two decades in the making, of how a brilliant writer-turned-activist and the first lady of the United States forged an enduring friendship that helped to alter the course of race and racism in America.

In 1938, the twenty-eight-year-old Pauli Murray wrote a letter to the President and First Lady, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, protesting racial segregation in the South. Eleanor wrote back. So began a friendship that would last for a quarter of a century, as Pauli became a lawyer, principal strategist in the fight to protect Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and a co-founder of the National Organization of Women, and Eleanor became a diplomat and first chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Lillian Smith Book Award
Finalist Georgia Author of the Year
Nominated Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award

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• Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (Black Women Writers Series)
• Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage
• Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet
• Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History)
• Proud Shoes The Story Of An American Family
• Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women's Movements
• Dark Testament: and Other Poems
• The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls
• Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform