AJC DECATUR BOOK FESTIVAL
Pat Conroy tribute keynote event, 8 p.m. Sept. 2 at Emory's Schwartz Center. Dav Pilkey kidnote event, 5 p.m. Sept. 2 at Decatur High School's Performing Arts Center. Festival, 9:30 a.m.-6:15 p.m. Sept. 3; 11:30 a.m.-6 p.m. Sept. 4. All events free; tickets required for keynote and kidnote events. www.decaturbookfestival.com.
For nearly a quarter century beginning in 1938, Pauli Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt exchanged hundreds of letters, handwritten notes and cards.
But it was several letters that Murray wrote to Patricia Bell-Scott in the early 1980s that turned out to be equally noteworthy.
Bell-Scott is professor emerita of women’s studies and human development and family science at the University of Georgia and the author or editor of five books. Back in 1983, though, she was the co-founder of SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women, where she’d invited Murray to serve as a consulting editor.
Initially, Murray was too busy working on what she described as her “dratted autobiography”; 18 months later, she was dead. But something about their correspondence stuck with Bell-Scott — and nine years later, she began researching a book about Murray, an African-American writer and activist whose impact reached into and beyond the White House.
"My interest, piqued by a reference to ER in what proved to be Murray's last letter to me, intensified when I read her autobiography published two years after her death," Bell-Scott explains in "The Firebrand and the First Lady," which she'll discuss on Sept. 3 at the AJC Decatur Book Festival.
“Firebrand” explores the unlikely friendship that developed between Roosevelt, a white, patrician-born (if not in spirit) first lady, and Murray, the bold and brilliant granddaughter of a mulatto slave who co-founded the National Organization for Women and was the first African-American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest.
Conducted mostly via correspondence, the friendship became much more than a written exchange, Bell-Scott suggests.
"Once I started reading their letters to each other, I started to see something there about the power of friendship as a place of growth, a place of comfort across generations," she told the book-centric website Signature. "When you look at class, cultural backgrounds, circumstances, it was so unlikely, but it was an enduring relationship. They were both transformative leaders partly because of this relationship."
Patricia Bell-Scott discusses “The Firebrand and the First Lady.” 10 a.m. Sept. 3. Marriott Conference Center B.
