The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt

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NEW YORK, Thursday—We are going to Hyde Park this morning to attend ceremonies in commemoration of my husband's birthday. I will tell you about them tomorrow.

These warm days we are having give me a little anxiety. I read of the cold weather in Europe, think how much better able we are to withstand it, and regret that the curious freaks of weather give us, in this part of the country, so many warm days in the month of January!

However, I would rather have a few warm days now than have them burst upon us temporarily in March. For the last two years, we have had prolonged warm spells in March which brought out our fruit trees, and then when cold weather came again in April, the buds were nipped and we lost a good part of our crop. I hope we will not have this same trend for a third year. As far as I know, we have not been told by scientists how to save our crops from freak weather of this kind. I have often seen, in the orange-growing States, a lot of smudges burning among the trees to keep them from suffering from the frost, but I doubt if that would help much in colder climates.

* * *

It seems incredible that a majority of the Georgia House of Representatives actually think that the State of Georgia is so far removed from the rest of the world that they go ahead and approve a "white primary bill" which would bar Negro citizens from voting in the Democratic primaries.

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights has before it the creation of a subcommission on discrimination. Are we going to put ourselves in the position of having the world think of us as a backward nation? A nation that discriminates, and takes away political rights from a large group of its citizens?

We can hide behind a provision in the U.N. Charter which states that domestic affairs cannot be interfered with unless they menace the peace of the world. But I do not think that will make us very happy, since there is no way of hiding from the thoughts of others.

I believe that a great majority of our citizens will hang their heads in shame if one of our great States actually practices what little Liberia has been trying to do away with. Liberia, I understand, has recently taken steps which seem to promise the full participation in the government of the country by all of her citizens who are able to vote.

I wonder if these citizens of ours, who, in the view of some of our other citizens, are so recklessly abusing their State's rights at the moment, think that this will have no effect on future arguments concerning States' rights. I can well imagine the orators who will cite this particular situation as showing that the citizens of a State should not be allowed to take a stand in opposition to the progressive outlook of the majority of the citizens of the country. This is not a stand which affects just the people of Georgia. It affects the standing of the United States in the world family of nations.

E.R.

(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1947, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC,; REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR PART PROHIBITED.)


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, January 31, 1947

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
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Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007

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MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.

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Transcription created from a photocopy of a UFS wire copy of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
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