The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship-Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice. By Patricia Bell-Scott. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. xix + 454 pp. $30.00 (cloth).When the dominant culture the United States becomes truly conscious and appreciative of significant contributions to the common life by individuals from marginalized groups, it seeks, arguably, to claim these individuals for itself, for its own institutions and processes. The transformative ministry of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., nonviolent advocacy for the civil rights of African Americans and the poor, for example, has become for the mainstream a national holiday. This past spring, two women-one of them African American-were similarly incorporated. The U.S. Treasury revealed that Eleanor Roosevelt, who broke many gender barriers her lifelong work for human rights, will be featured on the back of a redesigned five dollar bill, and Yale University announced that a new residential college will be named for Pauli Murray, an alumna of the Law School, as well as a writer and civil rights activist who, 1977, became the first African American woman to be ordained a priest the Episcopal Church. Such claiming by the dominant culture is not inherently wrong and can express authentic respect. Yet it also elucidates the power of Patricia Bell-Scott s new book about the friendship of these two women. Although the book honors their importance to the history of American social justice, and therefore needs to be widely read, its purpose is foremost to show their claim on one another.In 1952, after a visit by Murray and her two aunts to the Roosevelt home Hyde Park, New York, Murray expressed to Roosevelt, a thankyou note, that in our spiritual way, we consider you a member of the family (p. 210). Drawing from such correspondence over nearly a quarter-century, as well as diaries, interviews, memoirs, biographies, and other sources, BellScott tells exquisite detail the story of how the relationship between the two women grew into such intimacy. The narrative begins and ends with the firebrand, a term of affection Roosevelt once used for Murray an Ebony magazine article, and is structured around major stages of Murrays personal history, all the while documenting how the lives, advocacy, and sociopolitical views of the two women interwove with and influenced one another.The book will be of interest, of course, to students of U.S. history, especially those who view history not just as the progression of national events, but also as the are of individual lives and interrelationships. It also will appeal to anyone seeking to learn more about the civil rights movements the mid-twentieth century. The friendship of Murray and Roosevelt had early roots their shared hope for anti-lynching legislation and concern for poor sharecroppers, and took hold during their advocacy for Odell Waller, an African American sharecropper whose conviction 1940 by an all-white jury of murdering a white landowner raised national awareness regarding the injustice of poll taxes and their effect on jury lists. …