Eye on the Struggle

by James McGrath Morris

  She works day and night, alone in her apartment now that Vivian has deserted her. But publishers promptly reject the first draft of her novel. A successful novelist consoles her. “Madge,” he says, “you haven’t had enough experience with hardships. You think your trouble is hard, but you must learn to face defeat bravely. Victory comes in getting up after you are down, and trying again.”

  With renewed energy, Madge trims the sentimentality and weak portions of her manuscript. Convinced it is now bound for success, she goes out to consign it to the mail. On her way to the post office, she encounters a broken-down and haggard Vivian, abandoned by her gambler. Madge helps her into a nearby drugstore and over hot chocolate invites Vivian to live with her again. “Kid,” Vivian replies, “I know you mean it, but it’s too late to start again. I’m just driftwood, floating along, getting nowhere.”

  Several days later Madge returns to her room. She is months in arrears on the rent. There she finds her manuscript at her door, once again rejected. She sinks into despair and rushes out into the night. From the shadows emerges a slender sinister-looking man ogling her.

  “Hello, baby, going my way?” he asks.

  Madge prepares, as she had before, to give him a stare intended on sending him away. But instead she throws her head back, issuing “a laugh of despair and abandonment that lingered on the night air in haunting echoes.” Taken aback, the man stares at Madge. “Sure,” she says, “anywhere you say, daddy.”

  “They melted into the night and the great grimy shadows of the city swallowed them up.”

  CHAPTER 4

  AN ABUNDANCE OF NERVE

  IN NOVEMBER 1931, TWENTY-YEAR-OLD ETHEL PAYNE SAT before her typewriter in the house on Throop Street, placed a piece of paper in the roller of her machine, and put her fingers to the keys. “My dear Dr. DuBois,” she began. “Fate and circumstances have a curious way of coinciding to achieve a common purpose. So it is with a good deal of presumption that I take it upon myself to write to you at this time.”

  Presumption was the right word because her letter was directed to W. E. B. Du Bois. Sociologist, activist, and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he was the most nationally prominent African American of the day. Payne was proposing to write his biography. “Of course, I realize that this is a tremendous undertaking that requires wide experience and a broad range of material to draw from, as well as nerve,” she wrote. “At the present time the only one of these three that I have in stock is nerve, and that is in abundance.” If Du Bois replied, the letter was lost to history.

  Despite her determination and early good fortune with her fiction, Payne was learning—as Madge had—that a black woman had little hope of making a living by writing in the 1930s. A more practical career plan was in order.

  Payne left Crane College, which was struggling to remain open, and entered the Chicago Training School for City, Home, and Foreign Missions run by the Methodist Episcopal Church. The tuition-free college had a Bible-centered curriculum that offered basic medical and social work training likely to make one employable. Payne found its religiosity a bit overwhelming but she stuck it out, majoring in social services with minors in fine arts and religious education. She earned her highest grade, an A–, in a storytelling class. But overall her work, or lack of it, resulted in yet another lackluster academic performance.

  In her spare time, she continued to write her stories for Abbott’s Monthly. Her choice of subjects and her style was like those of Émile Zola, the French writer known for his natural style in writing about violence, alcohol, and prostitution. One of her tales featured a minister who had an affair with a parishioner, and another described a black prostitute’s day in court. The magazine was evidently happy with her contributions and promoted her work in display advertisements in the Defender. “You remember the story ‘Retribution’ in the March issue by Ethel L. Payne, whose fiction and facts are so closely interwoven that one marvels at the unfolding of her story,” said the advertisement. “This month Miss Payne has written ‘Cabaret.’ In it the glamour of the night life is brought into the open day.”

  Payne’s success with Abbott’s Monthly was no small achievement. Since its start, the magazine had grown in circulation to more than 100,000 and attracted some of the nation’s best black writers, such as Chester Himes, who would later write If He Hollers Let Him Go, and Richard Wright, who was struggling to launch himself as a writer, tearing into pieces most of what he wrote. But he was sufficiently pleased with one story called “Superstition” that he submitted it to Abbott’s Monthly. It became his first published work.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1934, Payne neared the completion of her studies in social service at the Chicago Training School. In the Torch, the student annual publication to which she was a contributing editor, Payne published a lengthy semifictional account of washday in an alley behind her house. “ ‘The row’ is like an alien intruder or an ill-favored child,” wrote Payne in introducing the place. “Complacently it squats in its ugly, squalid surroundings while the rest of Englewood haughtily lifts its skirt and passes around it.”

  On the evening of June 15, 1934, Payne graduated from the Chicago Training School. She was still not a scholar and finished eleventh out of her class of thirteen. For her yearbook, Payne selected words from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “All things come round to him who will but wait.” She still retained hope of a law career and asked the school to send her transcript to the University of Chicago. While the university had accepted black students as early as 1870 and by the 1920s had more than sixty African Americans in its student body, it would be another decade before a black woman would graduate from its law school. With her grades, Payne was not a feasible candidate.

  Instead Payne used her newly minted degree to land a job at the State Training School for Girls in Geneva, Illinois, about forty miles west. The reformatory housed about 400 to 500 girls sent to it by juvenile courts from around the state, mostly on charges of immorality and incorrigibility. “Those girls,” Payne said, “some of them 15, 16, 17 years old, and they’d had experiences of people 40 years old or more—street hustling, prostitution, into drugs and things.”

  When Payne arrived she found a campus-like setting situated on the sloping banks of the Fox River. The inmates were housed in about a dozen two-story-tall brick cottages, each with a dayroom, kitchen, dining room, and matrons’ quarters on the first floor and bedrooms with barred windows on the second. The day was given over to classes, vocational training, and religious services. In their free time, the juveniles engaged in sports such as croquet, basketball, and even roller-skating on the half mile of paved sidewalk.

  Payne was hired as a matron. Each cottage housed about thirty-five girls with two women who were on duty all the time except when the relief matron took a turn for a day each week. Payne had to wake the girls and get them off to classes or to their jobs within the reformatory such as working in the laundry. “I was like a jail warden,” Payne said.

  Payne’s wards were all black girls. About one hundred girls, or a quarter of the population, were African American, the high number a reflection of the eagerness of Cook County courts to lock up black youths compounded by the refusal of other state reform institutions to house black inmates. The black cottages, with such names as “Faith” and “Lincoln,” were overcrowded, and the residents received less-than-adequate treatment. In fact, the professional staff neglected them except when white girls were discovered having sex with the black inmates. The racial indiscretions horrified the staff more than the sexual transgressions.

  The job was exhausting and the girls were a challenge. “They put me to a test, and they would do all kinds of things to see how strong I was,” Payne said. “They had lived hard lives crowded into their very young years.” After a while she reached an accommodation with many of the girls, and some, Payne felt, came to respect her. “I don’t know how many lives I actually affected, because it was too much of an experience fo
r a young person who had been sort of sheltered.”

  But after a year and a half, her mother finally told her, “Stop it. Stop it and come home.” Payne returned to Throop Street. The best job she could find was as a nursery school teacher in settlement houses and public schools at $80 a month. She kept the job for three years, earning enough to get by comfortably. But she was now in her late twenties, more educated than most in her neighborhood, and yet Chicago remained shuttered to her. It was as Chicagoan Bigger Thomas said in Richard Wright’s Native Son, “Half the time, I feel like I’m on the outside of the world peeping in through a knothole in the fence.”

  IN JUNE 1939, Payne instructed the Chicago Training School to send her transcript to the Chicago Public Library Training School. Admitted and trained, she swapped tending children for working with books and became a junior library assistant, with a 40 percent hike in salary.

  The aspiration to be a writer, however, remained alive in her. She signed up for a two-credit evening course in short story writing at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism; the class was taught by John T. Frederick. Lanky, thin, with wire-rimmed glasses resting on a Roman nose, he looked every part the professor. However, the farm-raised Frederick, who rode a pony to school, was actually an accomplished author, editor, and host of a CBS radio show about books. During the Great Depression, as regional director of the WPA Writers’ Project, he had worked with such Chicago writers as Richard Wright and Nelson Algren, who would become one of the best-known American writers in the 1940s and 1950s.

  Payne stayed with the class and signed up for Frederick’s advanced short story writing class in the second semester. She wrote weekly class assignments of all sorts ranging from recollections to short stories, from plays to dialogues. Her papers came back carefully marked up with encouraging remarks such as those Miss Dixon used to write at Lindblom Technical High School.

  “You have a good feeling for words,” Frederick told Payne. “More than that, you have a rich and significant experience to share.”

  CHAPTER 5

  MUSKETEER

  MONOTONOUSLY STAMPING LENDING SLIPS OR SORTING books at the Chicago Lawn Branch Library was hardly the life Ethel Payne had imagined for herself. “Work at the library was boring for me,” she said, “and I’m almost sure I was a bore to it.” But Chicago remained intransigently inhospitable for an ambitious young black woman. Seven out of ten employed black women worked as domestic servants. Other than that, the few jobs that could be had were in eating and drinking establishments, clothing stores, and, with the right credentials, black schools. A professional black woman was as rare in the Windy City as a warm day in winter.

  Preparations for war in 1940 reinforced the resolute racism. The conflagration in Europe fueled a government armament-spending spree that fired up the economy and wiped out the last vestiges of the Great Depression. But the economic growth left most African Americans behind, a bitter reminder of the racial divide. Nearly one in two blacks in Illinois remained without work. Picking up a copy of the Chicago Defender was discouraging. The paper’s Los Angeles correspondent reported finding only one Negro among the thousands employed in the city’s booming aircraft industry. A plant manager in New York told the Defender there was no company policy against hiring Negroes. “He said that objections to working with Negroes undoubtedly would come from the men already in the plant and that the company did not wish to experiment at this present time because of the possibility of labor difficulties or the impairment of the morale of its workers.”

  Following the disheartening racism of the 1920s and 1930s, the stoicism of urban African Americans reached its limit. In the fall of 1940 three black leaders met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to seek an end to segregation in the military and defense industries. Roosevelt listened sympathetically, but the White House soon made it clear that it would not alter the policy prohibiting the intermingling of colored and white soldiers.

  The White House tried to mollify the black leaders. But A. Philip Randolph, the founding president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, was not to be placated. As he rode the train into the South, he brooded over the impasse. By the time he reached Savannah, Georgia, Randolph had a plan. Proposing his idea first to small gatherings and then finally to the nation in January 1941, Randolph called on African Americans to march on Washington as had Coxey’s Army of unemployed workers in 1894 and the Bonus Army of unpaid war veterans in 1932.

  Over six feet tall, elegant in gestures, and possessing a baritone voice once described as being as musical as an organ, Randolph rallied his people with an eloquence in speech and writing that belied his limited education. “The virtue and rightness of a cause,” he said, “are not alone the condition and cause of its progress and acceptance. Power and pressure are at the foundation of the march of social justice and reform.”

  The planned protest struck terror in the administration. Roosevelt turned for help to his wife, who enjoyed considerable respect among African Americans. With the date of the march drawing near, an anxious Eleanor Roosevelt pleaded with Randolph to call it off. If the arrival of thousands of blacks in the nation’s capital, still a deeply segregated city whose hotels and restaurants barred Negroes, triggered an incident of any sort, it would set the cause back, she wrote. “You know that I am deeply concerned about the rights of Negro people, but I think one must face situations as they are and not as one wishes them to be.”

  To the president, his wife, and such allies of theirs as New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, such a protest march was unfathomable, especially in wartime. This fear was Randolph’s trump card. The march, he promised, “would wake up and shock official Washington as it has never before been shocked” because “Negroes are supposed not have sufficient iron in their blood for this type of struggle. In common parlance, they are supposed to be just scared and unorganizable.”

  He invited African American laborers and lawyers, doctors and nurses, mechanics and teachers, men and women, young and old, to join in. The black press, with the exception of the Pittsburgh Courier, supported the plan. “To get 10,000 Negroes assembled in one spot, under one banner with justice, democracy and work as their slogan would be the miracle of the century,” proclaimed an editorial in the Defender. “However, miracles do happen.”

  TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD PAYNE was among the believers. Randolph had long been a respected figure in her house for having organized the Pullman porter union. But professional frustrations and her reporter-like observations of life in South Side also fueled Payne’s discontent. “Already,” she said, “I was beginning to have the seeds of rebellion churning up in me.”

  She was an active member of the Chicago branch of the NAACP, honored for recruiting more than twenty new members. The chapter was fighting the housing covenants that blocked blacks from living in 80 percent of the city and was campaigning to get blacks employed in defense factories. Payne had also organized a community improvement program in her neighborhood through the Modern Women Social and Charity Club that she helped establish at St. John AME Church. The program included a story hour for children at the YMCA, a community council aimed at reducing juvenile delinquency, and a college scholarship fund. Payne, with three volunteers, raised the scholarship money by going door-to-door and soliciting funds from merchants and organizations. Within a few years it provided $500 annually to a college-bound Englewood student.

  Nor was she sheepish about speaking her mind. When President Roosevelt sought to weaken the Supreme Court in 1937 by expanding its membership, Payne denounced the plan in a letter published not in the Defender but in the Chicago Tribune calling the court the “final, greatest hope for political, moral, and economic justice” for American Negroes.

  Throughout the spring and into the summer of 1941, no one in South Side could escape the buildup to the march. Each week the Defender reported on the growing plans as well as administration efforts at preventing its occurrence. Finally, with only a few days remaining before the
march, the president capitulated. On June 25, 1941, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) and requiring that companies with government contracts not discriminate on the basis of race or religion. Randolph called off the march. In its place, he redirected the planned protest into the March on Washington Movement aimed at solidifying the gains and making sure the new employment committee lived up to its promise.

  Hammering away at the military’s discriminatory policies, the lack of jobs in taxpayer-supported defense industries, and the Red Cross’s refusal to use Negro blood, Randolph announced a series of mass meetings in major cities. In mid-February he brought his campaign to St. John AME Church across the street from Payne’s house. Payne enlisted and was given the post of chairman of the planning committee for the mass meeting in the city’s Coliseum.

  It fell to Payne to turn out a crowd for the rally planned for the Coliseum on June 26, 1942, one of three events the movement planned over the course of the year in large cities with black populations. By April the group opened an office in the center of Bronzeville and installed a telephone and typewriter. But trouble brewed behind the flurry of activities and the veneer of unity.

  The prickly personalities of the various male Chicago leaders stirred up friction, made worse by their mulish resistance to put any of the women volunteers in leadership posts. “I had hoped that we might proceed in the greatest harmony possible,” Payne reported to Randolph, “but it seems as if there are some squalls which come up and must be weathered.” Payne chafed at the slow pace of the organizing work, caused by what she saw as a needless redrafting of letters and flyers by Charles Wesley Burton, a member of Randolph’s executive committee. She felt blocked at every turn by him. “I am to work in close cooperation with the chairman of the city wide committee, but if I go ahead and take action, I am constantly reminded that I am usurping authority,” Payne complained. She warned, “I cannot sit by and wait for orders to proceed.”