IN THE END THE WORK moved sufficiently forward. WAKE UP, NEGRO AMERICA! blazed the headline on the Chicago group’s flyer. “Do we want to work? Do we want our full rights? Do we want justice?” it asked, inviting black Chicagoans to send in a dime for membership dues, attend Friday-night meetings at the YMCA, or volunteer to work on the Coliseum rally.
Armed with the flyer, Payne and two volunteers canvassed neighborhoods on foot until a supporter offered the use of an automobile. “So you can imagine our raves,” reported one of the tired women, “when he stands in our planning committee meeting and quite nonchalantly offers the use of his car without any strings attached, except that most of the time we shall have to furnish our own driver.”
As the day of the rally neared, Payne drew up instructions for Bronzeville businesses to close their doors and extinguish their lights, inside and out-, on the night of the event. The gesture, borrowed from wartime blackouts in London, was intended to symbolize the manner in which African Americans were “blacked out” of American democracy. Payne dispatched dozens of volunteers sporting armbands to visit merchants and small-businessmen. The request to join the protest was hardly an invitation. “Stores that refuse to cooperate,” Payne wrote in her instructions, “should be blacklisted, boycotted and picketed as enemies to the fight for Negro rights.”
The work paid off. From her perch on the stage of the Chicago Coliseum, Payne watched as thousands streamed in. Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, warmed up the crowd before Randolph’s appearance. At length he explained that the federal government’s racist policies stemmed from the inordinate influence of Southerners, who controlled 50 percent of the congressional committee chairmanships.
“In the light of the control of our government by these men who spit upon democracy whenever the Negro is involved, is there any wonder that meetings like this are tragically necessary at a time like this?” White asked. “Or that, irony of ironies, we Negroes must fight for the right to fight when the world is threatened with destruction?”
Then, after a theatrical play whose humor brought the house down, and several more speakers, Randolph finally took to the stage at 11:00 PM. He recounted how at American train depots, USO canteen workers rushed out to greet white soldiers with cigarettes, candy, and drinks but refused to provide such service when the trains pulled in with Negro soldiers.
After detailing a litany of military discrimination and war industry prejudices, Randolph told the thousands that it was their responsibility to wage the struggle. “History shows that Jews must depend upon Jews to fight the battles of the Jews; Catholics must depend upon Catholics to fight the battles of Catholics; women must depend upon women to fight the battles of women; Negroes must depend upon Negroes to fight the battles of Negroes.”
Surely, he said, Negroes can’t be expected to fight for democracy in Burma when they don’t have it in Birmingham.
THE NEWS COVERAGE of the event was gratifying. On the Defender’s front page, headlined with 12,000 IN CHICAGO VOICE DEMANDS FOR DEMOCRACY, was a photograph of Payne wearing one of her many hats, a fashion accessory for which she would retain a preference until the end of her life. Other black papers increased the crowd estimates and carried long excerpts from the speeches. Even the white press felt it necessary to say something. The Chicago Tribune included a short report buried on page 20 that 10,000 Negroes had gathered to protest what it called “alleged discrimination” in the armed forces and war industry.
The rally took in $1,449.71, Payne excitedly reported to Randolph. “The main questions now being asked by the man on the street are what’s next and how are you going to keep interest alive?” Exercising his tendency to aggrandizement, Randolph told Payne that her work contributed to “making the great Coliseum Meeting the biggest demonstration of Negro power ever witnessed in the history of the world.” With the success of the rally Payne became, in Randolph’s words, one of the movement’s Three Musketeers.
The rally over, the planning committee disbanded. But Payne didn’t let up in her efforts. When the Pittsburgh Courier accused the movement of intensifying racial antagonism and weakening support for the war among African Americans, Payne rushed to its defense. Taking a cue from Randolph’s hyperbolic style, she wrote to the editors that the executive order opening factory gates to blacks was the most important victory since the Emancipation Proclamation. For too long the Negro has “depended upon the interest and sympathies of his white friends to intercede for him.” Instead, the movement is based on a principle “that the salvation of the Negro people comes from within.”
She took the lesson to heart. While holding down a full-time job in the library, she maintained the movement’s office after hours and worked on a mammoth tea party intended to sustain interest among Chicago women. For two weeks straight, she did not get to bed before one in the morning. In mid-December, Payne awoke complaining of a persistent headache and went to see her doctor. He told her that if she did not curtail her many activities she would have something far worse than a bothersome headache, namely a complete breakdown.
At home that night, Payne wrote to Randolph. “I am feeling at my lowest physical ebb so much so that I can scarcely hold the pen.” While she reported that the outlook for the organization was better than at any time since the Coliseum rally, there remained much to be done. New members needed to be managed, a constitution or bylaws had to be written, and planning had to get under way for the proposed May conference. “Now as egotistical as it may sound,” Payne wrote, “the strain of trying to balance these pressures is really telling on me. I think that if some of that burden were lifted I would not be so worried and nervous.”
With rest, Payne recovered her strength by summer’s end and was able to be among the sixty delegates who assembled in Detroit in September to design a permanent structure for the movement. The group voted to hold a national convention in Chicago the following year. Randolph thanked Payne for her participation but again voiced some trepidation about her Chicago colleagues. “I hope,” he wrote to Payne, “they will drop all bickering and grievances and concentrate on the conference.”
IN 1943, WITH THE UNITED STATES in its second year of the war, the movement redoubled its efforts. As the summer approached, Payne took a short leave of absence from her job at the library to work full-time on preparations for what was now being called the “We Are Americans, Too” convention set for the end of June. For her efforts she was paid $500, a considerable sum for the cash-strapped organization. Knowing that Randolph was the movement’s biggest draw, to publicize the convention she booked him for four community meetings in churches serving the city’s burgeoning black population.
Once again rebellion surfaced among Chicago members. This time the insurrectionist was Payne. Free labor from women, particularly admiring ones, had made it possible for Randolph to run his movement on a shoestring budget. But he regularly disregarded their advice and never considered them equal to men. During the previous year’s campaign, Payne had gotten a taste of this when Randolph had done nothing to help when male Chicago organizers undercut her. Many of Randolph’s numerous female supporters tolerated his paternalistic treatment of women, but not Payne.
She picked up the telephone and called Randolph. She told him that she wanted her duties and powers clearly spelled out. The call was insufficient. She took pen to paper. “I simply refuse to be treated like a worrisome child and patted on the head and told to run along,” she told him. “This is your brainchild and I simply want to help it grow, but if you’re going to be indifferent I don’t see why in hell I should get my blood pressure up for nothing. I refuse to be taken for granted and I hope I made myself clear.”
Payne had reasons to worry. The men in the movement remained uncomfortable with women in positions of authority. “Too many bossy dames around here,” complained one male organizer. When she was done itemizing her complaints in the letter, she closed with a promise. “I know,” she wrote, “you are relieved that this is
all I am going to say, but if you don’t straighten up and fly right there’s more yet to come.”
Randolph got the message and Payne resumed her organizing work. The convention’s agenda was announced. The focus would be on ending “Jim Crow in uniform” and the conference would include strategy sessions on eliminating military segregation and creating a program to do the same with American civilian life. Patience among Negroes was at an end, Randolph warned. “The pulse beat of the nation is being quickened by this restless volcano that disturbs men’s souls.”
RANDOLPH WAS PRESCIENT in a way that he did not anticipate. Roosevelt’s executive order, although weakly enforced, had given blacks access to the lowest-paid jobs in the defense industries. Their presence, however, created animosity among white workers in Northern cities who feared that their jobs would be threatened.
On a warm Saturday June evening, a week before March on Washington delegates reached Chicago for their meeting, a fight broke out between black and white youths at Detroit’s Belle Isle Park. Fueled by rumors, the clash escalated and spread into the Motor City, creating the worst urban riot in more than twenty years. It took three days for authorities to restore order. Thirty-four people died, twenty-five of whom were black, and 760 were injured.
The riots in Detroit, as well as ones at the Beaumont, Texas, shipyards, created a sense of urgency when the conference opened in late June. Randolph laid the blame for the outbreak of violence on the doorstep of the White House. “Riots are the result of the government policy of segregation of and discrimination against Negroes,” he said. Once again the specter of a march on the nation’s capital appeared as the gathering approved a resolution giving the executive committee the power to set a time and date for one.
Payne had all the details well planned out for the gathering. For five days, 109 delegates from fourteen states, meeting inside the South Side’s Metropolitan Apostolic Community Church, debated and voted on resolutions ranging from supporting the war and opposing the Communist Party to demanding a revision of the Atlantic Charter to include the darker races and require the Allied nations to give up their colonies.
During the meeting Payne intermingled with emerging civil rights leaders such as Edgar D. Nixon, who a decade later would organize the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, and Bayard Rustin. Only thirty years old and working as Randolph’s youth coordinator, Rustin had caught the attention of many activists for his principled devotion to nonviolent direct action inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s struggles against colonial British rule in India. The year before, Rustin had refused to give up his seat in the front of a bus while traveling in the South and had not fought back when police officers beat him. He now faced prison for draft resistance. His presentation on this new strategy moved the delegates to act audaciously. Under the watchful eyes of FBI informants, Payne and other delegates formally pledged to adopt nonviolent direct-action tactics. At the time, a fourteen-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. was preparing to enter his final year at Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School.
THE 1943 DETROIT RIOTS not only agitated the conference delegates but also panicked politicians throughout the United States. In Illinois, Republican governor Dwight Green looked anxiously at his 1944 reelection bid. He won the office in 1940 when support for the New Deal was waning. Voters were now preparing to reward him for three years of dependable service free from the chicanery of the Chicago Democratic political machinery. A riot could upset his reelection plans.
The concern was real. “It CAN happen here, because at the present time, living conditions here are worse than any city I’ve been in,” wrote a Pullman porter to the Defender. “Someone should wake up and look around Chicago if they want to avoid trouble here, because it is more serious than you realize.” The NAACP called on its interracial committees in nineteen potential trouble spots to persuade newspapers to suppress unsubstantiated rumors that could incite violence. Even CBS Radio joined in by airing an anti-riot program featuring thirty famous actors and writers.
Governor Green was not taking any chances. “We have been alarmed,” he said, “by recent outbreaks of interracial strife in other states and we are determined to prevent any such tragedies in Illinois.” To that end he selected seven white and seven black citizens from around Illinois to serve on an interracial commission aimed at easing racial friction. For its black members, Green selected two prominent pastors, a funeral director, a vice-president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a physician and former track star, a housing bureau official, and one other.
“I hereby appoint you to be a member of the Interracial Commission for Illinois,” Green wrote to Payne in late July, “for the purpose of investigating means, not only of preventing racial strife, but of effecting permanent improvement of racial relations in the State.” Her appointment stood out. Payne was one of only two women on the fourteen-member panel; the white side had a female elected politician. More striking, Payne was the only one without a post of some stature.
The March on Washington Movement had made Payne into a prominent Chicago activist with a reputation that reached the corridors of the state capitol.
CHAPTER 6
TIME TO LEAVE
IN SEPTEMBER 1943, ETHEL PAYNE RODE UP TO THE CHICAGO Loop and walked into the twenty-two-story La Salle Hotel, one of the city’s toniest hotels, a world away from South Side. There she joined the Interracial Commission for its inaugural meeting. The governor, underscoring his support for the group’s work, attended the session. “I’m looking to this commission for advice and counsel on a program that will lead us nearer to the American ideal of equal opportunity for all our citizens,” Green told the panel’s members, hoping his words would win him support among African American voters.
Getting down to business, though its members remained in the dark as to exactly what work they were empowered to do, the commission urged that similar organizations be established in Illinois communities that had substantial black populations. Payne brought her industriousness, her activism, and her impatience to the work. From the start, commission members turned to her for help in preparing reports and drafting resolutions.
In one of its earliest meetings, the commission identified housing as central to improving relations between the races. It charged Payne and two other commission members, a white judge and a black physician, to draft a resolution that could be quickly adopted. But compromise would have to be the order of the day to obtain an agreement from the biracial group. In its final version, a watered-down resolution urged that laws be enacted to tear down unsuitable housing, prohibit overcrowding, prevent overcharging rent, and secure cooperation from landowners to provide new housing. In only one instance in the seven-point resolution was discrimination even mentioned, and only in reference to public housing. The commission was hardly going to promote the change Payne believed was necessary.
Payne’s impatience for the weak declarations of the commission soon surfaced. She had met the night before with fellow commission member Catholic bishop Bernard J. Sheil, who was known for his outspokenness. He shared Payne’s more ambitious hopes for the commission. “Justice for minority groups is the ultimate test of our domestic processes,” Sheil told the press, “and this commission must proceed fearlessly to lead in this grave problem for Illinois and America.”
Payne described to her fellow members the plans she and Bishop Sheil had devised. “We both arrived at the conclusion that we feel it would be well to recommend to this commission that we hold a series of regional meetings, because we cannot adequately cover the problem unless we are on home ground,” she said. The meetings should particularly be held in areas of tension such as East St. Louis. The commission agreed to the idea but limited the hearings to a single day. When Payne complained, the chair told her the discussion was over.
When members turned to talk about instructions they believed should be provided to law enforcement in case of riots, Payne interrupted. “May I inject this thought,” she asked. “I have noti
ced that this commission was created out of an emergency because we thought there was enough racial tension throughout the state to warrant the establishment of this commission.” Now she wondered if the commission believed the tension had eased to the extent that there was not much to worry about. The chair replied, “The most dangerous situation in America regarding race relations is the tendency to feel we have gotten over the hump.” Then he quickly moved to the next item of business, closing off further discussion of Payne’s concerns.
Frustrated, Payne nonetheless remained on board. In contrast to her dull work at the library, the commission gave her status and a sense that she had a platform. But she was keenly aware that the commission, like most such political contrivances, lacked teeth. It was a point a Defender editor drove home when he appeared before the panel. He urged them to seek policing powers such as those granted to the Federal Fair Employment Practices Committee. “You would be wasting your time and energy,” he told them, “to sit here philosophying on social conditions and racial tensions, housing, etc., if you do not have the power to act upon those things.”
PAYNE’S WORK WITH THE March on Washington Movement was so rewarding that in the fall of 1943 she applied for a job as a field-worker at the NAACP. Randolph promised to talk to Roy Wilkins, then the editor of Crisis magazine, on her behalf. In the meantime, she received a surprising letter from the U.S. Department of Justice. Two years earlier, she had taken a civil service test and had earned a sufficient rating to be a government librarian. The letter asked if she would be interested in a library post. “Unquestionably,” Payne replied.
Eye on the Struggle Page 5
