In Washington on a lobbying trip for Randolph a few months later, Payne stopped in at the Department of Justice to seek out Matthew McKavitt, the librarian whose signature had been on the letter. Directed to the fifth floor of the department’s new building, which was decorated with WPA art, Payne found McKavitt. Although he greeted her warmly, McKavitt told her that her name had been struck from the list of candidates. “From some of the statements on my application,” said Payne, “it was ascertained that I was colored and so the conversation revolved around the difficulties which would arise upon having a Negro on the staff.”
There were, indeed, Negro women running the elevator, McKavitt said, and five Negro men working as messengers and clerks. No thought, however, had been given to having a Negro in a professional position. In fact, after learning of Payne’s destination, the receptionist who had greeted her downstairs had already called McKavitt to warn him not to hire her. All the while praising her qualifications, McKavitt apologetically said his superior from Georgia would oppose giving her the job. The next morning Payne sought out the Civil Service Commission. The best the staff there could do was to offer her a junior clerk’s position if she was willing to take yet another exam.
Payne retreated to Chicago by overnight train. When Randolph heard of Payne’s Washington ordeal, he immediately wrote to Attorney General Francis Biddle, saying that he was sure Biddle would not tolerate this kind of discrimination if brought to his attention. Press savvy as he was, Randolph also gave a copy of his letter to newspapers.
Hardly anyone paid attention. Segregation, while frowned on by some in the North, was widely accepted as a matter of fact, and jobs in Washington’s federal bureaucracy continued to be off-limits to African Americans unless they wanted to operate elevators, run messages, serve food, or clean bathrooms.
THE FAILURE TO GET the job in Washington or one with the NAACP intensified Ethel Payne’s despondency at being stuck at her Chicago library job. Her life was dull, punctuated only by volunteer work at a community house and the occasional Interracial Commission meeting. “I was definitely ready for a change, something more challenging,” she said. Even Chicago, her birth city, discouraged her by its lack of progress. “When I ride down South Parkway now or State Street or similar streets, I get a bitter nausea at the grimy squalor of Chicago’s South Side. It makes me ashamed, disgusted and fighting mad that a city of this size should allow such.”
The massive immigration of African Americans to Chicago worried her. Like many of the established black settlers, Payne was not immune to developing an antipathy toward the newcomers and what she saw as their general rowdiness and bad conduct as well as the crime and disease that accompanied them. “They even trespass the quiet somber decency of my own street and I resent it. They’re like barbarians overrunning the civilization that I’ve known,” she said. “I know they are my own people and somehow they must be taught the better way of life.”
The March on Washington Movement occasionally showed signs of life, but Payne recognized that its time had passed. “It was good to see you again and to hear you speak in this old familiar way,” Payne wrote Randolph after hearing him talk in September 1945. “It brought back memories of old times.” She retained some optimism that the end of the war might reinvigorate the movement. “I am hopeful,” Payne told Randolph, “that the Negro who has been deaf to all warnings of coming cutbacks and indifferent to problems of his own welfare will now have time to and cause to think and act. Soon the field should be ripe for reorganizing. Something has to be done.”
The war’s end was bringing a more tangible and personal change for Payne. Her brother, Lemuel, had enlisted in the Army and joined the approximately 125,000 African Americans who went overseas. Now he would soon be home and the family would once again be together. “Although he is anxious to return home,” Payne wrote to Randolph, “he dreads the thought of returning to the old American discrimination after he has had a chance to see some of the liberalism of such places as Paris, Belgium, and even some parts of Germany where the German people despite the verboten of fraternization have heartily welcomed Negro troops.”
As desired as it was, the international peace renewed economic challenges for African Americans. Returning white veterans displaced the black workers who had taken their places. (The same held true for those women who had worked during the war.) “The collapse of Japan this week,” the Defender told its readers, “boomeranged on Negro workers here with the devastating effect of an atomic bomb, blasting thousands from their well-paying wartime jobs.” Even those African Americans who served the country were behind the eight ball. Holding the lowest ranks in the military, they were often discharged later than white soldiers, and by the time they got home, most jobs were already filled. The peace, it seemed, would be no easier than the war. African American living standards rapidly deteriorated. By 1947, the unemployment rate for blacks was twice that of whites.
ON A HOT AUGUST DAY in 1947, Payne and her sister Avis came home from a picnic. When they got off the bus at the corner of Sixtieth and Racine in Englewood, they spotted police officers arresting a group of black men in front of a tavern and loading them into a paddy wagon.
“What’s going on?” Payne said.
The question prompted two plainclothes police officers to cross the street, cursing at the two women as they approached. “Get the hell out of here!” they yelled.
“This is not Mississippi or Alabama,” a furious Payne replied.
One of the officers struck her and dragged her to the paddy wagon across the street while Avis screamed and ran home. Their mother was on the front porch when she arrived. “Somebody get the bail money together,” she ordered, adding to send for her son-in-law the attorney.
The wagon delivered the two dozen or so arrested men, along with Payne, to the police station about five or six blocks away. An aging Irish captain asked, “Now what’s the trouble?” Payne lit into him. “This is an abuse of citizens’ rights,” Payne exclaimed, citing her membership on the Interracial Commission.
Her brother-in-law arrived and listened to the captain’s explanation. “Well,” he said in an apologetic manner, “the boys got a wee rough. They just went a wee bit far, but you didn’t do anything really wrong.”
“You book me,” Payne insisted, “because I want to go to trial. This is police brutality. You book me.”
“Let’s just settle this. Let’s go and have a peaceful weekend.”
“No, you book me. I want to be booked.”
So in due course the police officers fingerprinted her, booked her, and asked what else they could do.
“You let those people out of their cells downstairs, that’s what you can do. You let those people out.”
The officer, probably glad to be rid of Payne, relented. The others were released, and a month later a judge threw the case out. The incident became a favorite in Payne family lore.
IN 1948, NOTICES BEGAN APPEARING in newspapers that the U.S. Army wanted to hire at least 250 single women between the ages of twenty-five and forty for staff service club posts overseas. The chief Army hostess for the Far East command told the press there was a “desperate need” among enlisted men for organized recreation. The ideal hostess, she said, “must be of a high type, capable and energetic, and must bring a wholesome feminine touch to the service club.”
During World War II, when the Red Cross previously operated these social clubs, Payne had considered trying to obtain work in one. “I’m glad that I didn’t now,” she wrote Randolph when the war was over, “because the stories of discrimination and restrictions on staff workers are too convincing. I might have been frustrated and anything could have happened.” Instead, Payne did get a job for nine months as a hostess at Camp Robert Smalls, part of the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in North Chicago, where the Navy was training African American enlistees, including a group who became the service’s first black commissioned and warrant officers.
In March Payne submit
ted an application for the position of assistant service club director. She had the prerequisite two years of college and, more important, the Camp Smalls experience. Within a few weeks Payne got word that she had the job. She was given the choice of being assigned to Korea or Japan. She chose the latter. The Army remained segregated, “so I knew in advance I would be going into an all-Negro unit,” Payne said.
At the Throop Street house, she called her brother, sisters, and mother together for one of their family councils. She told them the news. Her sister Wilma objected. “Why can’t you settle down and be satisfied?” she asked. “You’ve got a good job with the Chicago Public Library. Why can’t you be satisfied with that?”
Bessie sat quietly listening to her children take different sides. “Well,” she said, joining in at last, “she’s been raised to know the difference between right and wrong, and she’s been raised in a religious atmosphere. At this point in time, I think it’s up to her to decide what she wants to do with her life. So if she wants to go, she has my blessing.”
CHAPTER 7
JAPAN
HER MOTHER’S CONSENT SECURED, ETHEL PAYNE PREPARED for her departure. She had several bad teeth pulled, fearing that dental care might be hard to procure in Japan, and even gave her insides a flushing by dosing herself with magnesium citrate. For the sea voyage, she laid in a stock of seasickness pills, dry crackers, and lemons. Japan was an uncommon destination for a South Sider. For a thirty-six-year-old single black woman in 1948, this was a journey of courage.
Japan put a pause on her romantic life. Since her teenaged years when she had her first love, a boy a year younger than she from a Mississippi family that had moved into the neighborhood, Payne had dated frequently. But by this point in her life, only one man, whom we know only as Paul, had asked her to marry him. A postal employee, Paul was “not particularly, you know, dashing or anything like that,” said Payne. “It would have been a marriage, maybe a good marriage, but it wouldn’t have been exciting and full of adventure.” As the date of her departure neared, Paul asked Ethel when she would return. “I’ll come back in a year,” she promised. “So,” Payne laughingly told an interviewer four decades later, “I left him at the dock.”
Setting off by train in early June, at the same time that President Harry Truman passed through Chicago on a train similarly bound for the West, Payne spent several days as a tourist in San Francisco, riding the cable cars and eating at Fisherman’s Wharf. The final leg of her overland trip brought her to Seattle, where an Army transport ship bound for Japan awaited. After checking in with the military authorities in charge of her ship’s voyage, Payne went off to explore downtown Seattle. She ditched her uniform, feeling conspicuous in it. “Evidently,” she said, “there aren’t many colored girls going through here in uniform.”
Her sightseeing agenda, however, was altered as she found herself in a sea of 100,000 people flooding the streets for a peek at President Truman. In the late afternoon sun, hundreds of flags along the parade route snapped in the breeze and buckets of confetti poured down from office building windows when Truman appeared in an open automobile. “I says to myself,” Payne wrote that night, “‘Look here, Harry, who’s chasing who? Darn if we ain’t bumped into each other all the way from Chicago to Seattle.’”
ON JUNE 15, Payne boarded her ship. Unlike during the war, when ships sailed under the cover of darkness, the ship steamed into Puget Sound at lunchtime and out to sea before sunset. During the passage across the Pacific, Payne spent time with the other women who had been selected as club directors and hostesses. They came from all parts of the United States, and while the military remained segregated, the white and black women traveled as a group, although they did sleep apart. At times it got to be a bit much for Payne. In particular, one white woman from Michigan was genial to a fault. “What she doesn’t know,” said Payne, “is that you can’t run this brotherly love down everybody’s throat and besides she don’t understand I can take only so much of white folk trying to be nice.”
After nearly two weeks, on the morning of June 28, the ship docked at Yokohama, just south of Tokyo, and awaiting buses ferried the new recruits to their quarters. As she got off her bus, still without her land legs, Payne felt the ground moving under her feet. It was an earthquake, centered in Fukui, less than three hundred miles to the west. While it devastated that city, the damage was minimal around Tokyo. “It was over in a few minutes,” according to Payne, “but I said, ‘Oh, what a welcome. What a welcome.’”
Payne was assigned to a small house just off the main part of the Tokyo Quartermaster Depot in Shinagawa, right on Tokyo Bay. A flimsy and drafty cottage with no cooking facilities and a Japanese-style shower, it had lodged a group of Red Cross hostesses getting ready to head home. Payne and another woman were to take their place as the Army took over running the social clubs.
The Seaview Club, where Payne was to work, was the only facility with a black staff in the Tokyo-Yokohama area. It was housed on the grounds of the massive depot, the largest of its kind in the world, charged with supplying all the U.S. forces in the Far East. Housing and life on the depot was not all that different than Chicago. Four months after President Truman had issued his executive order directing the desegregation of the military, the depot remained segregated, with white and black soldiers housed at either end of the facility. Payne’s club was solely for the black soldiers.
“There were rules and the ‘unwritten rules’ for blacks,” recalled Vivian Lee, an African American woman who was a child growing up on the depot at the time. “Black soldiers in my stepfather’s company had to be immaculately dressed and groomed before my stepfather, Sgt. Frank Little, would issue them a pass because the white Military Police would deliberately target them.”
Being kept apart from whites, however, did not mean that African Americans in the occupying forces were denied other benefits of life in the military. The Army provided dependable salaries and benefits, generous in comparison to civilian life back home, decent housing, abundant food, and affordable clothing. Moreover, what couldn’t be gotten from the military could be easily bought from Japanese destitute from the destruction of their country in the war. For example, African Americans, including Payne, were in the unusual situation of hiring servants of a different race. “Their dish washing, suds busting, and scrubbing days are over for a while,” declared a Chicago Defender who was a frequent critic of the military. He was so astounded by what he found that he called his piece WELL SHUT MY MOUTH.
Black soldiers, who were not in combat units, were given the military’s most menial positions. At the depot they were used primarily to unload, store, and transport equipment and supplies. The work was hard and long. On the other hand, by the nature of their assignments, African Americans came into greater contact with the Japanese than whites did. On the docks, for instance, Japanese stevedores were hired in large numbers and were often under the supervision of black noncommissioned officers. In turn, as base life mirrored segregated life in the United States, African Americans had a greater incentive to find recreation outside the confines of the facility. But they had to exercise caution because white soldiers, bringing their American racial customs with them, frequently succeeded in occupying and marking certain entertainment districts as exclusively white zones.
Even so, life in Japan could offer a new racial experience for young African Americans. For instance, a twenty-one-year-old black New Yorker heading home said Japan had been, for him, a place where “colored and white soldiers are working, eating, sleeping, drinking and ‘balling’ together, and it works out just fine.”
AT THE SEAVIEW CLUB, Payne enthusiastically took to her job of creating entertainment for the black servicemen and their families. “I lead the life of a squirrel on a treadmill always racing around in circles,” Payne told her family. Picnics by the bay were organized. Soldiers were recruited for musical shows that grew sufficiently popular to be performed for civilians off the base. “These boys are just li
ke little children,” Payne reported, “you have to bear down on them to make them stay in line.” Payne even recruited the wives of enlisted men to put on fashion shows. The first of these featured clothing from China, India, the Philippines, Japan, and Korea. A later edition of the show was elevated to a United Nations Fashion Revue and included the participation of representatives from various embassies. The soldiers, in turn, took an immense liking to Payne and trusted her. “The soldiers kind of flocked around her,” recalled one observer.
On a Saturday, only two months into her stay, a new friend, Marquerite Davis, asked Payne to accompany her to Yokohama. A Louisville, Kentucky, native of mixed-race parents (her father was African American; her mother, German), Davis was Payne’s age and they shared a background of civil rights activism in their native cities. Of the two, however, Davis was the seasoned Asia hand, having worked for three and a half years with the Red Cross in New Guinea and the Philippines and most recently as club director for the all-black 24th Infantry Regiment in Okinawa.
Davis wanted to expose Payne to a heartrending problem stemming from the behavior of the men whom their clubs served and for whom the female club directors often acted like den mothers. Since the arrival of the occupation troops, a growing number of Japanese women had become pregnant by U.S. soldiers. To military officials the infants, known as “occupation babies,” were none of their concern. It was forbidden to collect data on the extent of the problem and the subject was not to be publicly discussed. Only the month before, a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post had been expelled from the country for writing about occupation babies. Simply put, the subject was taboo. If blame was to be assigned, the military said it lay with licentious Japanese women who “made good clean American boys go morally wrong.”
Eye on the Struggle Page 6
