An elaborate system of restrictive housing covenants, collusive real estate operators, and compliant politicians continued to keep black families bottled up. The housing apartheid was so absolute that when black families challenged the system they faced a legal struggle stacked against them and sometimes violence. Carl A. Hansberry faced this when he tried to move his family into a white area. Carl’s daughter Lorraine Hansberry imortalized their ordeal in the play A Raisin in the Sun. “You mean you ain’t read ’bout them colored people that was bombed out their place out there?” asks Mrs. Johnson, a character in the play. “Ain’t it something how bad these here white folks is getting here in Chicago! Lord, getting so you think you right down in Mississippi.”
Health care, even emergency care, was restricted. Only a few of the city’s seventy-seven hospitals would accept black patients, and did so on a limited basis, leaving only the massive, overcrowded, and understaffed Cook County Hospital and the African American–operated Provident Hospital to provide the bulk of medical care. When Richard Wright took a menial job in a Chicago hospital, the racial division of the city was brought home his first morning when he saw two long lines of women coming toward him. “A line of white girls marched past, clad in starched uniforms that gleamed white; their faces were alert, their steps quick, their bodies lean and shapely, their shoulders erect, their faces lit with the light of purpose,” Wright wrote. “And after them came a line of black girls, old, fat, dressed in ragged gingham, walking loosely, carrying tin cans of soap powder, rags, mops, brooms. . . . I wondered what law of the universe kept them from not being mixed?”
In the spring of 1951 Payne moved back into her mother’s home on Throop Street. Despite some economic improvements brought about by wartime employment, life in South Side was much as it had been in Chicago before she left. All that had changed was Payne herself.
FOR ETHEL PAYNE, journalism was love at first sight, and the Chicago Defender reciprocated. Her personality traits, her ambition, and her skills were a recipe for success. A beguiling gregariousness gained her entry, and her obvious earnestness won over the trust of sources. Her ambition, stoked by years of closed doors, gave her the energy to match younger reporters. And in the end she delivered dependable copy, the kind editors craved to fill a newspaper’s seemingly insatiable appetite for words.
In no time, her stories were taking up full pages of each week’s edition of the Defender. One week she was reporting on a trade unionist’s four-month-long trip to Africa and his observation that Africans harbor suspicion about the United States because of its treatment of Negroes. Another week she was off writing about a mason trained at the Tuskegee Institute who was donating his labor to build a house for an Italian American veteran who lost his legs in the war.
As she became more skilled in the conventions of journalism—writing a lede, crafting a nut paragraph, and using quotations—the editors gave her increasingly free rein. Soon Payne picked up the responsibility for an ongoing series about employment in Chicago called “Industry USA.” The subject was of immense interest to readers. Before World War II, only 9 percent of the city’s African Americans held jobs in manufacturing. Now 30 percent did.
The articles were classic Defender fare that combined journalism with advocacy. They reported on progress in interracial hiring, rewarding forward-thinking employers with good publicity; exposed the lack of progress, putting recalcitrant employers in a bad light; and offered readers a guide to employment in the city. When Payne visited Inland Steel, she reported that not only were a majority of employees African Americans but the union leadership was also black. “I saw Negroes working side by side with whites on welding machines, planking presses, cutting machines, lithographing presses, and other equipment,” she wrote. “Full integration in industry like full democracy has a long way to go, but along the forward march we can say, ‘Good work: keep going.’ ”
On the other hand, Payne was quick to point out where progress was absent, as at the South Side packinghouses, where 50,000 Chicagoans were employed slaughtering and processing 15,000 to 20,000 cows, 11,000 to 15,000 hogs, and thousands of calves and sheep a day. None of the big three—Swift, Wilson, and Armour—employed any blacks in clerical, managerial, or executive positions.
Her output was prodigious. In the July 14 issue alone, Payne had three lengthy articles, including the first of a two-part series on sumo wrestling in Japan culled from her stockpile of diary material. Although the Defender obligingly published a number of her articles about her experiences in Japan, Payne’s hope to use her research to break into a national magazine were dashed. She submitted her work to McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal with no luck. It was as Payne’s fictional Madge experienced. “On the whole, there are few black women who can really get into publication in the major publishing houses,” she said. “That’s just the way it is.”
By the end of her first six months, Payne had churned out more than two dozen features. One could not pick up a copy of the Defender when it hit the streets on Saturdays without coming across an article with the byline “Ethel Payne.”
ON A SUNNY NOVEMBER MORNING, in her first autumn with the paper, Payne sat in a South Side apartment watching a familiar ritual. Just as her dad used to do, Golden William Smith was finishing off his packing by placing two iconic items into his suitcase: a small whisk broom—the kind used to brush off a suit—and the blue uniform of a Pullman porter. Notebook in hand, Payne had come to Smith’s apartment to gather material for a three-part series on the life of a Pullman porter. She selected Smith to be the center of the series because he was a veteran whose service dated back to the years when her father, William Payne, worked as a porter. Getting ready for his 615th run on the City of Los Angeles, his forty-second year as a porter, and the beginning of his seven millionth mile on the rails, Smith was, for Payne, “the symbol of an occupation familiar to millions.”
Twenty-six years after the death of her father, Payne composed a loving and public tribute to her dad. To do so, she followed Smith from his modest apartment to the rail yard where he boarded Car 1032, named Los Feliz. There she watched as he adjusted the heating controls, made the beds according to strict Pullman standards, and checked his supplies. Until the train rolled into the nearby Northwestern Station and he drew back the door and stepped onto the platform to welcome his passengers, Smith fussed anxiously. Slapping the porter on the back, a buffet car worker interjected, “You’ve been married to trains so long that you see them in your sleep. And, why the night before you go out, you’re worse than an old hunting dog, fidgeting for the bugle to blow.”
As the train headed out into the night and began its forty-hour run to Los Angeles, Payne shadowed Smith fluffing pillows, taking drink orders, helping his passengers settle in for the night, and standing discreetly back as a newlywed couple got off the train for a brief nighttime view of the husband’s hometown when the train paused in Council Bluffs. In between, Smith told Payne tales from his four decades on the rails that she recorded for use in her articles.
When they reached Los Angeles, Payne was not yet done. She accompanied Smith to the house he had purchased two years before, where his wife awaited him, and remained there overnight as their guest. He planned to work for three more years before retiring. “In the meantime,” Payne wrote, “Golden William Smith, symbol of the 10,320 porters serving thousands of customers, would continue to uphold an old tradition of fine service.”
In the early months of 1952 the Defender published her reports in a three-part series entitled “Knight of the Road” and included a photograph of Payne debarking from the train in Los Angeles. “Radiant from a luxury trip aboard the City of Los Angeles, reporter Ethel L. Payne gets an assist from the train by Porter Smith after journey to Los Angeles to get inside story on a Pullman porter.” In the pages of the Defender, Payne was becoming as well-known as the subjects of her articles.
In fact, the Newspaper Guild selected Payne’s earlier series on African American employ
ment for honorable mention in the 1951 Heywood Broun competition, named after an intrepid New York reporter. The judges said they were particularly impressed by various series they had read “written by Negroes concerning the place of the Negro in American life.”
CHAPTER 10
MORE UNWANTED BABIES
WITHIN A FEW MONTHS OF RETURNING TO CHICAGO, Ethel Payne embarked on a mission of sorrow. With a Defender photographer to chronicle the moment, Payne traveled to Buffalo, New York, bringing with her an urn containing the ashes of a two-month-old child of a Japanese woman and her husband, a black soldier who had gone missing in action in Korea. She delivered the remains to the soldier’s mother, who was campaigning to win a visa for her daughter-in-law and a surviving granddaughter.
Payne had not shaken off her experience with the Japanese orphans. Looking around Chicago, Payne discovered that black orphans in Chicago faced a dismal fate similar to that of the tan orphans of Japan. They weren’t wanted. The nation treated all of its citizens unequally, including babies. The offspring of unmarried white women received care and found a path to adoption from a bevy of foster homes and adoption agencies. But such agencies in Chicago might as well have posted a “whites only” sign on their front doors. Black mothers were told they could be charged with child abandonment if they tried to put their child up for adoption.
As a result, few institutions accepted black babies, and those that did struggled to find them a home. Adoption by families other than black ones was completely out of the question. In fact, white parents were permitted by the courts to return a child whose pedigree later revealed black ancestors.
In the spring of 1952, Payne began visiting the city’s adoption agencies. In one orphanage, she met seventeen-month-old Davey, who had been abandoned by a mother too young to care for him. “Davey has a pair of the biggest, most beautiful sad eyes in the world,” wrote Payne. “There is a haunting depth to them which makes one remember him long after the first sight.”
“The instinct to be loved makes Davey reach out his arms to be cuddled every time one of the nurses comes near him,” said Payne. “But the busy nurses, who have 200 other children to look after, have only the time to give him an occasional pat on the head as they hurry about their duties.”
Payne made Davey the center of the first installment of a series of articles, which appeared in mid-April. But after introducing the cute toddler to her readers, Payne explained that Davey was one of thousands of children looking for a home. “What makes his problem a little different than many of the other children in the institution is that Davey is a Negro child and there are not enough qualified applicants for the adoption of Negro children.”
Consequently, most black children would remain in orphanages or foster homes, Payne said. “Or worse still, remain with their mothers and grow up under the blighting stigma of illegitimacy.” Sixty percent of the children put up for adoption were born out of wedlock. But at the time thirty states still prohibited or restricted the advertisement or sale of contraceptives. So Payne crafted her next comment carefully so as not to mention sex, offend readers, or transgress the line of what could permissibly be said about the issue. There is, she wrote, “a basic need for educating people on what are the causes of the problem and how a more intelligent approach to it can be taken.”
For four weeks the Defender splashed Payne’s series on the front page and included, on the inside pages, a guide on how to adopt, a report on cases of successful adoptions, and a heartrending account of children in foster care. Seventy-three of every hundred children under the care of Chicago’s Children Division were black because there weren’t enough foster homes for them. At the end of the series, Payne pleaded with her readers to help. “It’s a grand feeling,” she wrote, “to know that you have not only saved a child, but you have done your share toward making better citizens for tomorrow.”
The series was a smash hit. Within weeks the city’s welfare offices reported an uptick in adoption applications from African Americans and an increase in the number of families volunteering to provide foster care. Her profiles, her feature articles, the series on employment, and her investigation into the plight of orphans taught Payne a valuable lesson about reporting. “Early on,” she said, “I decided that my best bet in newspapering was to build up a bank of contacts, and it proved very worthwhile, because people began to, well, admire me for my aggressiveness in going after something. So they cooperated by giving me information.”
THE EDITORS ASSIGNED PAYNE to do a follow-up series of stories on the mothers of the orphaned babies. To illustrate their plight, Payne settled on using the experiences of Amy Lester to tell the story of the others. “She was pert, pretty, young and sick with fright and worry,” wrote Payne in her front-page story. “Clutching a brown suitcase as she shuffled through the crowds coming down the ramp in the railroad station, she was unaware that she was one of a hundred thousand women in the same embarrassing condition.” Some 25,000 white and black pregnant unmarried women leave the small towns they grew up in and seek the anonymity of life in a large city, where, according to Payne, “they wait out their time to deliver the results of an illicit love affair away from the prying eyes and the wagging tongues of neighbors and friends.”
Payne followed Lester as she registered under the name Mrs. Carl Brewster in a dingy hotel and watched as the desk clerk took her cash payment for a week’s stay. After Lester settled into the room, Payne said the clerk called an abortionist to alert him of a new prospect. “All that is left now for the abortionist to do is to make contact with Amy and find out how much money she has or can get without arousing suspicion,” explained Payne. Unless she could get care from a licensed welfare agency, Lester, like others in her condition, had only two options: “Either seek relief from the ever-present abortionist or very often abandon the child shortly after birth.”
In subsequent installments, Payne reported on the opinions of social workers and highlighted the stigma borne by these women, not unlike like that of Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter. “Today, a century later, it is still the woman who pays and pays for the crime of bastardy; because the cruel and inequitable fallacy still exists that it is the woman’s fault in all cases,” Payne wrote. “On the other hand,” she continued, “the father of the illegitimate child is looked upon as merely a youth having its fling and to some extent, indulgence of this laxity goes to the point where it becomes a huge joke as to how many ‘outside children’ ‘so and so’ is the father of.”
Lester did not succumb to the abortionist’s offers, Payne informed her readers at the conclusion of her series. Instead, she was taken in by a maternity home. There she awaited the birth of her child with twenty other young women. After consultation with a minister, a psychiatrist, and a psychologist, Lester decided to give up her child for adoption and try to continue her college education in Chicago.
There was little doubt where Payne stood. In a world in which unwed mothers were pariahs, Payne was not going to join the condemnation. “There need not be illegitimate children or illegitimate parents,” Payne wrote. “It is an illegitimate society which fails to give each one of its members a chance to make good.”
The series resonated with other journalists. The Illinois Press Association selected it for first prize among feature stories appearing that year in communities with populations greater than 10,000. In writing this series, more so than her previous two on employment and adoption, Payne had found her journalistic voice.
CHAPTER 11
A TASTE OF NATIONAL POLITICS
IN THE SUMMER OF 1952, DEMOCRATS GATHERING IN CHICAGO for their presidential convention gave Payne an opportunity to try her hand at some political reporting. Until now, with the exception of a couple of press conferences, her reporting had been solely devoted to features and profiles. But a gathering of national political leaders a couple of miles west from the office sent Payne into her first political arena as a reporter.
For the Defender, the big story of th
e convention was civil rights, which threatened party harmony as it had in 1948, when a group of Southern Democrats bolted and nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina to run as the States’ Rights Party’s nominee. Four years later, Southern Democrats had returned to the fold. But it was not long before they and Northerners began arguing over the party’s civil rights plank.
Payne, who was paired by her editors with another Defender reporter, headed over to Chicago’s International Amphitheatre and the Conrad Hilton hotel to see the fireworks. The two arrived in time to see New York senator Herbert Lehman, a member of the platform drafting committee, squash any talk of compromise. He was demanding a civil rights plank that called for new Senate rules to break filibusters.
This was a direct attack on Southern senators who had successfully used the tactic in the Senate to forestall federal civil rights legislation. Lehman’s speech deepened the chasm between the Southern and Northern delegates and increased the likelihood of a floor fight. “I should regret a floor flight,” Senator Lehman said, “but I will press for a strong civil rights plank even if it makes such a battle inevitable.”
Lehman wasn’t the only national figure that Payne witnessed campaigning for civil rights. “Fighting also for the respect of individual dignity and first class citizenship for Negro Americans was Minnesota’s fiery senator, Hubert Humphrey,” Payne noted. It was, indeed, an unusual spectacle for Payne. With the exception of Chicago African American congressman William Dawson, who was on the platform committee, here were white politicians publicly fighting to advance the cause of civil rights. They were motivated by the changing color of voters, Payne concluded. Keenly aware that the Negro vote had delivered Ohio and Illinois in the 1948 election, they wanted to capture a larger share of the vote. The fight, Payne concluded, “demonstrated the vast importance of the Negro vote.”
Eye on the Struggle Page 9
