Instead of seeking time with the Democratic leaders who supported her cause and rewarding them with flattering pieces, Payne took an entirely different tack. She decided to enter the enemy’s lair. She sought an audience with the die-hard segregationist senator Richard Russell Jr., one of the four leading candidates for the presidential nomination. His membership in the Democratic Party, like that of other segregationists, raised the hackles of the NAACP. “If the Democrats win,” asked its magazine Crisis, “won’t the Dixiecrat-GOP coalition kill civil rights?”
Slender in build, with a Roman nose and large ears made more pronounced by his close-cropped hair, Russell graciously received Payne in his ninth-floor room of the Conrad Hilton. He represented the bulwark of resistance to federal civil rights laws and was the wiliest of opponents. When he first reached the Senate in 1933, Russell had taken it upon himself to become the chamber’s most astute parliamentarian. He skillfully opposed every effort that he deemed a threat to the Southern way of life. He fought against anti-lynching bills, removal of poll taxes, and equal employment opportunity measures and linked such plans to communism.
Sitting before Payne with a coterie of staff members hovering behind him, Russell affably told her that Georgians were unalterably opposed to integration of any sort. If integration were to come to schools, for example, he promised the state would shut down its public schools and replace them with private ones.
“Will you support whatever civil rights plank the Democratic Party platform will contain?” Payne asked.
“I believe I can support the kind of civil rights plank which the party will produce. I am absolutely opposed to a compulsory jailhouse FEPC,* which will throw a man in jail for not hiring somebody. I believe the Constitution guarantees civil rights to all persons. We must use the education approach to the problem, not the compulsory one. The method of approach should be left to the states.”
At this point Russell broke off from his well-honed speech about states’ rights to launch into a complaint about extremists. His sycophantic staff members nodded approvingly.
“What do you mean by ‘extremists’?” she asked.
“The senator,” said one of the staffers, taking up the question, “means the radicals on both sides; the ones who want to push integration by force and the few who don’t want to see Negroes have anything. Now believe me, the senator is just as fair as he can be about trying to see that the Negroes get just as much as anybody else; and believe me, he’s a lot more honest than this crowd that runs around making a lot of promises they don’t mean.”
The interview at an end, Russell rose, shook Payne’s hand, and apologized for not having more time for her. But Senator J. Lister Hill of Alabama caught up with Payne in the hallway as she was leaving to lecture her further on the segregationist cause. Back at the Defender she tried to make sense of the experience. What Russell said did not upset her, she told her readers. She had anticipated his answers. Nor did Senator Hill’s impassioned hallway speech get under her skin. It wasn’t even the denunciation by Russell’s staff of radicals that troubled her.
“What really upset me,” Payne wrote, “I guess is what poet Robert Burns describes as the ‘Unco good’ or the ‘rigidly righteous’ who so firmly believe they are right. It’s the same kinds of fanatic religious who freely quote the scriptures to [support the] righteousness of Prime Minister Daniel Malan of South Africa to back up his claims for white supremacy.” Payne was confounded to find that not only did Russell earnestly believe he was right but also he had the temerity to tell her he was the best friend the Negro has ever had in public office. “Negroes,” he had told Payne, “have absolutely nothing to fear from me.”
The convention provided Payne with her first exposure to the federal legislative battleground for civil rights. This was an Alice in Wonderland world where Northerners were attacked as hypocrites and Southerners resolutely proclaimed that Negroes back home lived in harmony with whites, accepting their respective social roles. If they complained, it was only because they had been instigated to do so by Northern meddling.
Her time with Senators Russell and Hill made it clear to her the immense and entrenched national power held by opponents of desegregation. “I came away from the interview,” said Payne, “feeling depressed and sick.”
THE ELECTION DID NOT GO as the Democrats had hoped. Instead, the nation’s voters selected war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, sending the first Republican to the White House in twenty years. Thirty-three percent of African Americans, almost all in the North, voted in the election. They supported Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate, by a margin of three to one. Yet Eisenhower did not engender the enmity of their community. In a sense, no verdict had yet been rendered on the civil rights record of the general who like Cincinnatus had assumed power.
Having recently lost its Washington correspondent, the Defender dispatched Payne for the inauguration. The choice made sense. She was now among the paper’s most visible reporters, with a story on the front page once every four or five issues in 1952. Her coverage of the Democratic convention had demonstrated her skills as a political journalist.
Reaching Washington on the eve of the swearing in, Payne found the city jammed with visitors. Republicans euphorically converged in record numbers. Pullman cars parked in the rail yard were being used as temporary hotels, and apartments in a not-yet-occupied building had been filled with cots. At noon on January 20, 1953, Payne watched as Eisenhower took the oath of office and Pennsylvania Avenue was overtaken by a massive inaugural parade made up of 22,000 military and 5,000 civilian participants, 350 horses, 3 elephants (and even an Alaskan dog team), 65 bands, and floats from all states.
That evening, in the company of her sister Thelma Gray, Payne made the rounds of the social events. They first attended a gathering of Howard University faculty wives and then made their way to the east side of Washington to the National Armory, where one of the two inaugural balls was under way; there they listened to Lionel Hampton leading his band and blues artist W. C. Handy.
Payne was enchanted by the gala’s glitter and glamour. Dozens of the most prominent black judges, lawyers, professors, doctors, publicists, and politicians dressed in tuxedoes and glistening evening gowns mingled freely among Washington’s power elite. Defender columnist Marion B. Campbell ceded her Mostly About Women space entirely over to Payne for a who’s who of the festivities. Gushing about the “breathlessly radiant” women with “sparkling warm personalities,” Payne filled an entire page of the paper, dotting her account with well-known names, all set in caps and surrounded by photographs.
A more demure version of Payne’s reporting was reserved for the front page. There she updated readers on the black cabinet, the nickname given to the Federal Council of Negro Affairs that had been created in the Roosevelt years as an informal advisory group of African Americans. Composed of blacks who had been appointed as special assistants to cabinet secretaries, the group advised the administration, acted as liaisons with the African American community, and represented the administration in the Negro press. It had included Walter White, Robert C. Weaver, and Mary McLeod Bethune, among others.
“As the last strains of the last band in the inaugural procession died away,” Payne reported, “jockeying for position in the ‘new black cabinet’ grow more intense and capital corridors hummed with predictions.” At some length, Payne ran through all the rumored judicial, administrative, and diplomatic appointments that might include an African American.
The celebrations at an end, Washington settled in under its new administration and Payne headed back to Chicago.
AFTER THE GLAMOUR and excitement of Washington, Chicago took on a dull sheen. Instead of national politics and high society, Payne found herself covering meetings of the American Library Association, press conferences, and endless church leadership meetings. Not that the church was not important. To the contrary, Defender readers were very religious, and the church was one of very few institutions over which bla
cks exert unfettered control.
But her stories slipped to the inside pages of the paper. In the following eight months, her reporting made it to the front page only six times, one of which was a story on the awarding of an honorary degree to her publisher. Such stories as “Prayer Guides Lives of St. Jude Nuns” or “3,000 Attend Christian Congress” weren’t exactly page one material. But even the two substantive series she wrote that year, one of which was about the integration of the State Street shopping district, didn’t merit front-page treatment. “I really didn’t have an inclination or a desire to do straight, mundane, local reporting,” Payne said. “I just didn’t have a feel for it.”
On the other hand, the work did put Payne on the road. She covered AME church leadership meetings in New Orleans, Philadelphia, Nashville, Atlanta, and Houston. She loved the travel and the perks, such as a steak dinner at the Top Hat Lounge in Nashville, tea at the Ministers Wives and Daughters Alliance of New Orleans, and a performance of the play Portrait in Black at Ohio’s Wilberforce University, the nation’s oldest private, historically black university.
Quite to her surprise, the Southern cities won Payne over. “I’ve fallen in love with the South—some parts of it. So far I’m torn between Atlanta and Nashville,” she wrote during one of her trips. “There are slums here just as in every other city: but compared to the litter of Chicago’s sore spots, the streets were far cleaner.” Later she added Houston to her list of favorite cities. There she found a black family residing in a residential community with large homes and front lawns, quite unlike anything available to blacks back in Chicago. “Yes, this is the South!”
While in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in mid-August to cover a church conference, Payne met with Edward L. Goodwin Sr., who owned the Oklahoma Eagle, the city’s black newspaper. A successful businessman, Goodwin had entered law school and was looking for someone to run his paper. “You know,” he told Payne, “I think you’re just the person I need.” He offered her the post of managing editor with complete control over the paper, a salary of $300 a month, which was a little less than she earned at the Defender, and an option to buy up to 49 percent of the paper’s stock. Payne told Goodwin she would consider it and he had his lawyer draw up a contract stipulating that she would report to work in early October.
An Eagle staff member drove Payne out to the Tulsa airport to catch a flight back to Chicago. It was unusual for African Americans to take to the skies. Those who traveled at the time did so mostly by car, bus, or train. The bible for black travelers was the Green Book, published by Victor H. Green, a Harlem postal worker. Frequently updated, The Negro Motorist Green Book, sometimes called The Negro Traveler’s Green Book, listed those businesses that blacks could safely use to get their cars repaired, find a meal, get their hair done, or spend the night. A traveling African American blindly entering a business establishment, particularly in the Jim Crow South, risked danger or even death.
Seating in airplanes was not segregated, but airports in the American South certainly were to different degrees. When Payne flew into Atlanta, she found the lounges to be integrated but colored and white signs above the bathroom doors. National Airport, a federal facility that served the nation’s capital, had only recently opened its restaurants to blacks and only after President Truman interceded.
After securing her seat on a Chicago flight at the Tulsa airport, Payne and her companion from the paper decided to get some coffee. At the restaurant the waitress told them they could not be served. When Payne complained, the assistant manager said that she was only following state Jim Crow laws. The establishment was operated by the Sky Chef chain, whose executives had instructed its staff that it would be to their peril to overlook local customs. With no other option, Payne waited for her flight without coffee.
WHEN SHE RETURNED TO WORK at the paper, she wrote up a page one item about her treatment at the Tulsa airport and vowed that she and the Eagle staffer would sue both the airport and the restaurant chain. She let the threat die because she had another, more pressing item on her agenda.
She drafted a request for a leave of absence and left it on Louis Martin’s desk. “You would have thought I had released an atomic bomb,” Payne said. “The place went up in smoke.” Martin said it was out of the question.
“See,” Payne said, brandishing her offer from the Oklahoma paper in front of Martin, “if you don’t appreciate me, then here’s somebody who does.” Martin took the papers and looked them over. “He acted like a Philadelphia lawyer before the Supreme Court,” said Payne.
If she took the proffered job, he said, she would make less money, work harder, and lose the prestige and advantage of working for the Defender. More important, she would give up the national reporting opportunities for which the paper was grooming her.
It all gave her a splitting headache. “The only reason why I listen to Mr. Martin at all is because he is respected as one of the smartest men in the newspaper game, white or colored,” she wrote to a friend. “The biggest thing which is swaying me at the moment and something which he knew would hit home with me was my fear of taking a long-shot gamble and losing.”
Holding Payne’s documents in his hands, Martin snorted.
“Forty-nine percent? Forget it!” he said. “If you don’t have fifty-one percent, you ain’t got nothing.
“You know,” he continued, “if you’re so restless, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you go down to Washington?”
CHAPTER 12
WASHINGTON
ON THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 10, 1954, ETHEL PAYNE made her way across Washington to the Executive Office Building, a massive gray stone structure adjacent to the White House that had once housed the entire Departments of State, War, and the Navy. Under a cloudy sky, the temperature would hardly reach the forties that day, but Payne was seething.
Five days earlier the choir from Howard University, the capital’s historically black college, had been asked to perform, along with singers from Duke and Emory Universities, at the annual Lincoln Day Dinner held by Washington Republicans. Happy at long last to have one of their own in the White House, about 8,000 Republicans crowded into the Uline Arena, a cavernous vaulted hall named for an ice mogul. When the two Southern white choirs reached the entrance, they traversed the security cordon without any delay. But when the bus carrying the Howard choir arrived, the police refused to let it pass.
The officers insisted that the bus had to come in through a different entrance, so the driver obediently pulled around to the other side of the building. Once again it was blocked from entering. The dean of the university’s school of music, who had accompanied the students, agreed to wait while a police officer went to talk with an event organizer. But during the first officer’s absence, another policeman ordered the bus to move immediately because the president’s limousine was expected at any minute. The dean’s patience ran out. He instructed the driver to take the choir back to the university.
The exclusion of the black singers, unreported in the press, wasn’t the only aspect of the celebration that had gotten under Payne’s skin over the weekend. In putting together a program to honor the great emancipator, the Republicans had included Jack Powell, an aging white vaudeville actor with a minstrel routine. Powell came onstage dressed in a cook’s outfit, in blackface and wearing a wig of kinky hair. According to the announcer, the actor was included in the program by special request of Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff. The morning after the event, Payne fired off a telegram to Adams. “Surely,” she wired, “there could have been some representation of the Negro people on such an occasion more dignified and in keeping with the progress of the race.”
Now, heading to the Executive Office Building, Payne planned to take up the matter with Adams’s boss. At 10:30 AM, Eisenhower was set to hold his twenty-seventh press conference of his administration. Since her arrival in Washington three months earlier, Payne had yet to ask a question at a presidential press conference. Today she was going to make sure she did.
A FEW MONTHS EARLIER, when editor Louis Martin asked Payne if she wanted to go to Washington, he had been motivated by more than a desire to retain a star reporter who was feeling unappreciated. The skinflint newspaper had lost its Washington correspondent to a better-paying job and Payne’s unhappiness was an opportunity for the Defender. “Go on down to Washington and try your hand,” Martin told Payne. “If you don’t like it, come on home after six months.” He was hedging his bet. By giving Payne the option of coming home, he preserved for himself the excuse to bring her back if her work did not measure up.
Since the end of World War II, the Defender had continuously maintained at least a part-time correspondent in the capital. Some had been government employees, like Al Smith, who wrote a column under the pen name Charlie Cherokee. In recent years, Venice Tipton Spraggs, a tall, striking woman with prodigious work habits, had ably served the paper. But she had taken a job with the Democratic National Committee, leaving the Defender bereft of representation in Washington, DC.
With the fanfare of a front-page story, the paper announced, “Miss Ethel Payne, one of the Chicago Defender’s crack news and feature writers, has been assigned to Washington.” Publisher John Sengstacke sung her praise. “We purposely waited to fill the Washington assignment in our organization until we were satisfied that we had a person capable of doing the same superb job of giving our readers the most accurate coverage possible of the Washington scene in the same excellent manner as Mrs. Spraggs and Al Smith who preceded her,” he said, giving the appointment the sheen of forethought.
If the segregation still prevalent in Chicago had been a jarring readjustment for Payne upon her return from Japan, Washington had worse in store for her. By constitutional designation, the city was the nation’s capital. In all other respects, from the Southern congressmen who ruled over the powerless federal enclave down to school officials and city administrators, it was a Southern town through and through, with an approach to racial matters not unlike that prevalent in Atlanta, Georgia, or Richmond, Virginia.
Eye on the Struggle Page 10
