In the end, Nixon’s office told her it was unlikely an interview would be granted because, as an aide explained, “the V.P. could not give out interviews for fear that what he said would be interpreted as speaking for the administration.” In addition, Payne learned that the White House didn’t very much appreciate what Nixon had been saying. “The V.P. is being gagged because he has latterly been making some forthright statements on the color question,” she shared privately with her boss. “The gagger is Sherman Adams.”
But as much as Payne presented herself to Rabb and others in the administration as an objective reporter with a nonpartisan agenda, behind the scenes it was a different story. In February a source provided her with confidential information concerning the Republicans’ plans for the fall elections. Fearful that any action taken by the administration sympathetic to Negro causes could increase voter registration and benefit Democrats, the Republicans were planning to hold off taking favorable civil rights positions until after the deadline for voting registration had passed. “The information is of tremendous value to the Democratic Party, and at the urgent request of the source, I have turned over the materials to Congressman Dawson,” she told Sengstacke.
To some, Payne’s actions violated the accepted journalistic codes of conduct that dictate reporters not take sides on an issue or engage in partisan work. But for Payne, what she did was not comparable to the actions of a reporter who favored a candidate or a political cause. At stake here were fundamental constitutional rights denied to African Americans. Supporting the Democratic Party, in a moment like this one, was the only viable means to advance civil rights. “The only people who can afford to be neutral in a situation are those who are untouched by what’s going on,” Payne said years later. “And any time there’s a racial injustice, it involves me, just as much as the person who’s directly involved.”
IN THE SPRING OF 1954, while African Americans anxiously anticipated the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board, Payne was drawn to another long-running Washington story. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s four-year-old crusade to ferret out Communists in the government consumed vast amounts of ink and airtime. This was, however, not true with regard to the black press.
Communists had never been regarded as much of a threat to the black community. In Chicago during the Depression, recalled Payne, “when people were evicted, communists would come and move the furniture and everything else back into these houses, and they would bring baskets of food.” And for a group lacking civil rights, the fact that McCarthy tramped all over civil liberties hardly mattered. The Wisconsin Republican senator had so far merited only an occasional mention in the pages of the Defender. But in the spring of 1954 Payne changed that.
She believed McCarthy and his Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations were dangerous, damaging, and destructive. “To me he was savage in the way he operated. I thought that McCarthy was a modern-day Savonarola,” Payne said, referring to the fifteenth-century Florentine Dominican friar who ruthlessly tried to create a puritanical republic. “He was just really savaging people, destroying people in the process.” Whenever she could find the time she would attend the hearings, sometimes dropping in between chasing down other stories.
In early March, Payne found the means to make McCarthyism a story for her readers. The committee had summoned Annie Lee Moss, a forty-nine-year-old African American widowed mother who worked in the Pentagon. Washington had treated the South Carolina native well up to this point. She had started off life working in cotton fields at age five, followed by years of domestic service, laundry work, and factory labor. With the outbreak of World War II, she and her husband came to Washington, where the demands of war opened federal employment to black women. By 1954, although now widowed, she was making good wages as a clerk in the Pentagon.
Preparing to launch a set of hearings on Communist infiltration of the Army, McCarthy focused on Moss when an FBI informant claimed she was on a list of dues-paying Communist Party members. A Communist working as an Army Signal Corps communications clerk, Moss seemed to the senator to be the perfect target. “Who in the military,” asked McCarthy, “knowing that this lady was a Communist, promoted her from a waitress to a code clerk?”
Payne made sure to be on hand when Moss answered the committee’s summons, accompanied by her attorney, whom McCarthy immediately labeled as a Communist. The planned showdown with Moss, however, failed to get under way. She was sick with bronchitis and looked exhausted. “If she says on the stand that she is not a communist,” intoned McCarthy, “she will be committing perjury, and I do not want to send a sick woman to jail.” Although there was nothing more than an unsubstantiated charge against Moss and she had not had her day before the committee, the Army skittishly suspended Moss from her job.
On March 11, a healthier Moss returned to Capitol Hill, with her attorney, to face the committee. Payne took her seat just to the side of the witness table in the classically designed grand Senate Caucus Room, with a floor of Italianate black-veined marble and a ceiling of gilded flowers, leaves, and a ribbon of Greek key pattern. Unlike her white colleagues at the table, to whom Moss was only one more in an interminable line of witnesses, Payne had made an effort to learn about the woman. She had interviewed her pastor, who said that Moss was a good Christian who had belonged to the Friendship Baptist Church for a decade, along with her twenty-three-year-old son.
To Payne, the gray-haired, widowed mother was a pawn in McCarthy’s battle against the secretary of the Army, who refused to permit his officers to testify before the committee. “She was a woman of limited education, she was a very humble person,” Payne said. “The three things in her life were her son, her grandson, and her church, besides her job. And other than that, she knew very little about the world outside.”
WITH THE TELEVISION CAMERAS rolling, McCarthy swore in Moss and began with his questioning. First he sought to learn about any coded messages she might have handled as a clerk in the Pentagon. Moss said she had never been in the code room and was charged only with filing and passing on messages of unknown classification. Then the senator signaled Roy Cohn, the committee’s chief counsel, to launch his often-repeated line of questioning.
The committee, said Cohn, had information that Moss had been a member of the Communist Party.
“Not at any time have I been a member of a Communist Party, and I have never seen a Communist card,” Moss said.
“You have never seen a Communist card?”
“That’s right.”
McCarthy resumed the questioning, repeating essentially the same questions that Cohn had tried. The back-and-forth continued, with no admissions made by Moss. Then McCarthy drew what he thought was the ace up his sleeve. He asked about Robert Hall, a white man who used to deliver the Daily Worker to her house years before when her husband was still alive. In a quiet voice, Moss replied that he might have been at the house once, years ago, to see her late husband, but she was absent at the time. The diminutive bespectacled Moss, clad in a black coat with a small white hat, quietly and respectfully held her ground, thwarting McCarthy at each point. “She answered the questions with disarming candor and won the sympathy of many of the spectators and newsmen crowded into the room,” said Payne.
A discouraged McCarthy suddenly excused himself from the hearing room, and Senator Stuart Symington Jr., who as a newly elected Democrat from Missouri was already earning the enmity of McCarthy, resumed the questioning of Moss. He asked her to tell the committee more about Hall, the alleged white Communist leader in Washington who had supposedly brought the Daily Worker into her house.
“Is the Robert Hall that you know a colored man?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yes, I am pretty sure that he is colored.”
“Does he look like a colored man, or does he look more like a white man?”
“The man that I—I—have in mind as Robert Hall was
a man about my complexion.”
In turn, further friendly questions revealed that Moss wasn’t even sure about the meaning of the word espionage and that there were as many as three other women in the city with a name similar to hers. The hearing went from bad to worse for the absent McCarthy.
“Did you—did you ever—to the best of your knowledge, have you ever talked to a Communist in your life?” asked Symington.
“No, sir—not to my knowledge.”
“Did you ever hear of Karl Marx?”
“Who’s that?”
The hearing room burst into laughter. Cohn took to the microphone and made one last attempt to regain the upper hand by restating that the committee was in possession of information that Moss was a party member. But emboldened senators halted him.
“Mr. Chairman,” interrupted Senator John McClellan, a Democrat from Arkansas. The witness has already been cross-examined, he said. “To make these statements that we have got corroborating evidence that she is a communist, under these circumstances I think she is entitled to have it produced here in her presence and let the public know about it—and let her know about it.” The audience applauded. “I don’t like to try people by hearsay evidence,” he added, triggering yet more applause.
Outside the caucus room, a jubilant Moss recognized Payne among the throngs of journalists and rushed over to thank her for her reporting. Embracing her, Moss exclaimed, “Honey, I want you to tell the world that if you just trust in God, everything will come out all right!”
Payne went back to her apartment. At her typewriter, she wrote, “With dramatic intensity, the case of Mrs. Annie Lee Moss, Pentagon clerk accused of being a former card-carrying communist, blew up last Wednesday in the face of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.” Quoting what Payne called “corridor opinion,” she concluded her report by saying that “the senator from Wisconsin took a real beating.”
The following week Edward R. Murrow devoted an episode of See It Now on CBS to Moss’s appearance before the committee, a week after his landmark attack on McCarthy. It was becoming clear that the senator’s days were numbered.
BY APRIL 1954, when Washington’s famed cherry blossoms opened, Payne had settled comfortably into her new role as a national correspondent. While she still had a great deal to learn, particularly about the pitfalls of national politics, there was no talk of bringing her back to Chicago. In fact, it was quite the opposite in the offices on Indiana Avenue. The paper even ran circulation advertisements listing its famous writers and citing Payne’s reporting as a reason to subscribe to the paper. “From such brilliant minds as Walter White, Mary McLeod Bethune, Langston Hughes, and Ethel Payne (D.C. Correspondent), you begin to know what’s what and why.”
Payne’s growing confidence permitted her to remodel the job of Washington correspondent for the Defender. While she dutifully continued to send home reams of copy on standard government stories, she also began to assume a far broader beat, that of civil rights. Typical of her efforts in this new direction were two lengthy articles appearing in the April 3, 1954, issue of the Defender. Easily two to three times the length of her usual pieces, the two works dominated the pages of the paper.
The first was a detailed analysis of pending civil rights legislation in Congress that included a survey she had administered to at least forty members of Congress. At question was the future of efforts to ban segregation on interstate travel, anti-bias amendments to existing labor laws, and the admittance of Hawaii and Alaska, which proponents of civil rights believed would strengthen their hand in the Senate because of the states’ multiracial populations. Her report revealed a gloomy prognosis. “Progressive legislation either directly or indirectly pertaining to civil rights is really getting the run around in Congress these days,” Payne told her readers. “Unless some drastic action is taken to goad the lawmakers into action, they are slated for the graveyard.”
Payne’s second, even longer article was a review of President Eisenhower’s record on civil rights in his first fifteen months in office. She was immensely proud of the piece and pushed editor Waters to display it prominently. “I’d like to get full dress treatment as I think it will mean a lot to us,” she told him. “I want a whole lot of care because on the outcome a lot of things are hinged, a good job as I know we can do, and more inside tracks for me to get the real dope on things.”
Waters followed Payne’s request and the piece was laid out on a full page with fourteen photos. The text was a panegyric to the president. “For months after the inauguration the administration dragged its feet in giving Negroes a place in the sun in running the government,” wrote Payne. “And then suddenly, the executive machinery began moving in high gear, and to the delighted astonishment of all but the reactionaries, color bars began tumbling in rapid succession.”
Eisenhower moved to desegregate restaurants in the nation’s capital, filed a brief in support of desegregating schools nationally, and gave visible posts to blacks. “Appointments of Negroes in choice positions began to fall like ripe plums from a tree,” wrote Payne. But E. Frederic Morrow, who had worked on the campaign, was still biding his time as an assistant to the secretary of commerce. “Rumor persists that he will move up to a berth on the presidential staff,” Payne said. “At any rate Morrow is highly respected by the President for his capabilities.”
Payne’s flattering assessment of Eisenhower gained national attention. Mainstream newspapers from the New York Herald Tribune to the Washington Post reported that the Defender, a pro-Stevenson publication, was praising Eisenhower. Even Life magazine took note.
At the White House, Max Rabb, who had been given an advance peek at the article, told Payne how pleased he was with the work, especially “the very friendly approach you took in reference to this problem.” He promised to bring the article to the president’s attention. Morrow sent his congratulations to Payne, praising what in his eyes was her fairness. “The other remarkable feature about the article,” he said, “is the fact that the Defender, true to the newsman’s code, prints the news as it is, despite the fact that the paper was not necessarily a supporter of the President during his campaign.” The Republican National Committee staff was ecstatic. The committee issued a two-page press release quoting extensively from the article.
Two weeks later, a happy Rabb lent Payne a hand in putting on a version of the What’s My Line? television game show at the Capital Press Club, the black alternative to the segregationist National Press Club. He served as the mystery guest and panelists had to guess his occupation. The love between the administration and the African American press was such that Sengstacke and other black newspaper publishers, accompanied by Payne, presented to the president the National Negro Publishers Association John B. Russwurm Award, in memory of the publisher of the first black newspaper.
For now, Ethel Payne was the White House’s favorite Negro reporter.
CHAPTER 14
TURNING LIKE A SPINNING TOP
AS SHE HAD EACH MONDAY FOR SEVERAL MONTHS, ON May 17, 1954, Ethel Payne joined a group of lawyers and reporters at the neoclassical-styled Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill in hopes of being present when the court handed down its long-awaited decision in the Brown v. Board case. Payne had covered the final oral arguments five months earlier. Then the chambers had been packed and the press section was overflowing with reporters, including many foreign correspondents. When NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, along with his mother and wife, passed by the press box he paused to tell reporters, “If any of you are in touch with the man upstairs, you can put in a good word for us on this case please.”
Presenting the opening arguments was Spottswood Robinson III. He had represented the children from the Robert R. Moton High School in Virginia, where student Barbara Johns had led the student body out on strike. Representing the other side were such Southern stalwarts as Virginia’s assistant attorney general, who, Payne noticed, peppered his speech with the word nigra, and John Davis, who invoked an Aesop’s fable as a warn
ing that integration might cause Negroes to lose the gains they had already made. “By the time Thurgood Marshall took to the floor for the rebuttal,” wrote Payne, “he was in his best fighting form as he coolly repudiated all the arguments of the opposition.”
For three days the lawyers waged verbal battle over racial segregation while the justices listened and questioned. Presiding for the first time was their new chief justice, Earl Warren, whom Eisenhower had appointed. Schoolchildren were at the heart of the case, but the principle at stake was greater. Ever since 1896, the South had built a legal rampart around its segregationist culture on the principle enunciated in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate but equal treatment of blacks was permissible under the Constitution. Should the court now overturn this principle when it came to schoolchildren, other forms of segregation would certainly be doomed. A decision was expected before June on a Monday, the day the court handed down its decision.
The Mondays of winter and spring had come and gone, and June was now only two weeks away. But when Payne and her colleagues reached the pressroom on the ground floor of the Supreme Court building that morning, they were told that it looked like a quiet day. At noon the justices took their seats, entering the chamber through an opening in the red velvet curtain. In the audience were fewer than a dozen African Americans, but among their ranks were Thurgood Marshall and two other NAACP attorneys. The day before, Marshall had received a phone call in Mobile, Alabama, suggesting he might want to be at the court the next day. Reporters made little note of the presence of the NAACP attorneys or the fact that all nine justices were in attendance, including one who had been recently hospitalized for a heart attack. The consensus that this was not the day for the ruling seemed to be confirmed when the justices began disposing of some routine business and announced a decision in a dairy monopoly case.
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