Shortly after the column appeared, Defender editors began extensively editing Payne’s dispatches on the dispute, and full paragraphs disappeared in the published versions. In addition, Granger was given the opportunity to rebut Payne’s charges on the front page of the paper. He claimed that it was Urban League policy not to reply to what he called “slanderous gossip,” but because the “malicious stories” continued to be circulated, he agreed to answer selected questions that been put to him by “genuinely interested reporters.” The questions, not surprisingly, were contrived opportunities for Granger to defend his record.
Payne complained to editor Louis Martin. “I have noticed recently,” she wrote him, “a consistent pattern of censoring all material submitted by me relating to Mr. Lester Granger and the current unrest within the Urban League.” She felt that the items she had filed were neither slanted nor opinionated but were news. “I am concerned because it seems to be a radical departure from the liberal atmosphere and policy of the Defender to print the news favorable and unfavorable. I certainly do not mind being criticized or checked up when I have been guilty of being biased, but it becomes a matter of personal freedom when the pattern is consistent,” she wrote. “I would appreciate having your views on this matter so that I may know how to proceed in the future.” She certainly got them.
Four days later, in Chicago, Martin took to his typewriter. “Dear Miss Payne,” he frostily began his two-page, single-spaced response. “Until you exercise the elementary, basic and fundamental journalistic principle of presenting, or attempting to present, both sides of highly controversial issues in your copy, you leave us no choice but to rewrite it, complete it or throw it out.” Martin, the most politically connected member of the Defender organization—in fact, he often worked for politicians on the side—was apoplectic.
From the start, Martin told her, she had skewed her coverage of the dispute in favor of the rebellion inside the Urban League. He further accused her of ignoring his suggestion that she check with those being attacked before running accusations. “This was not done because you deliberately did not wish to present but one side of the issue, the side that you are personally convinced is the right one.”
Martin tore to shreds her unsigned article, listing the unsubstantiated charges and criticizing the nonsensical comment about Dowling’s Who’s Who entry. “Such silly, below the belt writing makes us look far more ridiculous in the eyes of intelligent people than it does Dowling.” In short, because she was in a highly visible post and both whites and blacks were carefully reading her work, her shoddy journalism had diminished the paper.
Payne owed her career to Martin and he reminded her of the fact. “I also feel responsible to some extent for sending you there,” he said. “I wish you well and, up until this incident, I thought you were on the ball.” His fury continued unabated to the last line of his letter. “Let it not be true,” he told Payne in closing, “that we with our pens in our hands are no more civilized than the monkey with the shotgun in his hands.”
Granger and Dowling carried the day. A chastised Payne tried to shake off Martin’s verbal beating and threw herself back into her work. But she soon experienced the wrath of another powerful person.
ON THE MORNING OF JULY 7, 1954, Eisenhower greeted the 165 reporters who came that day for his regular press conference in the Indian Treaty Room. After congratulating the press on the media’s efforts to reduce casualties from fireworks during the recent Fourth of July celebrations, the president took questions.
A UPI reporter asked: Would Eisenhower support the admission of Red China to the United Nations? A New York Times correspondent wanted to know: Did the pending farm bill meet with the administration’s approval? One reporter after another plied the president with the usual questions on politics, policy, and foreign affairs.
Seventeen minutes into the conference, Eisenhower looked over at Payne and gave her the nod. “Mr. President,” she began, “we were very happy last week when the deputy attorney general sent a communication to the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee saying that there was a legal basis for passing a law to ban segregation in interstate travel. Mr. Rogers also said that in view of the recent decision by the Supreme Court in the schools cases, that such legislation ought to be enacted by Congress at this time, and the Bureau of the Budget approved it. I would like to know if we could assume that we have administration support in getting action on this?”
The president drew himself up into his military posture. “I don’t know what right you say that you have to have administration support,” Eisenhower barked like a general affronted by the temerity of a grunt. “He became very angry,” Payne said. “Oh, he was so angry.”
“The administration is trying to do what it thinks and believes to be decent and just in this country, and is not in the effort to support any particular or special group of any kind. These opinions were sent down, these beliefs are held as part of the administration belief, because we think it is just and right, and that is the answer.”
This brusqueness from the usually affable Eisenhower startled the room. Nor was it lost on the reporters that the president had just suggested that African Americans and their quest for equality were tantamount to a special interest group. The UPI reporter stood up and switched the subject to the potential for Hawaiian statehood. At the end of the press conference, as the reporters broke up, Edward T. Folliard, a veteran reporter from the Washington Post, came up to Payne. “You asked the right question,” he told her. “In fact, we should have asked those questions sooner.”
Payne was gratified by Folliard’s words. When she returned to her apartment, which still doubled as her office, the phone was ringing off the hook. From Chicago, her Republican mother intoned, “Now, sister, I don’t think you ought to be down there making the president mad.” Next it was Martin and Sengstacke calling from the paper to tease her about picking on presidents. The Washington Star, the city’s afternoon paper, carried the page one headline: PRESIDENT ANNOYED BY QUERY ON TRAVEL RACE BAN SUPPORT. Under the headline EISENHOWER NO CHAMPION OF ANY SPECIAL GROUPS, the New York Times told its readers that the “President made the statement with considerable heat when a Negro reporter asked if ‘we have Administration support’ in seeking legislation to outlaw segregation in interstate travel.” Payne’s question even made news outside the United States. US NEGRO REPORTER DRAWS IKE’S WRATH, reported the Panama Tribune.
Payne’s own paper led its front page with the headline DEFENDER QUERY ANGERS IKE. “The president’s remarks made at his weekly press conference,” read the unsigned article likely to have been written by Payne, “were interpreted as meaning that he regarded the passage of the bill as favoritism towards Negro citizens and his outburst of temper marked a new low in relations with the Negro Press.”
DUNNIGAN RALLIED TO PAYNE’S DEFENSE. In a guest column, she told readers of the Defender that for months Eisenhower had repeatedly been vague in answering civil rights questions or had put off replying, claiming he needed more information. “The president’s lack of knowledge on many racial issues, raised by reporters of Negro newspapers, seems to have become embarrassing after a while, and his impatience began to show,” Dunnigan wrote.
While white journalists reported on the president’s discourteous behavior, Lautier chose instead to attack the two black women pursuing this line of questioning, Dunnigan explained. “This unethical journalist action has resulted in a running word battle between the man reporter and those who would dare speak out in defense of the women.” Lautier’s behavior, she claimed, was spreading to other male columnists “who are joining the fray and vehemently tossing word stones of unpleasantness at those who would dare go to bat for issues affecting ten percent of America’s population.”
But Lautier didn’t restrict himself to solely hurling brickbats. Rather, according to Dunnigan, he informed Hagerty that both women were earning incomes from groups other than their news organizations. By now Hagerty had grown we
ary of Payne and probably regretted having made it possible for her to be part of the White House press corps. Four months earlier she had applied for credentials to attend Mamie Eisenhower’s meetings with reporters. On the application, Hagerty scrawled a note to the First Lady’s secretary. “Stall on this one until you talk to me, will you? I would like to give you the fill-in on this orally and not in writing.”
Hagerty summoned Payne to a meeting in his large office directly across from the Cabinet Room. Spartan in furnishings so that it could hold meetings of several dozen reporters, it was decorated primarily with political photographs. Hagerty had entered politics in 1943 when he left his job as a New York Times reporter in Albany, New York, to become Governor Thomas Dewey’s press secretary in 1943. He subsequently handled press relations in the governor’s two runs for president. Eisenhower, running in 1953, tapped Hagerty for the job on his campaign and after his victory appointed Hagerty press secretary.
When Payne entered Hagerty’s office, she found that Murray Snyder, the assistant press secretary, was also present. “Looking like a pair of executioners, the charges were read to me.” Hagerty made no mention of the press conference incident. Rather, he took another tack. In his hands was a report from the clerk of the House of Representatives that had been filed by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) political action committee reporting its contributions and disbursements in compliance with lobbying laws. “I see here,” Hagerty said, “that you were paid by the CIO at the same time you were serving as an accredited news correspondent at the White House.
“We can’t have that,” he continued. “It’s against regulations. The CIO-PAC is a political organization and I’ll have to report this to the standing committee of correspondents.” Payne admitted that she had indeed been paid for doing some editorial work for the labor group to supplement her meager salary from the Defender.
“Are you still on the CIO payroll?” Hagerty asked.
“Absolutely not,” replied Payne. “It is correct that I received a payment from the CIO on September 10, but that was the last payment I received. Furthermore, I only edited campaign material. I had nothing to do with making policy.” Hagerty brought an end to the meeting. He told Payne that if he found another instance of her doing work for an organization while serving as a White House correspondent, he would refer her case to the standing committee of the congressional press galleries.
The rules of the standing committee, which governed the congressional press galleries and influenced press credentialing throughout the capital, were vague. They did not prohibit freelance writing. Rather, the arcane rules prohibited admission to those who could not satisfactorily document that they were not engaged “in paid publicity or promotion work.” Payne was certainly not alone in doing work for others. Many reporters wrote articles for publications other than their own and gave paid talks. “So what this was,” said Payne, “was clearly a harassment tactic, and it was an effort to get rid of me, because I had become a nuisance.” She stormed out of Hagerty’s office.
“I was put into deep freeze and given the silent treatment by the White House,” Payne said. The president had called on Payne seven times since she asked her first question five months prior. He would call on her only two more times during his remaining seventy-nine months in office.
CLARENCE MITCHELL WAS FURIOUS. He worked to make sure the incident with the president did not undermine Payne’s standing at the Defender as the earlier Urban League fiasco had. “I hope that your readers and the public generally will understand that in Washington there will always be those who want reporters to refrain from asking any questions on racial matters,” Mitchell told Enoch Waters, now the paper’s executive editor. “No doubt Miss Payne could be the darling of these interests if she kept quiet at press conferences and was content to enjoy the prestige of being a White House correspondent.”
Then one of the best-known civil rights leaders, Mitchell gave her work a ringing endorsement. Payne, he said, could curry favor in Washington circles by sticking to reporting minor squabbles and reporting on personalities. “Fortunately for your paper and the public generally,” he wrote, “she is a reporter who seeks the news and does not attempt to color it.”
The White House remained unhappy with Payne, but she was back in the paper’s good stead. She resumed her duties, sending in a prodigious amount of copy. One moment she would be crafting a lengthy explanation of why after a dozen years Congress was no closer to creating a fair employment practices commission. She wrote in what was developing into a folksy style that directly connected her readers with seemingly obtuse governmental issues. “Politicians prattle about equal opportunity for all people and have overworked the phrase ‘voluntary methods rather than compulsion’ until the words have become nauseous gobble de gook, particularly with the people most affected—the worker barred from a job solely because of the color of his skin.” The next moment Payne would be detailing the defeat of improvements in public housing by the Senate’s acceptance of a compromise bill. The vote, she said, “took another yank at the hangman’s knot around public housing, thus sending it on its way to sure death.”
After clawing her way into the Washington press corps, enduring assaults from her colleagues for being black and female, surviving a fight with her editors, and standing up to the president, Payne was no longer the hesitant Chicago features reporter. Instead she had forged herself into a hybrid journalistic role as both an emissary from and a representative of African Americans in a media whose whiteness kept readers in the darkness about civil rights. “Like Folliard said, they hadn’t paid much attention to it,” Payne said. “They were talking about the Middle East or whatever, you know. Everything was more important than civil rights.”
Her reporting grew aggressive and her writing took on an explanatory tone. The line between journalism and advocacy blurred. Looking back years later, Payne offered an explanation. “If you have lived through the black experience in this country, you feel that every day you’re assaulted by the system itself,” she said. “You are either acquiescent and you go along with the system, which I think is wrong, or else you just rebel, and you kick against it. That was just my feeling that somebody had to do the fighting, somebody had to speak up. So I saw myself as an advocate as much as being a newspaper person.”
In the time Payne had been in Washington, she had come to love her new life. Money remained an issue. She rented an apartment that served as both her office and her living quarters, and this in combination with the expenses associated with being a correspondent strained her budget. Her annual salary of about $5,000 was the same she had earned for the last two years. This wasn’t a bad salary, especially considering Payne was without a college degree. It was roughly equal to what a professional woman could expect to earn working for the federal government. In April, when she had asked for a salary increase, Martin had made a verbal promise to hike her wage at some point that year. She sat down to remind Martin of his pledge, addressing Waters in the letter as well.
“I am fully aware of heavy financial obligations of the paper plus some anger which occurred when I broached the subject some time ago,” she wrote. “I want by all means to avoid any unpleasantness because the discussion of money with me, believe it or not, can be very painful. I would much rather leave it to your discretion and the confidence which I have always had in you (despite some differences).
“Can I get biblical,” she said in closing, “and ask ‘Is the Servant worthy of his hire?’?” Her question, however, went unanswered.
But as with journalists everywhere, she thrived in being in a profession that every day brought a new challenge. At any moment she could be writing about important civil rights legislation, a court ruling, or the president’s press conference. She never knew what the day might bring.
FOR A NEWSPAPER THAT RARELY RAN much in the way of international news, the front page of the Defender on January 7, 1955, was out of the ordinary. Under the large headline AFRICA
N, ASIATIC LEADERS TO MEET, the paper reported that five Asian prime ministers were organizing a meeting of African and Asian leaders later that spring in Indonesia. At first glance, the reader might assume this would be yet another gathering of international leaders. However, a more careful examination of the announcement, like that employed by officials in Washington, revealed why the Defender thought it to be front-page material. The idea that as many as thirty nonwhite nations, representing a quarter of the landmass and more than half the world’s population, would meet on their own without inviting, consulting, or notifying the Soviet Union or the United States sent shock waves through Moscow and Washington. One correspondent called the planned meeting “the biggest time-bomb set for 1955 which puts our State Department right on the hot seat.”
Payne’s phone rang. It was her publisher calling. “How would you like to go to Indonesia?” Sengstacke asked.
CHAPTER 17
BANDUNG
JOHN SENGSTACKE WAS SERIOUS. HE WANTED HIS NEWSPAPER’S star reporter Ethel Payne on the scene of the planned April gathering of African and Asian leaders in Bandung, Indonesia. It was growing daily into a big story not just for the African American community but internationally as well.
In Paris, writer Richard Wright was astonished to hear about the conference. “Only brown, black, and yellow men who had long been made agonizingly self-conscious, under the rigors of colonial rule, of their race and their religion could have felt the need for such a meeting,” he said. He called his wife into the living room and handed her the newspaper.
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