Eye on the Struggle

by James McGrath Morris

  BANDUNG WAS THE MEETING PLACE of the world’s underdogs, and it attracted its share of sympathizers. W. E. B. DuBois and singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson hoped to come but were denied passports by the State Department. Instead they sent greetings that were read aloud to the delegates. Among the many who were able to make the trip were authors James Michener, Vincent Sheean, Norman Cousins, and Homer A. Jack, a Unitarian minister and social activist who had worked with Payne on the Chicago Council Against Racial and Religious Discrimination.

  Payne discovered that her race—along, perhaps, with a treasured talisman—worked magic. In addition to her credentials, she wore around her neck a ceramic locket made by her sister Thelma Gray. It was turquoise blue with decorative black squiggles that looked like Arabic. Every day when Payne approached the conference hall the soldiers would lift their bayonets and let her pass, including into sessions closed to reporters. Not one to question her access, she continued entering each day.

  On the fourth day, Chet Huntley, an NBC radio reporter who a year later would become coanchor of television’s Huntley-Brinkley Report, fell into step with Payne. When the pair reached the checkpoint, Payne strolled right in, but the guards would not let Huntley pass. Laughing, Payne said from the other side of the security cordon, “Now you know what it means to be a minority.” An interpreter standing nearby looked at Payne and stared intently at her necklace. “Aren’t you attached to the Saudi Arabian delegation?”

  Payne spent most of her time with delegations and only rarely met with the various national figures leading them. She had brief encounters with Nehru and Zhou. Of the leaders whom she met, Payne was most struck by U Nu, the prime minister of Burma. A devout Buddhist, U Nu was also a spiritual leader in his nation, as well as an accomplished author, novelist, and playwright. Payne spent a long interlude with him, discussing philosophy and religion. “He was almost monastic, in that he was deeply religious,” she said. From her perspective, Payne thought he “tried to mute the militant tones at the conference with his philosophy of peace and love.”

  After each long day of speeches, meetings, and sudden rainstorms, nightfall brought political receptions. Each nation sought to outdo the other. According to Payne, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Faisal was the uncontested winner. He provided a buffet dinner, complete with roasted pheasant cooked in Paris, allegedly at Maxim’s, and flown to Bandung at the cost of $36,000. Not to be outdone, Zhou held a reception, inviting both Rowan and Payne, at which the Chinese gave out beautiful reproductions of antique Chinese paintings. The artwork would decorate the office walls of both journalists for years to come. In Payne’s case, her new friend Chet Huntley was worried about the gifts. “He said that it was a communist ploy, you know, and I, as a black woman, was particularly vulnerable,” Payne said. “So he just hoped that I wouldn’t fall victim to that.

  “Years later,” Payne continued, “I always giggled when I would watch Huntley and Brinkley on the evening news and say to myself, ‘Chet, old boy, wouldn’t you be surprised to know that those paintings are hanging on my apartment walls, and I’m waiting for the FBI and the CIA to charge me with Communist collaboration.’”

  When all the participants found their way back to their lodgings for a night of sleep, it was then that Payne would pull out her small portable typewriter and begin banging out her stories, hunting and pecking for each letter with her index fingers. “It was an exhausting thing, but there was so much excitement about it,” she recalled, “that I felt like I had taken on a major thing that was different from any other experience I’d ever had.” When done, Payne had to locate the special courier employed by the conference who flew out to Jakarta each day and could put her articles on a flight to the United States.

  FOR THE TRIP Payne had intended on packing four or five cans of Sterno, jellied alcohol that burns while still in its container. Payne needed a flame to warm a metal comb that she used to straighten her hair. “There was no such thing as going about with nappy hair,” Payne said. “You straightened your hair.” But when her sisters helped her pack during the few days she was in Chicago before leaving on the trip, one of them thought she was taking too much stuff. As it was, Payne would already have to pay overweight charges on her luggage. To cut down on what she was taking, her supply of Sterno was reduced to one can.

  In the humidity of Bandung, Payne’s Sterno ran out quickly. Wearing a scarf to cover her hair, she ran into Richard Wright. He was staying in the same compound of houses, and the two found they had much in common from their years in Chicago to their strong personal reasons for coming to Bandung. “He said he was trying to find a link for his own identity with what was happening at the conference,” Payne said.

  “Oh,” she said upon seeing Wright, “I don’t know what to do about my hair! My hair is just . . .”

  “What’s the matter?” Wright asked.

  “The Sterno is gone. I didn’t have but the one can of Sterno!”

  “Well, don’t worry. If there’s any Sterno in Bandung, I’ll find it for you.”

  Late that night Payne got back to her room after attending one of the endless series of social events. As her room had only a Dutch door, or half door, that could not be locked, she would often find gifts on the table from one of the delegations. Payne spotted a bottle wrapped in white paper. She presumed it was a present, and not being much of a drinker, she left it unopened and went to bed. At about three in morning she heard a voice from outside.

  “Ethel! Ethel! Please answer me! Ethel! Are you all right?” It was Wright.

  “What is it?” she asked him when she let him in.

  “Did you open that bottle?”

  “No, I was too tired.”

  “Well, thank God!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I couldn’t find any Sterno, so I got some pure alcohol.”

  “Well, what do you do with that?”

  “You got any cotton?”

  Payne did. They put the cotton in a saucer and Wright poured the alcohol over it and lit it. Then the pair took turns heating the comb and pulling it through Payne’s hair.

  “Together,” said Payne, “we were frying my hair. It was the wildest thing you ever heard of!”

  NOT A SINGLE ONE of the 600 delegates to the conference was a woman. And although the 387-member press contingent included women, they were very few in number. As a result, Payne attracted the attention of a group of reformist Muslim women. Interested in the American women’s rights and civil rights movements, the women invited Payne to a tea. When she arrived, she discovered they were angry about the actions of two leading men at the conference. The Pakistani ambassador had divorced his wife for a woman of mixed English and Asian blood, and their own president, Sukarno, had taken a second wife. “And these women were—I guess they could be described as feminists, but they were very upset about this.”

  The Indonesian women asked Payne what she thought.

  “You are predominantly a Moslem country, aren’t you?” Payne asked.

  “Yes,” they replied.

  “Well,” Payne said, “I thought it was a custom to have plural wives.”

  The women claimed it was an ancient practice to ensure that war widows were cared for, but it was no longer needed. “And that,” Payne realized, “was my first lesson in real feminism, you know, for equal rights and everything.”

  Following the discussion, the women wanted to demonstrate their knowledge of American culture. One of them read poetry by Walt Whitman and one sat down at the piano and played “Old Black Joe,” a Stephen Foster tune. At its conclusion, Payne stood up.

  “I thank you for your hospitality,” she began. “You’re so gracious. But let me tell you a little bit about the history of that particular piece of music. It represents a very sad, a very bleak picture in the history of our country. It goes back to slavery days when my people were in slavery, and ‘Old Black Joe’ represents the kind of denigration that we had. So we don’t accept that anymore. We think
it’s a pattern back to a day that we would like to put behind us.”

  When she finished speaking, there was silence in the room. One of the women said the sheet music had been brought over by other Americans as an example of music favored in the United States, but they hadn’t known it was offensive. Then another woman stood and went to the piano, grabbed the music, and tore it in half. “We will never again sing that song.”

  “It was,” Payne said, “a high moment, a very high moment.”

  DESPITE THE POTENTIAL PITFALLS, such as the opening-day attacks on communism as the new imperialism, the Bandung conference was free of conflict. At its end, the delegates agreed on a ten-point declaration that mirrored many of the principles in the United Nations Charter and called on Third World countries to further exchange technical assistance to lessen their dependence on industrial nations.

  The conference achieved nothing concrete beyond its declaration, yet it was clear to all who had been there that it had been a historic moment. “Bandung was more important as ceremony than as conference,” wrote Norman Cousins upon his return home. “The ceremony, of course, was the graduation exercises of two continents into equality in the family of free nations.”

  Delegates and others packed up to return home with a sense of optimism about what had occurred. As one writer put it, the gathering was “the voice of the voiceless.” Adam Clayton Powell found himself changed by Bandung. “It made me over into an entirely new man,” he said. He shed his nationalist beliefs to embrace an internationalist sense. “Whereas previously I had thought of civil rights in terms of rights for Negroes only, I now thought of civil rights as the sole method by which we could save the entire United States of America.”

  Likewise, Payne was exuberant. “I felt that I was witnessing something that had never happened before in the history of the world and probably would not happen again,” she said. But unlike the other American attendees heading east to the United States, she boarded a flight going west. The Defender was milking the trip all it could. There was more reporting to be done.

  AT A TRAVELING SPEED that would have impressed Nellie Bly, who famously emulated Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days for the New York World in 1889, Payne flew west, setting down briefly in Ceylon, India, Pakistan, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and France. From each stop she sent the paper an impressionistic piece filled with local color and anecdotes about her sightseeing. They were like postcards home.

  “This is the hottest spot I’ve hit yet,” said Payne of Ceylon. “The winds blowing in from the Arabian Sea sear you like tongues of flame and everything is parched brown.” In Karachi, Pakistan, “graceful young girls in baggy trousers balance jars of water on their head and move along with [the] rhythm of ballet dancers.” At Alfredo’s restaurant in Rome “six handsome waiters descended on me, smiling and talking away with their shoulders and eyes and hands—the Italian way.”

  Only in Germany did she put back on her reporter’s cap, and for good reason. About 12 percent of the more than 150,000 servicemen stationed in Germany were African American. Payne traveled about to several cities with large bases to get a sense of their lives. Her three years of service on a base in Japan made her feel at ease among troops. In the interviews she conducted, she learned that in the prior two years there had been a marked decline in racial friction and brawls. At the headquarters of the 37th Engineer Group (Combat), an eight-year veteran of European service told her that the primary reason for the improvement in race relations was the Army’s efforts to weed out those resisting integration.

  In fact, Payne found that the U.S. military in Germany had opened up college courses, such as those run by the University of Maryland, to black soldiers and had worked to end the racial restrictions she had known in Japan. “On duty, at chow time, in their sleeping quarters, at post recreation facilities, mixing is the normal procedure of routine,” she said. However, the improvements ended at the base’s gates. “When it comes to fraternizing over a beer or visiting a dance hall or nightclub,” Payne said, “separation becomes an automatic thing, self imposed by the troops and not by military authorities.”

  According to Payne, if black soldiers frequented a beer cellar, then the “fräuleins,” as Payne referred to the barmaids, fraternized with the soldiers while the proprietors informed the white soldiers that the bar is for the use of the black troops. “Conversely, it’s the same with the white soldiers,” Payne said. “Wherever they take over, it’s understood it is their domain and the fräuleins will have nothing to do with the colored GIs.”

  If a soldier crossed this informal color line, he would be thrown out of the establishment. For that reason, Payne found tension to be high in Mannheim, where a move was being made to desegregate the night spots. About a dozen black and white soldiers banded together and stopped in at bars normally reserved for one race or the other. “The expected fights didn’t come off,” reported Payne, “but the German proprietors were pretty nervous. Muttered one, ‘Never know how to figure those Americans.’ ”

  Her reporting also included accounts of life for the African American wives. “A Negro woman is a great object of curiosity,” Payne wrote. “Negro men, whether in uniform or in civvies, seem to be accepted as a matter of course, but when a lady of color appears, it causes a great deal of elbow nudging, stares and excited conversation. Some are amused and snicker behind their hands. Others sit or stand and fasten their eyes on you in a marathon look with the same fascination of a strange species of fowl or animal.”

  One wife so hated this treatment that she sent her husband out to do the shopping. And then there was the petite brown-skinned wife of a sergeant that Payne encountered. When she would overhear the word schwarz, she would turn around and sweetly say, “Guten Tag, mein lieben dumkopfs” (“How do you do, my dear stupid ones”). But Payne insisted it was not German hostility, rather the national character of bluntness. “The Auslanders,” said Payne, “have neither the finesse of the French nor the polite continental dignity of the Swiss.” In fact, one black woman told Payne she encountered more genuine hostility and whispering from Southern American whites than among the Germans.

  In the late afternoon of May 23, the Pan American Super 6 Clipper carrying Payne touched down at Chicago’s Midway Airport. Clad in a polka-dotted dress and a white hat, and wearing round dark sunglasses, she paused at the base of the stairs to be photographed, flanked by two stewardesses. ETHEL PAYNE BACK AND GLAD OF IT, heralded the Defender.

  CHAPTER 19

  SOUTH AT THE CROSSROADS

  THE JET LAG FROM HER WHIRLWIND TOUR OF THE GLOBE had hardly abated when on a June evening Payne went to Washington’s Raleigh Hotel to bask in her success at home and abroad. The Capital Press Club, the black alternative to the National Press Club, had selected her as its “Newsman’s Newswoman” of 1955. Bestowing the honor, complete with a three-foot-tall twenty-five-pound trophy, was the centerpiece of the club’s annual gala dinner in the hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, four blocks from the White House. Payne shared the stage with Vice-President Richard Nixon, who was being given a citation for his work with his committee on government contracts and employment, and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, who delivered the main speech.

  The soiree underlined Ethel Payne’s growing public visibility. She had even become fodder for journalist Drew Pearson, whose syndicated muckraking column, Washington Merry-Go-Round, was feared by politicians and loved by newspaper readers. At a Howard University banquet in May, while Payne was still out of the country, Pearson claimed that the Eisenhower administration had instituted a “reign of terror and intimidation” against those raising embarrassing questions concerning race discrimination. Although he did not mention Payne by name in his talk, instead referring to her as “a Chicago Defender correspondent,” Pearson said that press secretary Hagerty’s private meeting with her was an attempt to “silence the press from asking legitimate questions on racial prejudice.”

  But in his column, also published while
Payne was away, Pearson made no attempt to mask her identity. In fact, Pearson elaborated on his portrayal of Hagerty’s intimidation campaign by claiming it had included the use of Payne’s personal income tax returns. A furious Hagerty took the unusual step of holding his own press conference to rebut the charge. He admitted he had called Payne to his office for a meeting and had threatened her with the loss of her credentials. But Hagerty denied he engaged in the illegal action of getting copies of her tax records. “I don’t normally criticize stories,” he told reporters. “But when any columnist or anybody in the newspaper profession says I’m using tax returns, they are completely either deliberately lying or they are completely uninformed.” The brouhaha made the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, among other mainstream newspapers, and page one of the Defender.

  Besides writing front-page news for the Defender, Payne was making its front-page news.

  THE HAGERTY MATTER DIED DOWN and Bandung turned into a distant memory. Payne threw herself back into her work, trying to keep up with the burgeoning number of civil rights developments in Washington and in the South. “While there was never a dull moment, there were plenty of times when I just sat and cried with weariness and frustration,” Payne recalled. “My problem was that I wallowed in self guilt if I missed an important news break, never rationalizing that it was impossible for me to be on top of every story breaking.”