Payne was onto something profound, perhaps even more significant than she realized. Since the Civil War, the black freedom struggle had been led in turn by educators and intellectuals such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, who were followed by labor leaders such as A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and most recently by lawyers such as Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP. Now Payne perceived yet another change in leadership, perhaps the most important one yet.
Everywhere Payne looked in the South she saw the emergence of a new leadership. She told her readers about the Reverend Joseph A. DeLaine, who was fighting for the integration of South Carolina schools, and Reverend T. H. Jennings, who organized a bus boycott in Louisiana that inspired the one in Montgomery. “The Negro preacher is praying,” Payne wrote, “but he is also fighting for the democratic way of life for his people that has so long been denied them.”
Her reporting was even ahead of what others on the front lines could see. Marshall, for instance, failed to understand the significance of the boycott. He thought the action was premature because the NAACP would eventually prevail in court and the bus company’s practices would be found to be an illegal form of discrimination. But what he and others failed to understand was that the daring actions of the Montgomery boycotters were galvanizing blacks nationwide. It was like rousing a sleeping giant. In Montgomery, according to Payne, every Negro minister was crossing all denominational lines to join the effort in a unity of purpose. “So the church,” Payne said, “is leading the way in painful transition to a new social order.”
In Chicago the editors were so impressed by Payne’s reporting that the paper’s lead editorial was devoted to her observations. “A seasoned reporter who has literally made the world her beat, Miss Payne has brought back from behind the ‘color curtain’ some heartening news in the battle that is raging for the second emancipation of the black man,” read the editorial. “It is a fitting tribute to the courageous Negro clergyman.”
Payne followed up her first report with a second one enlarging on her theme of a leadership transition. In South Carolina, for instance, Payne said a bishop was ordering his ministers to escort their members to voter registration sites and polling booths. “The courage and stout heartedness of these new Knights of the Cross have brought hope and inspiration to millions of discouraged people,” she wrote. “For many, it has been the reaffirmation of confidence that in a time of need, true leadership will come forth to guide the people.”
HER ARTICLES AND ANALYSIS complete, Payne returned to Alabama. In Montgomery she found the boycott was still holding strong, although tensions were high. Along with King’s home, organizer Edgar Nixon’s home had been bombed. Floodlights illuminated Nixon’s property at night and a watchdog provided a warning should anyone approach. “But,” she added, “it looks as if the boycott can go on and on and on.”
The unity was such that Payne devoted an entire article to Jeannetta Reese, a black woman who was ostracized for giving in to white pressure by recanting the permission she gave Fred Gray to use her name in the lawsuit against the bus company. “What Jeannetta failed to recognize was that a phenomenal thing had happened in Montgomery,” wrote Payne. “The bus boycott had brought about a unity of purpose and nobody was tattling to ‘Mr. Charlie.’ ”*
From Montgomery, Payne went to Birmingham to catch up with Lucy and her lawyers. They were seeking to persuade a federal judge to have Lucy readmitted to the University of Alabama. At the federal courthouse, Payne found a tense and crowded scene. In keeping with custom, black and white spectators lined opposite sides of the hall while waiting for Judge Harlan Hobart Grooms, an Eisenhower appointee, to convene his court. In a few hours, Lucy got what she wanted. The university was ordered to readmit her in four days. “That means only one thing,” she told Payne and others in the hall, “that I am going back to school.”
In the Masonic Hall offices of her Birmingham attorney Arthur D. Shores, Lucy sat with Payne, several other reporters, and Thurgood Marshall. She was exhausted and the situation was growing more dangerous. A university trustee put it plainly. “She will probably be killed,” he said. Marshall offered to pay for Lucy to go anywhere she wished for a rest. Payne suggested she come with her to Chicago. James Hicks, however, won the honor for New York with a soliloquy praising the city’s virtues from the Brooklyn Bridge to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
The decision made, Lucy and an entourage reduced to Hicks, Payne, and NAACP organizer Ruby Hurley retired to Payne’s room at the A. G. Gaston Motel, where they relaxed over a steak dinner while the rest of the press corps scoured the city looking for Lucy. But Hicks couldn’t rest. “Ethel and I have worked side by side on many a big story from Tokyo to Miami and I respect her as one of the most able gal reporters I know,” he said. “And it gave me no comfort to have Miss Lucy sitting there in Ethel’s room: I was afraid that if I went to bed I might wake up the next morning to find Ethel and Autherine in Chicago!” Ethel was not so underhanded or at least resisted the temptation, and Lucy went to Hurley’s home for the night.
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, Payne and Hicks met in a coffee shop. They both learned they should have stayed up the night before. “For as we sipped our coffee,” said Hicks, “the radio announced that the crackers at Alabama University had ‘permanently expelled’ Autherine Lucy from school.” Stunned, they dashed over to Shores’s offices. “Everything was bedlam there,” Hicks said. “The ’Bama bigots hadn’t even given Shores the courtesy of telling him about it.”
The university’s rationale avoided race. They deemed the charges of conspiracy Lucy made in the courtroom to be slanderous and said that this reflected poorly on her fitness as a student. (They would also eventually expel the anti-desegregation student leader Leonard Wilson.)
Lucy and her legal team rushed to the airport for a 10:50 Eastern Airlines flight to New York City. Hicks managed to snag the last ticket on the flight. The airline tipped off the press, and a cordon of police officers was required at LaGuardia Airport as if Lucy’s arrival was that of a movie star. Payne managed to catch up with the group the following day at the New York offices of the NAACP, where Lucy faced a battery of reporters with Marshall and Roy Wilkins by her side. The glare of the publicity and the pressure of the case became too much for the twenty-nine-year-old, who had never been to New York, much less traveled a lot outside of Alabama. She collapsed into the arms of her two lawyers.
Regaining her composure, she told the reporters she agreed to come to New York to obtain medical help and rest from the strain she had been under since the case started. She had intended on returning to the campus and resuming her classes, but the expulsion order convinced her that staying away for the time being was the best course. Meanwhile she went shopping with Payne.
In the company of Marshall’s secretary and a detective assigned to protect her, Lucy and Payne headed off by subway to Fifth Avenue the next day. “One of the most charming things about Autherine is her genuine modesty and the quaint habit she has of lapsing into some of the colloquialisms of the regions where she comes from,” wrote Payne in her account of the shopping expedition. “As the train came roaring in, she commented in her Southern drawl, ‘It makes a heap of noise for a spell, doesn’t it?’ ”
Surfacing at Forty-Second Street, they went into Arnold Constable and other department stores. Lucy selected a dress, fawn-colored elbow-length gloves, and a beige hat of straw and crepe ruching. Payne refrained from providing sartorial advice. “Your scribe was neutral,” she told her readers, “since shopping panics me.” Back at the Marshalls’ apartment, Lucy modeled her new outfit. “Ain’t that a pip. Baby, you sure look good,” said Thurgood Marshall.
PAYNE AND LUCY, in the company of the NAACP’s public relations director, took the train to Washington. When they reached Washington’s Union Station at 4:25 PM, the scene was a repeat of that at LaGuardia Airport. News photographers snapped pictures and their flashes attracted a crowd of autograph seekers, includin
g twenty-five women from Sweet Briar College, in southern Virginia, returning from a weekend at Princeton University. Payne and the NAACP man guided Lucy, hatbox in hand from her shopping trip, out of the station and into the city.
The purpose of Lucy’s trip to Washington was to attend a national assembly for civil rights convened by the NAACP. It was being held in the Mellon Auditorium, the largest government-owned meeting hall in the capital. Lucy, now a heroine of the struggle, was to be presented to the crowd during its first evening rally. It would be the high point of her struggle. She eventually decided not to pursue the court case further, and it would be another seven years before the first African American student would successfully enter the University of Alabama. Thirty Southern congressmen registered their displeasure at such use of a government facility. But the national leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, both vying for the support of black voters, sent their emissaries to speak to the nearly 2,000 delegates. Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, one of the Republicans’ most vigorous supporters of civil rights, debated Paul Butler, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Butler was already in trouble with his audience before arriving. Earlier in the year Payne had put the Democratic chairman on the front page of the Defender when he said that the “time is not ripe” to push any civil rights legislation through Congress. Talking to Payne and four other black reporters, he even claimed that he had consulted with Senator Hubert Humphrey, a champion of civil rights, and the Minnesotan was in agreement. Representatives Adam Clayton Powell and Charles Diggs publicly rebuked Butler and said his reluctance to push civil rights legislation would put the party in jeopardy of losing the black vote. And more damning, a Humphrey aide accused Butler of lying about his boss.
The three-day conference succeeded in helping promote civil rights as an issue for the fall elections, Payne concluded. But it also highlighted the split among Democrats. “There has always been a conservative—the polite term for the Dixiecrats—and a so-called liberal wing, composed mostly of Northerners who pay lip service to progressiveness in the human rights arena,” Payne explained. But she was convinced that Northern liberals were finally willing to fight for this issue because the party was losing its electoral strongholds. “Chief among these,” she said, “is the Negro vote which for more than twenty years was the exclusive property of Democrats.”
AGAIN PAYNE MADE HER WAY back to Montgomery, reaching the city on the eve of a trial in which King and ninety or so organizers of the bus protest faced charges brought under an arcane 1929 state law prohibiting boycotts. On Sunday, March 18, 1956, she went to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The day was beautiful. “Outwardly Montgomery was quiet,” reported Payne. “But there was an uneasy calm over the city.” At the Dexter Avenue Church she found King instructing his congregation, many of whom were among those indicted, to face their courtroom accusers without hate and “to tell the truth and know that we are right.”
“Violence,” King told the packed church, “carries the seeds of its own destruction. Every true Christian must be a fighting pacifist. Even if we didn’t have tension in Montgomery, there would still be no peace. If Negroes continue to accept the old order, there will be peace without meaning. We don’t want peace if it means keeping our mouths shut about injustice or accepting second class citizenship.”
As she had done on her previous visits, Payne stayed in a private home. But she noticed that the trial had made Montgomery the destination of choice for the national press. Reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post as well as Time and Newsweek and even the television networks were here. Not since the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy ninety-five years earlier had the dateline of Montgomery appeared in so many papers and magazines, noted one observer.
Dean Drug Store, a fifty-year-old establishment in downtown Montgomery, had served as a central meeting place for reporters since the start of the boycott. “First it was all the black correspondents who came down, and then the whites got in,” Payne said. The presence of the white journalists strengthened the reporting coming out of Montgomery, Payne noted. “They would fill us in sometimes about what the white power structure was saying, and in turn, we’d give them little bits of information that they hadn’t yet gotten access to.” With the exception of those from the Montgomery Advertiser, Payne found an immense camaraderie among the reporters. “I think they were all universally sympathetic with the spirit of the movement and what had happened.”
King, who was being tried first, presented himself before Judge Eugene W. Carter’s courtroom, which was filled with a mostly black audience. Court officials worked hard to maintain strict racial segregation. Payne was greatly amused by their efforts. She shared with readers the dilemma they faced in seating a swarthy reporter from India. After conferring gravely over the matter, the officials seated him with the white reporters, even though he announced he would like to sit with the Negroes. “There was a great deal of laughter over this!” said Payne.
The prosecution got off to a poor start in its efforts to show when and how the boycott began. They made better headway using the subpoenaed MIA records. The financial trail certainly revealed the strength of the protest. In the first sixteen weeks of the boycott, the MIA had banked more than $30,000 that it used to pay the gasoline and oil expenses for the automobiles used in the car pool.
At the end of the day, Payne and other reporters crowded around King on the courthouse steps. Asked about the money, King said with a smile, “I have heard rumors about me using it to buy a Cadillac, which is absurd.” He promised he would continue to drive his 1954 Pontiac for at least another five years. That night Payne followed the crowds to St. John AME Church. She found it so jammed with people eager to learn about the first day of the trial that a large segment of the crowd was forced to listen from the sidewalk as loudspeakers broadcast the speeches from inside.
THE TRIAL LASTED FOUR DAYS. Reporters keeping count found that Judge Carter overruled seventy-six objections made by the defense team. As the lawyers expected that the case would ultimately be decided on appeal, this poor treatment at the hands of the judge might serve them well later. On Thursday, the testimony complete, Judge Carter took only minutes to find King guilty, fining him $1,000 or 386 days in jail. The imposition of the sentence and the prosecution of the others were held in abeyance pending appeal. King exited the courthouse smiling as more than three hundred supporters greeted him outside. Responding to the cheers of “Behold the King” and “Long Live the King,” the convicted reverend promised that the verdict would not lessen his ardor. “We will continue with the protest in the same spirit,” he said, “with nonviolence, passive resistance, and using the weapon of love.”
A few hours later, Payne landed an interview with King. At length he explained that the movement was, from its start, a spontaneous outgrowth of years of oppression. “It came from the people, and it is truly a people’s movement,” he told Payne. “One could say that this is really part of the worldwide revolt of subjugated peoples in their yearnings for the dignity that belongs to free men.” Neither the conviction nor the violence directed at the movement would deter them, King promised. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” he said. “The eyes of the world are watching us, but we are not pursuing our course because of this. We are determined to carry through our fight because it is the only right and decent thing to do.”
Montgomery had been exhilarating. “Somehow, I felt I was woven into the drama that was going on,” Payne said. “This was something taking place for me and for all the people that I knew, and we were all drawn into this thing. It was like a historic battle being drawn out on a field, and you were part of it. You were not the audience, but you were part of it. You just felt drawn into it.”
Upon her return north, Payne spoke to a gathering in Bloomington, Illinois. Combining her international reporting with her recent coverage of events in Alabama, Payne repeated a theme of hers since
the 1941 March on Washington Movement: The lack of progress on race in the United States was hurting the nation overseas. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles ought to “unpack his bags and stay home.”
In Chicago, Payne put the finishing touches on two immense projects. The first was a lengthy series called “The South at the Crossroads.” It was not good reporting, the dozen full-page installments hurriedly written. The series offered not news but a readable and understandable explanation of the key events that had made headlines over the past two years. Payne analyzed the effect of the Brown v. Board ruling, recounted the Montgomery bus boycott that was still under way, profiled Martin Luther King, highlighted how the dominance of key congressional committees by white Southern Democrats was stymieing legislative progress on matters of civil rights, detailed the plight of Southern liberals, and attacked “gradualism” as a delaying tactic. “How many more Emmett Tills and Rev. George Lees,” asked Payne, referring to two recent murders, “are needed before the federal government decides that something more than moderation must be used against cold-blooded killers?”
The pages of the Defender were not just consumed by Payne’s exhaustive series but also featured Mamie Bradley’s almost book-length memoir as exclusively told to Payne through a series of interviews. Bradley had not forgotten how Payne had helped when Senator Eastland dug up the information on her husband’s demise and rewarded her with exclusive access.
In the midst of churning out all these words, Payne made time to attend Martin Luther King’s speech in the Gothic Rockefeller Memorial Chapel on the campus of the University of Chicago, where she had once wanted to study. The speech exposed a 1,600-strong audience of white and black Chicagoans to the minister’s inspiring speechmaking abilities that Payne had witnessed close up in Montgomery. The audience, she reported, sat spellbound.
Eye on the Struggle Page 18
