Payne continued to be impressed with Nixon’s avowed commitment to civil rights, but not all of her colleagues in the black press were so smitten by the man. “Although he was probably in the company of Negroes more than any other member of the administration, Nixon never seemed really comfortable in that company,” noted Jet’s Simeon Booker. In fact, this discomfort was awkwardly evident when Booker and his wife arrived at the Nixon house that night. Richard and Pat Nixon were overly effusive in their welcome and left Booker completely puzzled. The mystery was soon resolved when it turned out they had mistaken Booker for another black White House correspondent, the Republican sympathizer Louis Lautier.
Two days after her visit to the Nixon home, Payne reported that King would have his audience with the vice-president on June 13. In the company of Abernathy, King arrived at Nixon’s office at 3:30 in the afternoon of the appointed day. Labor Secretary James P. Mitchell, who served as vice-chairman of Nixon’s contract committee, joined them. The meeting, originally planned for one hour, stretched to two hours and forty-five minutes as Payne and other reporters cooled their heels in the corridor outside the office. When King and Abernathy emerged from the meeting, they were escorted quickly to an awaiting car, leaving behind a frustrated group of journalists.
Luckily for Payne, who needed some comment from the participants if she was going to file a piece about the meeting, King and Abernathy met with reporters later in the day at a Washington hotel. The two claimed the meeting had produced concessions. The administration pledged to push for the passage of a civil rights bill and Nixon also promised that King and other civil rights leaders would get a chance to meet with Eisenhower.
Nixon, in Payne’s eyes, was the hero of the day. Unlike the Democrats who pledged support to civil rights, this Republican was taking tangible action.
CHAPTER 22
A TOOTHLESS ACT
WORK ON THE CIVIL RIGHTS BILL BEGAN IN EARNEST shortly after the King-Nixon meeting. For the first time since the nineteenth century, Congress gave serious consideration to legislation aimed at protecting the voting rights of African Americans, only 20 percent of whom were able to register as voters at the time, and at expanding the federal government’s right to monitor civil rights.
The House of Representatives easily rejected amendments intended on watering down the measure; 167 Republicans joined with 118 Democrats to send the measure to the Senate, where the real battle lay.
Ethel Payne was optimistic. She predicted the bill would pass the Senate and provided her readers with a senator-by-senator tally showing thirty-seven Republican and twenty-two Democratic votes, for a total of fifty-nine, ten more than needed for passage. At some length she described the major stumbling blocks and the implications for the 1958 and 1960 elections. “It is no secret that both the Democrats and the Republicans would like to make political hay of civil rights,” Payne wrote. “Perhaps,” she added, “because civil rights has been for so long a football, falling just short of a touchdown, there is more skepticism on the part of the average person as to the Simon pure motives of those who so loudly espouse its cause.”
From the press gallery Payne watched what she called “the long-awaited showdown” get under way. And showdown it was, presaging many future legislative battles over civil rights. Southern opponents used parliamentary skills developed over years in power to buy time and weaken the bill. In fact, on the very first day Payne watched a demonstration of their wiliness when Georgia senator Richard Russell first protested the inclusion of the bill to the Senate calendar on the basis of a printing error and then insisted the bill be referred to the Judiciary Committee.
Led by Southern Democratic senators Russell, James Eastland, Strom Thurmond, Sam Ervin, Herman Talmadge, John Stennis, Russell Long, and Harry F. Byrd, the opposition concentrated its fire on two sections of the legislation: Section III, which would expand the Justice Department’s authority to enforce civil rights through civil and criminal proceedings, and Section IV, which would reserve to judges the power to determine the fate of civil rights law violators instead of a Southern jury. On this provision, the Southerners sought to amend the bill to include trial by jury for anyone who disobeyed a judge’s order, such as in the case of a white official blocking blacks from voting. The innocuous-sounding amendment was a deadly alteration to the bill’s enforcement powers because in the South a jury would be all white.
Payne sought to use her reporting to keep the heat on vacillating liberals, many of whom were now currying favor with the growing black vote. For instance, when Massachusetts Democratic senator John F. Kennedy voted with Southern senators to bottle the bill up in the Judiciary Committee, which was controlled by one of their own, Senator Eastland, and in favor of another parliamentary move aimed at slowing the bill’s progress, Payne cornered the senator. “Kennedy,” she reported, “insisted that the issue involved was over a matter of procedure and had nothing to do with his position on civil rights. ‘I just felt it was a bad precedent to act in bypassing a Senate committee,’ he said.”
In the interview, which she claimed was an exclusive, Kennedy was visibly angry at having his civil rights credentials challenged. “I have no apologies to make for my action. I think my eleven-year record in the House and Senate is a demonstration of my position on civil rights, and this has not changed at all.”
By the end of July, Payne reported with chagrin on the mortal wounds being inflicted on the bill. “When the smoke cleared away, the South had triumphantly succeeded in tearing out the entire Section III and then were free to rally forces for the next attack to append a trial by jury clause into the decimated bill.”
IN EARLY AUGUST the bill faced what appeared to be its Appomattox. Majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson made his move, desperate to prevent the debate from splitting apart his party and endangering his leadership. Already his fingerprints were on the successful effort to strike Section III. He now brought the amendment concerning trial by jury to a vote on the floor. An angry Payne tried to expose Johnson’s tactics, publicizing his work at getting recalcitrant colleagues to toe the line by enlisting help from the powerful head of the mine workers’ union and logrolling on bills of parochial interest.
“Shock-haired Jack Kennedy,” Payne said, “who is glassy-eyed from star gazing at 1960, toppled over like a ten pin in a bowling alley after his pal, Sen. George Smathers of Florida, and Lyndon Johnson put a fatherly arm around him and recounted some political facts of life to him.” According to Payne, Kennedy was not alone in succumbing to Johnson’s pressure tactics. Senator John Pastore, the first Italian American elected to the Senate, caved after getting assurances from Southern senators that they would vote to increase immigration quotas. “On Tuesday, if the vote had come, the amendment would have lost,” Payne said. “But by Wednesday, the Johnson bulldozer was mowing down resistance like hay in a field.”
To Payne the treachery seemed all the more painful after watching her political mentor Clarence Mitchell go without sleep and food. He haunted the corridors and cloakrooms of the Capitol in search of votes right up to the moment when Senator Thurmond made his epic effort to halt the final passage of the bill by launching what was to prove to be the longest filibuster ever in Senate history, twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes. Payne remained in the chamber until a little after midnight. As she departed, she spotted Mitchell still doggedly keeping watch, virtually alone, in the gallery across from the press seats. When she took her seat in the morning she looked across the Senate and saw that a haggard and red-eyed Mitchell was still there.
“I have watched him from the press gallery, sitting in the visitors’ section of both houses, listening to abuse of the NAACP, the Negro people, and assaults upon the bill from the North and the South,” Payne said months later, reflecting on the moment. “We all sat watching while Sen. Lyndon Johnson, the most astute maneuverer on the Hill, cracked his whip and marshaled his forces to cut the guts and heart out of the bill.”
Thurmond’s speechify
ing resistance was shut down and the watered-down bill was approved. In the end, all that was left of the measure was to establish a civil rights commission and grant the Justice Department limited power to file voting discrimination suits. As with the 1955 Brown v. Board II opinion, which set out a vague timeline for the desegregation of schools, the Civil Rights Act dismayed Payne. In contrast, the white press, except in the South, heralded its passage. The wire services called the bill’s passage “history-making” because Congress had not approved a civil rights measure since 1875, and the New York Times hailed it as “incomparably the most significant domestic action of any Congress in this century.”
Payne and civil rights leaders knew better. She warned her readers that what President Eisenhower would soon sign was “the battered, almost unrecognizable version of the civil rights bill” and that Congress had passed it only “after virtually all the teeth had been pulled from the original administration version.”
In the Defender Payne eviscerated the Democrats, highlighting how liberals from the newly elected Frank Church to John F. Kennedy had “broken faith with Negro voters.” In this moment Payne became the Democrats’ Cassandra. “Now, the Northern and Western Democrats are splitting up and realigning themselves with the reactionary South, leaving only a small band of liberals standing alone.” But as was true with the words of the mythological prophetess, Payne’s predictions fell on deaf ears.
The Panglossian attitude displayed by the white press toward the act highlighted the segregation of the nation’s press. It also reflected the sense among many whites that supporting civil rights was a benevolent gesture, whereas blacks viewed their struggle as an effort to obtain rights that were owed them. As a result, the mainstream media that had heralded Brown v. Board in 1954 and now praised the passage of the Civil Rights Act did so for their historic momentousness without focusing on the restrictive elements found in the details. White readers were thus left with an impression of steady judicial and legislative progress on race issues. But blacks, clued in to the limitations of these victories by the reporting of their newspapers, were not so sanguine. In many ways the white press was setting up its readers for bewilderment in the coming years when blacks expressed their frustration and rage at the lack of change.
AS THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT made its way to a vacationing Eisenhower in Newport, Rhode Island, for a presidential signature, a rebellion in the hinterlands became national news. On the morning of Tuesday, September 4, 1957, nine black students prepared to enter the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, as part of a court-approved integration plan. As a precaution, civil rights activist Daisy Bates, who published the local black newspaper with her husband, and some ministers decided to bring the students to the school as a group. Unfortunately, there was no phone at the house of one of them.
So, clutching her notebook, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford set off for the school on her own, wearing round dark glasses and a freshly ironed white blouse and skirt with a black checkerboard pattern that she had made. Awaiting Eckford was a cordon of armed soldiers from the Arkansas National Guard that Governor Orval Faubus had ordered into place to bar the entry of the nine black students. All by herself, Eckford approached. “A nigger,” yelled a member of the growing mob, “they’re coming, here they come.” Rebuffed by the soldiers in front of her and facing an angry crowd behind, Eckford turned and walked toward the municipal bus stop to return home. As she did, Hazel Bryan, a white student, heckled her. The press camera shutters clicked. The television news film rolled. The images of Eckford stoically walking away followed by Bryan, her face distorted in anger, were soon splashed on newspaper front pages and television screens worldwide.
The nine children were then kept home, lawyers for the NAACP returned to court, and a standstill ensued. Payne caught a flight to Little Rock. She wasn’t the only reporter with the name of the erstwhile sleepy state capital on her plane ticket. Dozens of national newspaper, magazine, and broadcast network reporters poured into town. Among the black reporters who arrived were Payne’s friends James Hicks and Alex Wilson—both of whom were getting used to finding their discovery in Japan turning up at major civil rights battlefields—and Carl Rowan. As none of the black reporters were welcome in Little Rock’s motels, they found beds in private homes.
After landing at Adams Field, Little Rock’s airport, which was named after an Arkansas National Guardsman who was killed in the line of duty twenty years earlier, Payne headed to the city’s black business district. Much like Chicago’s Black Belt, the vibrant and thriving Ninth Street was a city within a city, filled with black-owned barbershops and beauty parlors, funeral homes, insurance agencies, pharmacies, jewelers, and other enterprises. And it was also where one went to hear the likes of Count Basie at the Taborian Hall Dreamland nightclub or eat one’s fill of pork chops with black-eyed peas and turnip greens at the Flamingo Hotel.
Here Payne found “sidewalk philosophers” who “spit tobacco and lambast ‘Old Faubus’ ” and gladly shared their view that the governor had created an unnecessary crisis and castigated the state’s Democratic Party. “Before Sept. 3, Little Rock was just the capital of Arkansas,” Payne wrote in her first dispatch from the scene. “Now thanks to the foolhardiness of Gov. Faubus, it has become infamous as the seat of defiance of the federal government and it looks as though the governor will have to reap the wild wind of his own undoing.”
AFTER A NIGHT’S REST in a private home, Payne received a dinner invitation from Lee Lorch, a white mathematics professor at the small black Philander Smith College in Little Rock. The two had met the previous year when Payne was traveling for her “South at the Crossroads” series. In fact, she had written two articles about Lorch, tracing his repeated firing from colleges as an example of the treatment accorded to whites who joined the civil rights movement. “Lee Lorch and his family had been hounded through four states from the North to South like refugees in displacement camps,” Payne had told her readers. “And in the process of punishing Lee Lorch for his views, three proud institutions of learning have been made to grovel in the dust and bow the knee to bigotry.”
Payne was particularly interested in reconnecting with the Lorches because on the day Eckford had faced the troops and the mob, it had been Grace Lorch who had stepped forward to protect the young student as she sat alone on the bench at the bus stop. Enduring catcalls, Lorch had remained with Eckford until she safely boarded a bus. She was also hankering for some decent food. “The restaurant situation for Negroes in Little Rock is worse than bad,” she said.
Lee Lorch picked up Payne from the house where she was staying. As they drove through town, Lorch said it was the first time they had a guest over to their apartment overlooking the Capitol building and he cautioned Payne that something untoward might be said.
At the building they entered the elevator, operated by a young black woman. “I don’t believe I ever got your name,” Lorch said to the woman.
“Frankie,” she replied.
“Oh, but you do have another name, don’t you?”
“Sure, it’s Frankie Coleman.”
“Miss or Mrs.?”
“Mrs.,” replied Coleman, at which point Lorch introduced Payne, calling the operator “Mrs. Coleman.”
“Frankie, looked slightly nonplussed at this departure from southern tradition,” said Payne, “but new gal of the South as she is, she didn’t quibble over the fact that I was riding in the front elevator.”
As soon as they reached the apartment, the telephone rang. The manager was calling because he understood that the Lorches were “entertaining a colored guest and this was in violation of the rules and when would he be vacating?” Lorch replied he knew nothing of the rule and “he was accustomed to entertaining his friends, whatever their pigmentation happened to be.”
The following morning the Lorches received an eviction notice. “Right now,” Payne reported to her readers, “Little Rock to me is about the crummiest corner on the map. Whe
n I got home, Henry Cabot Lodge was on TV sounding off at Russia and giving the commies hell. Well, he should be in Little Rock now and see what’s going on.”
PAYNE SPENT HER FINAL DAY in Little Rock with the nine students at the home of Arlevia and Hosanna Claire Mothershed, whose daughter Thelma was an eleventh grader. All of them were honors students in the Negro schools they had attended, which was why they had been selected for entry into Central High School. “It was refreshing to watch this group of bright uninhibited and unafraid students calmly discuss the situation which swirls around them in the angry bilious pattern of race prejudice,” Payne said.
“It never crossed the minds of either the children or their parents that they should toss in the towel and go back to Horace Mann, the all-Negro school,” Payne reported. “They all seem to realize that much more is at stake than just the issue of whether they will be permitted to attend a mixed school and they are fully aware of their responsibility in history.”
Payne left Little Rock as the story shifted to a meeting between Governor Faubus and President Eisenhower engineered by Arkansas U.S. representative Brooks Hays. Although he had signed the 1956 Southern Manifesto denouncing Brown v. Board, Hays was valiantly trying to resolve the crisis in his district by bringing the two men together. His efforts to find a middle ground made him as many enemies among segregationists as among desegregationists. Rumors circulated that the governor would capitulate, and in Little Rock citizens remained glued to the radio. For his part, Eisenhower did not seem to expect much from the meeting. He simply hoped it wouldn’t interfere with his vacation and made plans for a round of golf in the afternoon in Newport, Rhode Island.
Eye on the Struggle Page 20
