Reflecting on her brother Lemuel’s service in the Army during World War II and her own experience with the military in Japan, Payne deemed this the first war in which American troops were entirely integrated. “Gone are the days of separate units and the special categories of service reserved for Negro soldiers,” she said. “Gone, too, is the type of individual who resigned himself to the system.” In his place, according to Payne, are more aggressive, militant, and confident black soldiers.
This was not to say there was no discrimination. In her visits to the various camps, she ran across tales of racism and prejudice and did not hesitate to write about them. The most common incidents of bigotry were assaults and name-calling, particularly between urban black soldiers and Southern whites. When she visited Cam Ranh Bay Air Base, north of Saigon along the coast, she encountered a group of black soldiers brooding over a notice on a bulletin board. It offered a reward for information regarding a series of recent assaults. In describing the attacks, the assailants were described as “unknown negro soldiers.”
The black soldiers were indignant over the one-sided nature of the notice, claiming nothing had been done when they had been assaulted. They were irate about the potential of the notice to encourage false reports against them and were insulted by the use of Negro with a lowercase n. Sparing no detail, Payne published a lengthy account of the racist behavior and discontent among the soldiers. “We get threats in the barracks, on the job and at the EM [Enlisted Men’s] club,” one soldier told Payne. “They put lynch ropes on our bunks and write warnings in the latrines, but if we even look like we want to go after them, the company commander threatens us with Article 15.”*
Payne sought out the base’s white commanding officer, Brigadier General Mahlon Eugene Gates. An earnest, affable fellow, he introduced himself with his old family nickname of “Ink.” Gates was surprised when Payne told him the use of the word Negro in lowercase was considered derogatory. He listened attentively when Payne discussed the larger complaints about the notice and invited her to offer suggestions. Not being one to be demure on such an occasion, Payne told him to identify and isolate the troublemakers, train unit leaders and commanders on dealing in a more equitable manner with the troops, and use the chaplains to counsel the soldiers.
Despite this incident, Payne believed the experience of serving in a more integrated setting would spark change back in the United States. “After the searing experience of being in Vietnam in a war of unparalleled cruelty, Negro soldiers are coming home to claim their share of democracy,” she wrote. White soldiers, who endured the same baptism of fire, will return convinced that prejudice is wrong. “But with or without help, Negroes will demand a better deal from America.”
“In general,” Payne wrote her mother from Bangkok after leaving Vietnam, “integration has been very successful in the military service, much faster than at home, but human beings are still fallible and every once in a while it crops up.”
LEAVING VIETNAM, Payne was grateful she had survived. Though she did not come near actual combat and had felt danger only on a dusty road outing with marines, she was leaving a war zone. On the day before she left, Bernard Fall, a highly respected correspondent, historian, political scientist, and expert on Indochina, was killed after stepping on a land mine. “I felt the experience personally,” Payne wrote her mother, “since we had become quite friendly and just a week ago while we were at dinner, he was so happy because he was bringing his family to Hong Kong and buying a house there to stay two years while he worked on more books about the Far East.”
But, unlike Fall, who was widely known for his critical reporting on the conduct of the war, Payne did not question the American war policy or the effectiveness of its military operations. She had not gone to Vietnam to cover a war. If she had, she might well have become a critic like her colleagues Frances FitzGerald and Martha Gellhorn, who arrived in Vietnam around the same time. Instead, following her instructions from her publisher and by her own choosing, Payne had focused her coverage on race. By doing so, she wrote about the war’s one good story and played into the hands of Moyers, Martin, and others in the administration eager for favorable coverage in the black press to retain the support of African Americans for the war and the president.
“I didn’t really understand the politics of the war,” Payne admitted two decades later. “I think I was—maybe I was a little brainwashed myself because I didn’t concentrate on that, and I should have. I was so busy concentrating on how well the black troops were doing, that maybe I overlooked that.
“I’ve always regretted to this day that I didn’t do what I felt was an adequate job in reporting on the immorality of the war.”
SHE PAUSED IN SOUTH KOREA for the promised interview with General Benjamin O. Davis Jr., the only black general in the American armed forces. They met in a small brick building in the midst of a sea of Quonset huts that served as the military headquarters of the United Nations Command. In a wide-ranging interview, Payne brought up General Westmoreland’s comparison of the service of black and white troops. “Gen. Westmoreland said that during the Korean Conflict, Negro troops did well, but not as well as their Caucasian colleagues. With progress in race relations, he thinks they are now doing as well as all other soldiers,” Payne told Davis.
Westmoreland’s patronizing comment about the service of black troops offended Davis but he replied carefully, reflecting his years of working around white commanding officers. “I don’t think there’s any question about their outstanding performance in Vietnam, regardless of whether they are Negroes or not,” said Davis, his voice rising. In World War II and Korea, black soldiers fought under—selecting the right words—“an unnecessary burden.” The burden—his way of referring to segregation in the military—had been removed, he said. “We have a real fine operation in which every man can prove himself, and this is the way it should be.”
Making one last stop before returning to the United States, Payne revisited the country that had once been her home for three years. “Rip Van Winkle awakening from his 20-year sleep could not have been more amazed than I at the changes I found in Japan after 16 years.” As she rode in from the airport, nothing seemed familiar. “The freeways stretching like strips of spun-ribbon taffy could have been Washington, D.C., or any other American city.” When Payne asked her young cabbie about the Dai-ichi Hotel, General MacArthur’s headquarters, in front of which she had stood on her last day in Japan, he thought she was talking about a hotel. When they passed it, she saw it now served as an insurance building.
There was, however, one unchanged aspect of life in Japan that saddened Payne. The tan babies, children of black American soldiers and Japanese women—some of whom had reached adulthood—continued to face discrimination. “They are scorned as outcasts and inferiors,” she wrote.
She boarded a flight back to the United States. Sixteen years earlier she had crossed the Pacific by plane to come to work for the Defender. Once again she was making a similar journey to begin a second chapter in her life as a reporter for the storied paper. Yet, resuming the beat that she had given herself—that of civil rights—she knew that these many years later the movement remained a long way from its goals.
CHAPTER 28
THE POOR PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN
UPON HER RETURN FROM VIETNAM IN MARCH, ETHEL Payne wasted no time in resuming her old duties as the Chicago Defender’s Washington correspondent. Once again she rushed about covering goings-on in Congress and at the White House, attending Commission on Civil Rights meetings, churning out profiles of high-ranking blacks, particularly women, and restarting her column So This Is Washington after an interlude one week short of nine years.
As a member of the press, Payne regained entrée to Washington social life, especially now that once again, in contrast to the previous decade, Negroes were in demand among the liberal power brokers. For instance, Payne found herself on the list for a diplomatic white-tie dinner and was seated at a table with Soviet ambassad
or Anatoly Dobrynin. “Well,” said Payne, “that called for the full treatment—nails, hair, etc,” she said. “All gussied up in a high style wig, floating chiffon and a stand-up girdle with sittin’ down shoes.”
Her new apartment, into which she had just moved, doubled as an office. Its $165 rent was a godsend, as her Defender salary of $785 a month was a considerable cut in pay from what she had earned at the Democratic Party. Less spacious than her last place on Belmont Road, the new flat on Sixteenth Street nonetheless was cleaner, safer, more convenient, and filled with light. (In this, her fifteenth year in Washington, she still retained her voting address in Chicago.)
“During the day and night, while I’m working, it gets cluttered with papers spread all out,” said Payne, “but when company comes I pile it all in a rolling file which can be whisked under the map ledge in the hallway.” She kept a radio on at all hours and made frequent dashes by cab to Capitol Hill or the White House, where she was once again obtaining accreditation as a correspondent, this time for Sengstacke Publications, which now included the Memphis Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Detroit Chronicle, in addition to the original Chicago Defender. This enlarged publishing empire expanded Payne’s readership.
IN EARLY JUNE, Payne joined 750 men in black tie and women in gowns for chicken and sweet potatoes at the twenty-fourth annual gathering of the Capital Press Club in the Sheraton-Park Hotel. Payne was one of three reporters whom the club was honoring that night with its Journalist of the Year Award for her reporting from Vietnam. It was the second time the club had given her the prize. The last time it had been for her reporting on the Bandung conference eleven years earlier.
The club had scored a coup and landed Martin Luther King as its dinner speaker. There had been considerable debate among club leaders about King’s appearance since he had come out against the Vietnam War. Many of his movement colleagues, including the NAACP, were rushing to disassociate themselves from his efforts to connect the civil rights and peace movements. His allies in the white press deserted him as well. The New York Times said that by fusing race and peace King had done a disservice to both movements. The Washington Post said that his stance had diminished his usefulness to his cause and country.
Even the Defender joined the chorus of critics. First, it did so by reprinting Payne’s account of how soldiers viewed the war on the front page a week after King’s speech. In her article, she reported that 99 percent of the men she interviewed while in Vietnam supported the war. Eleven days later, the editorial page made the Defender’s views clear. Saying that King “had been swept along by the prevailing tide of hysteria against the war in Vietnam,” the paper predicted that “he will be a shepherd without flock.”
“He knew he was under siege for his views,” observed Payne, who sat not far from him at the club dinner. When he took to the lectern, King began by recalling the halcyon days of the movement in the 1950s and early 1960s and its great legislative victories in 1964 and 1965. “Now we are moving into a transition period, moving from one phase of the revolution to another,” he said. “We are in a struggle for genuine equality.” The early gains, such as opening hotels, transportation, and restaurants, were won at a “bargain rate,” King continued. Finding jobs for Negroes and eradicating the slums lay ahead. “The audience,” said Payne, “was so quiet one could have heard a mouse running over velvet.”
In a slow and rhythmic cadence, King continued. “There must be a radical redistribution of economic power.” Whenever the government funds a poverty project in Mississippi, it is labeled creeping socialism. “In this country there is socialism for the rich,” King said. “Only the poor are cast out into the unproductive world of free enterprise.”
“By this time,” said Payne, “the audience had come alive and the applause was at steady intervals, but a hush fell again as Dr. King approached the third phase of his speech on the subject of war.” Without mincing words, King repeated his opposition to the war and claimed that women and children had been brutalized while others had been victims of napalm. These charges, Payne noted in her account of the speech, were unsubstantiated and “indicative of the weak spot in the King logic.” It was clear that, just back from her carefully managed tour of Vietnam, Payne was not ready to join the critics of war even if they now included King.
But King was not done with confronting his own critics. “To those who say, why don’t you stick to civil rights and leave the peace issue alone, I say, I refuse to be limited or segregated in my moral concern.” The applause was deafening, reported Payne. In her eyes King, the dissenter, had won over the crowd and, at least on this point, her as well. “When he finished there was a standing ovation and it was clear to the hawks and the doves that ‘the conscience of America’ had spoken clear and firmly.”
LESS IMPRESSED WITH THE GENUINENESS of King’s stance on the war was Payne’s rival Carl Rowan, who along with her had pursued the same trail of stories in the civil rights battlegrounds of Montgomery and Little Rock. He published an attack in the widely circulated Reader’s Digest claiming that King had been transformed by communist influence and his growing sense of self-importance. As a result, King had alienated important elements of the civil rights movement and become persona non grata to the president, Rowan concluded.
It was indeed true that a rift had opened between King and Johnson. The war was also causing discord between the White House and other African Americans who had previously supported the president. Several months later, Payne was at a luncheon put on by Lady Bird Johnson as a forum for a discussion about urban crime and violence. The singer and actress Eartha Kitt—then regularly referred to by the press as a “sex kitten”—used the moment to directly criticize the war policy of the hostess’s husband. Shouting angrily at the First Lady, Kitt said that youths were rebelling because they were “snatched off to be shot in Vietnam.”
Lady Bird Johnson grew pale but Kitt continued her tirade. Others in the room grew silent. “The sisters of color who were present became immobilized like so many ebony statues,” said Payne. “It was like Watts in conflagration in the White House.” The press loved the moment, and Kitt’s assault made the front page of newspapers everywhere and received scolding editorials from many quarters. Despite a growing admiration for and friendship with the First Lady, Payne wrote a long and evenhanded account of the conflict that concluded Kitt had been provoked by behind-the-scenes machinations that thwarted her plans to use a visit to Washington to support several antipoverty efforts on Capitol Hill.
KING’S FALLING-OUT with the Johnson administration was not the civil rights leader’s sole problem. His Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), formed following the Montgomery bus boycott, was losing members and hemorrhaging money. He faced a leadership challenge among young followers from Stokely Carmichael, who controlled the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and had replaced the slogan of “Freedom Now” with “Black Power.”
Payne pursued the story of King’s transformation and struggles to win back leadership of the civil rights movement. From Cleveland, Ohio, she reported on his denunciation of the emerging radicals. “He did not name anyone specifically,” said Payne, “but it was clear that his attack was aimed at black-power advocate Stokely Carmichael and his followers.” The new leaders were inciting people to riot while remaining as bystanders, according to King. “When I urge people to march, in nonviolent peaceful protest, for their rights, I make sure that I am at the head of the line, leading them, and not skulking behind.”
In August 1967, Payne traveled to Atlanta for a convention in honor of the SCLC’s tenth anniversary. There King confronted his restless delegates by proposing a campaign of massive civil disobedience as an alternative to rioting. Specifically, he called for poor people to come to Washington for a sit-in. Payne was skeptical of King’s plans. “Neither are the suspicious hostile ghetto youth, the fifteen- to twenty-five-year-olds who give vent to their rage by smashing store windows and hurling Molotov
cocktails, convinced that King’s way is the answer to their frustration,” she reported. “To them it seems, nonviolence is Whitey’s way of keeping things quiet in order to continue exploiting black people.”
Three years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and two years after the 1965 Voting Rights Act, it seemed to young African Americans that they faced a future not much better than that of their parents. Black power offered a new and promising call for change. “King,” Payne said, “knows that he is in a race against time to defuse the ticking bombs of impatience in the big cities.” The urban disorders and the controversy over black power were causing many to think that the civil rights movement was coming to a close. The Nation, one of the stalwarts of the movement among the white press, believed it was “nearing the end.” Everywhere Payne looked she saw evidence that the unity she had chronicled since 1955 was crumbling. The previous month she had reported on a mini-revolt at the NAACP convention in Boston challenging the rule of the organization’s old guard. In Newark, New Jersey, Payne had chronicled the National Conference on Black Power.
It was a somber moment for Payne. She told her readers the Newark gathering signaled that “the point of no return was reached in the crisis of race in America.” Even though the meeting was held in the Cathedral House, a facility of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, delegates attacked religion as “a hobble to black independence.” Even though Payne no longer attended church, she was nonetheless shocked. “But such is the temper of the times that yesterday’s crusaders are as old and out of date as whalebone corsets,” she wrote. “The word Negro is out and black is in and the machete knife of black impatience is hacking through the hundreds of accepted mores.” From Boston to Atlanta, Payne found the movement in disarray.
Eye on the Struggle Page 26
