Compounding the troubles was disharmony between protesters. Reies López Tijerina, a Hispanic leader famous for his fight on behalf of land-grant heirs in New Mexico, charged that the campaign was black dominated and neglected the issues of Native Americans and Hispanics. Abernathy quickly promised to add land rights and fishing treaties to the list of protest demands. “The rift points up the confusion and failure to develop an all-inclusive strategy by the leadership,” concluded Payne.
As organizers struggled with crises brought on by inadequate shelter and provisions, the more important efforts to make political headway were also faltering. Payne found that this failure was due in great part less to the camp’s administrative problems than to the campaign’s internecine leadership squabbles. Abernathy was no Martin Luther King, and the protesters did not respond to his lackluster style. In contrast Jesse Jackson, who now led the SCLC Operation Breadbasket, suddenly emerged as a potential leader after conducting protests around the city. Payne was moonstruck. She compared his looks, augmented by having let his hair grow out into curly ringlets, to Michelangelo’s David. “When he strides into a tense situation as occurred during the arrest of eighteen demonstrators outside the House Office Building last week,” Payne told her readers, “he raises a clenched fist and shouts ‘Soul Power’ and the crowd goes wild.”
But within days, Payne reported on Jackson’s ouster from the leadership as the power struggle within the civil rights movement played out. Taking his place was Hosea Williams, for whom Payne had little regard, calling him bombastic and a trouble seeker. However, she found a glimmer of hope in Bayard Rustin, the brains behind the 1963 March on Washington, who had been brought in to fashion a manifesto, and in Sterling Tucker, director of Washington’s Urban League, who was to organize the final demonstration set for June 19.
Rustin put together a seven-point list of demands, calling for jobs, an increase in financial and food assistance, and other specific policy changes. Tucker said he would model the demonstration on the March on Washington, culminating on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. But once again, Payne’s rising expectations were quelled. Bayard Rustin, whom she considered the only person capable of putting together the protest, quit after he was publicly denounced and humiliated by Hosea Williams, who told Payne he was “the real boss of this show.”
With Rustin gone, Jackson banished to Chicago, and the camp a waterlogged shambles, Payne felt the protest encampment’s end was near. “The pilfering and licentiousness has spread throughout and even the most warmhearted sympathizers now feel that it is time for them to leave.”
IN THE MIDST OF the disorder and leadership fights, Robert F. Kennedy, the one national politician in whom most encampment residents placed their trust, was shot by a gunman hours after winning the California presidential primary. Hundreds knelt in the mud of Martin Luther King Plaza in Resurrection City, praying for his recovery. He died the following day, and the hearse bearing his body stopped at the encampment on its cross-country journey to Arlington Cemetery.
The encampment’s population fell below 1,000 and leaders valiantly continued to make plans for the culminating protest march. On June 19, somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 people rallied in front of the Lincoln Memorial as SCLC leaders and politicians spoke. To Payne’s pleasure, women took center stage, unlike at the march five years earlier. Coretta Scott King led off speeches by Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women; Martha Grass, who spoke on behalf of Native American participants; and Peggy Terry, of the JOIN Community Council of Chicago.
“They expressed the concern and hopes of millions of their sex about the problems of poverty and racial injustice,” reported Payne in a front-page story headlined WOMEN SET THE TONE OF THE POOR MARCH. King called for a “campaign of conscience” to be led by women and said that women had a moral obligation to oppose the war. “The white woman,” Payne wrote, summing up the speakers, “fights for equality with the white man, but the black woman must fight for equality for herself and the black man.”
Talking to sources in Atlanta, Payne learned that Coretta Scott King’s remarks, which she had highlighted in her coverage, had a secondary meaning that had escaped her at the time. King was upset by the behavior of SCLC leaders staying at their makeshift headquarters in the Pitts Motor Hotel in Washington. “The carousing till all hours with women of questionable character trooping in and out affronted the wife of the slain leader,” said Payne.
Thus Coretta Scott King’s call for a “campaign of conscience,” said Payne, was “a quiet countermove to the demoralized leadership of the Poor People’s Campaign.” Having experienced men’s demeaning treatment of women in the movement as early as 1941 when she worked for A. Philip Randolph and his March on Washington Movement, Payne knew firsthand what King was saying and confronting. “The emergence of women as leaders,” wrote Payne, “has again raised an old familiar bug-a-boo among Negro males, the resentment of female dominance.”
THREE DAYS LATER, Payne was sitting in the upstairs lounge of Billy Simpson’s restaurant with Willard Murray Jr., a California activist who worked for Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty. The spot was a popular hangout for notable African Americans in government and entertainment, and its owner was a supporter of both the civil rights and the antiwar movement. Simpson announced that police were moving in on Resurrection City with plans to close it down. Teargas canisters had been set off and the last remaining residents were fleeing.
Payne and Murray caught a taxi and headed downtown. As the two neared Resurrection City, the wind carried the smell of teargas toward them. “All of us were choking with our eyes streaming.” Police barricades caused the taxi to detour toward Memorial Bridge to reach the camp. Payne found about two hundred police officers massed in front, women with small babies walking in a daze, and youths with transistor radios muttering threats. Moving to city hall, Payne encountered Abernathy meeting with SCLC leaders and representatives of other groups as Roger Wilkins from the Justice Department arrived.
The police remained at bay and calm was restored. “A young buck grabbed a gas mask from a policeman and ran back into the city,” Payne said. “No one attempted to follow him. It was plain that the police did not want to escalate the hostility, since sixteen hours remained before the permit would expire.” But it was the beginning of the end. Within several days the hangers-on left, the last ones departing when a thousand police officers cleared the camp.
Payne came across a woman from Mississippi who had endured seven weeks of heat, rain, and mud. Now she wept as she gathered her belongings to return to a life of sharecropping with her husband in Marks, Mississippi. “Drifting like eider down borne by the wind,” wrote Payne, “the poor went off in all directions, their tattered banners discarded and their hopes still marooned on a lonely isle of poverty.”
After six weeks, the section of the National Mall by the reflecting pool that had teemed with thousands lodged in shanties and tents was empty and quiet except for the sound of the occasional group of policemen on patrol. Martin Luther King’s final campaign was over. Like the piles of debris, his Poor People’s Campaign was in shambles. “Resurrection City is no more,” wrote Payne. “Maybe the dream was only a mirage.”
CHAPTER 30
NIXON REDUX
ARRIVING IN MIAMI IN THE MID-AUGUST HEAT TO COVER the 1968 Republican Party convention, Ethel Payne might have rightfully thought that Resurrection City had not died two months earlier but simply moved. Veterans of the Poor People’s Campaign, dressed in denim overalls, work shirts, and straw hats, occupied the lobby of the swanky Fontainebleau Hotel. Leading them was Ralph Abernathy, sporting a Brooks Brothers suit. “True to his promise that ‘poor people no longer will be unseen, unheard and unrepresented,’” Payne reported that Abernathy aimed to make sure Republicans were confronted with the needs of the poor.
“If nothing else,” said Payne, “the whole episode gave the convention the electric charge it was lacking to really get turned on.
The sedate ladies from the Women’s Division who were selling tickets to a Wednesday brunch for the leading GOP feminists sat in a state of shock at the carryings on.”
To the relief of the ladies, the protesters soon vacated the hotel. Payne watched from across the street as the bedraggled group spilled out. She also spotted a yacht making its way down the bay, loaded with Rockefeller delegates and festooned with balloons. “The poor people,” wrote Payne, “their tattered banners waving, moved on, inevitable and inexorable—a reminder that ‘the problem’ was not only there, but was sitting in the midst of the many splendored palaces of Collins Ave.”
In the Miami Beach Convention Center, a phoenix-like Richard Nixon, long thought politically dead, locked up his second nomination for president. Eight years earlier, when Payne had been distrustful of candidate John F. Kennedy for his conduct in the 1957 Senate consideration of the Civil Rights Act, Nixon had not been the anathema represented by his new incarnation. The old Nixon was one she had known well. But the man who once pushed for the Civil Rights Act, went to Africa, met with Martin Luther King, and came to her house with a bottle of bourbon was now unrecognizable, wrapped in the rhetorical shroud of his law-and-order campaign. Suggesting that government was soft on crime and police were unduly restricted in their work, Nixon’s law-and-order rhetoric appealed to white Southerners who harkened to a life before all the “troubles,” as they might refer to the civil rights struggle. Blacks, on the other hand, were leery, concerned that talk of reducing crime was aimed at them.
From Miami it was on to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention. The small protests the Republicans faced were nothing in comparison to what awaited Democrats. Their party was in complete disarray. President Johnson had startlingly withdrawn from the race after faring poorly in the New Hampshire primaries, and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated. “The Democratic Convention, which a year ago was rated the most likely to be routine, promised to provide the most suspenseful event of the year,” wrote Payne.
In assessing the field, Payne concluded the nomination would go to Hubert Humphrey. In Chicago, where the police fought protesters on the streets and bedlam reigned inside the International Amphitheatre, Humphrey was indeed selected on the first ballot. Payne voiced her doubts of the Minnesotan’s prospects on the fall ballot. “Today’s generation doesn’t remember 1948,” she wrote, referring to the period when Humphrey stood up at great political risk for a civil rights plank. “It is not impressed with the reminder of what happened then. To the reckless and disenchanted younger voters, to the disillusioned black voters today, Hubert Humphrey is regarded as a puppet of Lyndon Johnson, who in turn is denounced as a warmonger, as he strikes out now on the campaign trail.”
But the convention did, in Payne’s view, have some positive moments. There were a record number of black delegates. The integrated delegation from Mississippi that had been barred from the 1964 convention was seated. And for the first time, the names of two African Americans were put into nomination at a major political party. Channing Emery Phillips was nominated for president and Julian Bond for vice-president. (Bond, however, pointed out that at twenty-eight he was below the constitutional requirement that he be thirty-five years old.) “Whatever else may be said about the disastrous effects of the Democratic Convention, black political power came on strong,” wrote Payne.
IN THE FALL CAMPAIGN, Payne wrote almost every week about Humphrey and rarely, if ever, mentioned Nixon, except when there were unflattering reports. As Election Day neared, Payne joined the Humphrey campaign plane. Between San Jose, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada, she talked with the candidate. In her report, she highlighted Humphrey’s excoriation of Nixon on the issue of race and the Republicans’ failure to rebuke George Wallace, a third-party candidate whose campaign rested on appealing to disaffected white segregationists. Her old friend Nixon couldn’t catch a break with her. But on election night Nixon prevailed, and eight years of a Democratic White House friendly to the civil rights movement came to an end.
In December the four hundred or more black appointees in the Johnson administration began packing their belongings and saying their farewells. In the presidency that had brought about the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, African Americans had been appointed in record numbers to government posts. Their futures, however, were less secure than those of departing white officials. “While such well-known personages with the Kennedy-Johnson administrations such as Pierre Salinger, Bill Moyers, Theodore Sorensen, Mike Feldman and Joe Califano have left government service for six-figure jobs,” Payne told readers, “black members in the super grad categories have only a minuscule chance of landing fat incomes in private industry.”
On December 17, Payne joined a large crowd, which included 150 black White House appointees, at the resplendent Federal City Club to mark the end of the era and to say farewell to President Johnson. On behalf of the black appointees, Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall presented to the president a mahogany and silver desk set containing an exact replica of the first voter registration certificate issued to an Alabama black voter following the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Johnson was moved, noted Payne, and paid tribute individually to many of the figures in the audience, including Louis Martin, who as an editor of the Defender had first hired Payne in 1951 and now, as an official of the Democratic Party taking his leave, was heading back to the paper in Chicago. The Washington civil rights guard, to whom Payne was a valued ally, was leaving, and in their place was a new crew, for whom Ethel Payne’s name on a telephone call slip—let alone that of the Chicago Defender—would mean little.
AT FIRST PRESIDENT NIXON seemed to make an effort to court the black press. Its newspaper and magazine publishers were invited to a White House stag black-tie event given in honor of Whitney Young Jr., head of the National Urban League, who was thought to be in line for a cabinet post. The appointment, if it came, would be significant. Only one other African American had served in a presidential cabinet, and this happened during a Democratic administration.
The appointment didn’t materialize, although rumors circulated that Nixon had actually offered it to Young. In her reporting, Payne painted an administration hardly sympathetic to African Americans. She filed pieces on Young’s complaint that blacks were not getting jobs in the new administration, Clifford L. Alexander Jr.’s resignation as chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and Ralph Abernathy’s meeting with Nixon, after which he said the president was more interested in the poor of Vietnam than the poor of the United States.
On the other hand, occasionally she saw hints of the old Nixon. For instance, on April 29, Nixon presented Duke Ellington with the Medal of Freedom and put on a gala for the jazz artist’s seventieth birthday. The lavish soiree in the East Room went past midnight as many of America’s most famous musicians held a jam session. The president joined in the music-making at the piano. “It was nice to discover,” said Payne, “that the president wasn’t a two-headed monster, but a fellow who could be jolly and human and could play ‘Happy Birthday to You’ in the key of G.”
When members of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, the renamed trade organization of the black press, were invited to meet with President Nixon, Payne sat in for her publisher. Prior to their meeting with Nixon, Daniel P. Moynihan addressed the group in the Indian Treaty Room of the Executive Office Building where years before Payne had challenged Eisenhower during his press conferences. The professorial presidential adviser was the author of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, a report that for three years had rankled many African Americans because of its conclusion that poverty in their ranks was due to lack of families with both a father and a mother present. Moynihan made no effort to make converts among the publishers, according to Payne. “He continues to be a thorn in the side to most blacks and manages to arouse hostility by the pompous manner in which he speaks.” When he completed his speech one publisher dema
nded to know what he was talking about. “Whereupon,” Payne said, “Moynihan asked loftily, ‘Were you listening?’”
At 5:00 PM the group was ushered into the Cabinet Room, where Nixon and a number of aides awaited their arrival. The president was cordial and listened carefully as the group’s spokesman explained their concerns about the lack of black appointments in the administration and the dearth of money in the budget for jobs programs. Nixon promised to meet with the publishers again.
Weeks later, from the third row in the press briefing room, Payne watched and listened as Nixon misstated the size of the African American population, cutting it in half, returned to his law-and-order campaign rhetoric, widely regarded as coded reassurance to segregationists, and pronounced that he had full confidence in FBI director J. Edgar Hoover despite recent revelations that the Bureau had tapped the phones used by the late Martin Luther King.
The Richard Nixon of 1957 whom Payne had respected was gone. In his place was the new Nixon, who found a political advantage in the increasing division between affluent whites and poor blacks. “This polarization, predicted by the Kerner Report,* had been developing quietly under a semi-official veil at a rather lighting-like pace during the past six months since President Nixon took office,” Payne wrote.
IN APRIL, ONE DAY SHORT of her eighty-eighth birthday, Payne’s mother had died in a Chicago nursing home where she had resided for the past seven months. In her daughter Ethel’s ledger, Bessie got credit for having instilled in her a strong code of ethics, inspiring ambition, and steering her to a career in writing. With her mother’s death, Ethel’s family was reduced to her two surviving sisters from the original brood of six siblings. Approaching fifty-eight, Payne began to face the sense of mortality that confronts most people as one ages. Within a few years, after the death of yet another friend, Payne would write, “One can be philosophical in accepting death as part of life; nevertheless, the passing of old friends and relatives diminishes one in many ways.”
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