Eye on the Struggle

by James McGrath Morris

  The film showed Stans and his traveling companion acting like British colonists addressing the natives as “boys” and snatching coins from necklaces on women. More revolting to Payne was a segment of the movie in which a group of whites uncovered an ancient burial ground while the natives hung back, refusing to participate in what they deemed a desecrating act. “After the whites had unearthed the tomb,” said Payne, “it was Stans who displayed the bones and skull and a few artifacts.” The spectators, which included a grimly silent Ghanaian ambassador, were taken aback. James Pope, U.S. Information Agency African press section chief, rebuked Stans for using the term boy and called the film “an Amos ’n’ Andy Show.”

  Payne rushed an account of the incident into the Defender, provoking a firestorm that she further fanned by writing a widely quoted letter to the secretary. Working damage control, Stans’s assistant sent a lengthy and feisty rebuttal to Payne’s bosses in Chicago. In turn, Payne took issue with the assistant’s claims. In the end, Stans agreed to shelve the film and not show it, at least while he remained in government.

  THE FOLLOWING YEAR, on March 11, 1971, Whitney Young, the longtime head of the National Urban League, who had been rumored to be in line for a cabinet post in the Nixon administration, went out for a swim off a stretch of Nigerian beach with former attorney general Ramsey Clark, his wife, and friends. Young, Clark, along with John Lewis and Jesse Jackson, had traveled to Lagos to attend a conference on Afro-American affairs.

  Ten minutes after Young left the shore, his compatriots noticed that he looked like he was in trouble, raising his arms above the water but not his head. Suddenly a wave submerged him. His friends rushed to his aid, but it was too late. The forty-nine-year-old leader had drowned.

  To bring Young’s body home, President Nixon dispatched a plane, under the command of Brigadier General Daniel “Chappie” James Jr., who was the highest-ranking black officer in the Air Force. For the journey, the White House selected Payne, Simeon Booker, and photographer Maurice Sorrell, both with Jet magazine, and several Urban League and government officials, including presidential assistant Donald Rumsfeld. Three Southern white pilots and a black navigator guided the plane the 5,400 miles to Lagos. “To Whitney Young,” said Booker, “it would have been a planeload of examples of the kind of equality for which he had struggled.”

  Landing in Lagos, as she had numerous previous times, Payne found her way quickly to Young’s sister. The sister had the difficult task of going through her brother’s personal belongings. In a suit pocket she came across a well-worn copy of Joe Darion’s lyrics to Man of La Mancha. Across the top, Whitney Young had penned, “I challenge you to leave this room with the spirit of our founding fathers spurred by Joe Darion’s lyrics.” At Lagos’s Cathedral Church of Christ, Payne joined a congregation of three hundred that included a head of state and many prominent members of the American civil rights movement. In what Payne described as the service’s high point, Bayard Rustin broke off from his eulogy and sang an old song once sung at funerals by Alabama slaves called “Death Ain’t Nothing but a Robber.”

  When it was his turn, the Reverend Jesse Jackson recalled urging Young to accept President Nixon’s offer of a cabinet post. “He told me that he wanted the cabinet job and that he knew he could have done a good job,” Jackson said. “But he didn’t accept it because he thought that the ‘brothers’ just would not have understood.” The Air Force jet carrying Young’s casket returned to New York. Just before landing at Kennedy Airport, where a large crowd waited, Payne listened as Jackson told the passengers, “I don’t want to see any of you all going off this plane carrying those souvenirs you picked up in Africa and wearing those funny hats. I want you to button up and be dignified and humble!”

  After services in New York City’s Riverside Church, Nixon flew to Lexington, Kentucky, which Young had designated as his final resting place. Payne was again among those selected to accompany the body. On the flight south, Nixon and his wife walked the length of the plane and talked with each passenger on board. “At my age,” said Pat Nixon, who had turned sixty-nine a few days earlier, “it seems one is always going to funerals.” Speaking to Payne and other reporters on the flight, the First Lady said she was pleased her husband planned on recounting at the burial how he had offered Young a place in his cabinet. “I was there,” she said, “when he made the offer and I know that he really wanted him on the team.”

  At the grave site in Greenwood Cemetery, where a chain-link fence still stood that once separated the white graves from the black ones, Nixon won points from Payne and other black observers. “President Nixon’s attendance at the burial service in Greenwood and his presence marked the first time that a U.S. president had shown such respect for a black man and such concern for a black family in grief,” Simeon Booker wrote in Ebony magazine, which devoted more than a dozen pages to photographs of Young and his funeral services.

  No more than five months later Nixon again called on Payne for funeral duty. This time it was the death of President William Tubman, the longtime ruler of Liberia. Recent racial remarks by the gaff-prone vice-president Spiro Agnew ruled him out as a leader of the funeral delegation. Instead Nixon designated White House counselor Robert Finch, who had actually been Nixon’s first choice for vice-president. Congressman Charles Diggs and the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins also joined the group. Wilkins was making his first trip to Africa, and Payne reported that the last piece of advice given to him was “Don’t go near the water.”

  ETHEL PAYNE WAS FRANTICALLY PACKING for yet another trip to Africa in the summer of 1972 when Maurice Robinson, a CBS producer, reached her by telephone. He was producing a new radio program called Spectrum, which featured short commentaries by an assortment of pundits from the liberal Nicholas von Hoffman to the conservative James J. Kilpatrick. Robinson called Payne after lunching with Mildred Roxborough, a friend of Payne’s who worked for the NAACP. Robinson told Roxborough that he thought the show could benefit from the addition of a black woman. “I’ve got just the right person for you,” Roxborough replied.

  Robinson asked Payne if she would be willing to substitute for four weeks for columnist Shana Alexander while she took a leave. Payne jumped at the offer and agreed to squeeze in a stop at CBS’s Washington bureau to take a voice test before leaving the country.

  Robinson liked the sample of her voice and caught up with Payne again, this time by paging her at Dulles Airport, where she was awaiting her flight to Zaire. He told her he would be in touch. When her plane reached Kinshasa, an aide from the U.S. embassy brought Payne a telegram from CBS offering her the slot on the show, which now also included a weekly appearance on the televised CBS Morning News with John Hart. She would be paid $100 per broadcast; at twice a month it would boost her income by 25 percent. But more important, if she were to get the job, Payne would become the first African American female radio and television commentator on a national network.

  Upon her return to the United States, Payne met with Robinson in New York. CBS put her up in a hotel while she recorded her first two-and-a-half-minute commentaries. For the first one she prepared a piece, stemming from her journey to Zaire, about negritude, a movement in Africa that rejected Western ideas and stressed pride in being black. “Basically,” she said, “it’s a philosophy of exploring your inner self and your inner roots, and coming to be comfortable, so that you have a sense of pride and a sense of projection of that particular kind of ethnic identity.”

  Robinson was pleased with her early efforts. But he detected caution on her part. “I think anyone with a heavy news background, such as yours, will take a while to realize the complete freedom he (or she) has on Spectrum—to talk about anything on which you have an opinion—and the greater the variety the better.” Payne followed his advice and soon listeners heard her ruminate caustically about noisy children on planes, charitably about George Wallace after an assassination attempt left him crippled, and nostalgically about Hubert Humphrey.

  In 1972, wit
h the exception of Belva Davis, a television reporter on the West Coast, and Carole Simpson, who could be seen on television news in Chicago, almost all broadcast news jobs were closed to African Americans, particularly female black reporters. When Payne took to the air she was an immediate source of pride for many listeners and viewers. John Raye, a black reporter with a Seattle television station who would go on to become the city’s first African-American evening news anchor, remembered turning on his set one morning and seeing Payne deliver her commentary. “My gosh, this is something,” he said he thought at the time. “Back in those days you very rarely saw black people on television.”

  THE ZAIRE TRIP during which Payne received the invitation to join CBS had been, like the Nigerian tour three years earlier, made on the dime of those who would benefit from her news coverage. The Congo had recently changed its name to Zaire by order of its strong-arm ruler, Joseph-Desiré Mobutu. Courtesy of the Press Association of Zaire, Payne flew to Kinshasa in the summer of 1972 for the meeting of the First Ordinary Congress of the Popular Revolution Movement. In stark contrast to the party politics that Payne covered in the United States, the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (MPR) was the only legally permitted party in the nation. Its convoluted election rules and doctrines were dissimilar only in name to one-party rule in communist nations, with the result of a long, uninterrupted, and autocratic rule by President Mobutu, who had recently changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga,* or Mobutu Sese Seko for short.

  Payne was completely taken by Mobutu and the congress. “It was black power in French and Lingala, sleek and lean and exotic,” she reported in gushing tones. Convinced of Mobutu’s good intentions, Payne compared him to Adam Clayton Powell in his sense of timing and described his use of power as having led the country safely out of a bloody past of rebellions fomented by interfering outside powers. Payne went as far as reporting that the MPR was created “to give people a method of becoming involved in political action for the job of nation building. It is participation African style.”

  If nothing else, Payne’s dispatches rewarded Zaire’s government’s generosity by producing a round of flattering stories about Mobutu’s rule in the Defender and other black newspapers. “Tribal feuding has given way to the fervency of authenticité [official state ideology] as defined by Mobutu. The army remains the backbone of the administration, but it is disciplined to serve, rather than rule,” said Payne.

  Payne was certainly not alone in her praise for Mobutu at the time. His rule had indeed brought stability to his land. “Ask any Zairian whether he or she disagrees with some of his measures or not and he or she will end up saying that ‘Mobutu brought us peace. We don’t want any more wars.’” Mobutu also used the Cold War to his advantage, disguising his repressive tactics as fighting Communists and earning the loyalty of the American government, flattering reports by George H. W. Bush, then ambassador to the United Nations, and toasts by President Nixon at a White House dinner.

  But in the end, Payne could not bring herself to publicly criticize a black African leader any more than she could have with embattled civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s. In her mind, to do so would have undercut the movement. Payne believed her duty still lay with the larger freedom struggle, in which, to her way of thinking, journalism was a tool of advancement.

  CHAPTER 32

  CHINA

  THE DUST HAD HARDLY SETTLED ON ETHEL PAYNE’S suitcase when she had to pull it down from the closet again. On the first Thursday of 1973, she had been awakened by a phone call from California. The man on the line identified himself as Thomas B. Manton. Born in Burma, the son of American missionaries, Manton ran the China-American Relations Society. Manton wanted to know if Payne would be interested in joining a group of reporters leaving soon for China. “That is like a hungry person being asked if he or she would like a choice steak,” Payne said.

  Only a handful of Western journalists had been inside China since the communist takeover in 1949. When Nixon went in February 1972, he brought with him more than a hundred reporters, but only one female print reporter and no one from the black press. In the eleven months since, the country still remained mostly off-limits to the American press. “For a journalist,” said Payne, “the thought of going to China is like a tantalizing prospect of the world’s greatest assignment.”

  However, because Manton’s group was leaving in a week, Payne would have to scramble to complete the paperwork, obtain vaccinations, and reorganize her schedule to accommodate the unexpected three-week absence from Washington. The lack of advance notice was because Payne had been a last-minute addition. When Manton submitted the names of seven editors, authors, reporters, and one publisher to the Chinese embassy in Canada, which was handling the details of the trip, as the Chinese did not yet have an embassy in Washington, he was asked if there were any African Americans on the list. There weren’t. The search for a suitable candidate led Manton to call Payne. “Who says black ain’t beautiful? And lucky!” said Payne.

  On January 12, Payne caught up with the other seven members of the delegation in San Francisco. There was one other woman, Susan Sontag, a New York intellectual who was a contributing editor to Ms. magazine, the first issue of which was appearing on newsstands that month.

  After landing in Hong Kong, the group traveled briefly by train to the Frontier Closed Area, land that China maintained as a buffer between it and the British colony. There the group debarked and walked across the Lo Wu covered footbridge, which had been the scene of famous repatriations, similar to the border crossing in Berlin known as Checkpoint Charlie. On the other side, they completed customs formalities under a huge mural of a beaming Chairman Mao Zedong. “Flanking the chairman on either side were two black Africans in native garb,” noted Payne.

  Now inside China, a five-member team, who also served as interpreters, acted as chaperones. “Shepherding eight undisciplined Americans around the country for twenty-six days is an exercise in endurance,” Payne said sympathetically. But soon she and her colleagues chafed at the constrictions put on their movement. Writing in her diary, Sontag said group members complained that they felt herded about and deprived of their freedom of movement by an endless series of official welcomes involving white tablecloths, tea, fruit, cigarettes, introductions, and speeches at communes, railway stations, schools, factories, and museums. “Americans prefer to be voyeurs,” she wrote. “Chinese insist we are guests.”

  Almost every day the group toured factories, textile mills, schools, universities, government bureaus, and hospitals, at one of which they watched doctors use acupuncture as a form of anesthesia for an operation. With no choice of itinerary, the group was shown only what served to demonstrate the success of the revolution. Typical of their visits was a stop at the Number 1 Northwest Cotton Textile Mill, situated in a suburb of Xi’an. In comparison to American industrial plants, the twenty-year-old factory was more like a community than a place of employment. Dormitories housed thousands of unmarried women in their twenties, many of them bunking four to a room, with squat toilets down the hall. The workers with families lived in three-room houses with outdoor plumbing. The plant operated kindergartens and elementary schools, as well as twenty-four-hour-a-day child care, for the 3,200 children.

  During a visit to a unit of the People’s Liberation Army, a two-hour drive from Canton, the director of the corps’s political division touted the lack of overt distinctions in rank among the soldiers, the friendship between the soldiers and the local population, and the willingness of the soldiers to help peasants in the busy seasons. One soldier earnestly proclaimed that he and his compatriots saw it as an opportunity to help the people. Payne shed her usual reporter’s guard. “Instead of being a tax burden to the people, the People’s Liberation Army not only feeds itself but is so integrated with the civilian population that it helps sustain it.”

  Over the next few weeks, the significance of the mural Payne spotted on her entry to China grew apparent as
her hosts used every possible occasion to point out China’s close ties to Third World nations, something she had first witnessed in Bandung two decades earlier. Officials explained that the government’s limited foreign aid budget was devoted to African independence movements in Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola, and Mozambique. “There is deep consciousness here of China’s leadership role in the Third World,” Payne reported. “This is reflected in the treatment of her own minorities.”

  Payne found further proof of the government’s commitment to minorities when she and her colleagues were taken on a tour of the Central Institute for Nationalities in Beijing, where a cadre of leaders from the nation’s fifty-four identified minorities were given leadership training. Once again, Payne reported unquestioningly on what she was told. “China places emphasis on autonomy and retaining the cultural tradition of these groups,” Payne wrote, adding that there was even an official policy to encourage more births among minorities. “This is quite in contrast to the U.S. attitude,” she concluded.

  PAYNE WAS DAZZLED and astonished at every turn. Unlike in the United States, where her race singled her out in a negative fashion, it was a calling card in China. “Every opportunity the people get, they tell me through an interpreter of their warm regard for black Americans,” she wrote to her sister Thelma Gray. “Many places have posters showing friendships between black Americans and Chinese.”