Eye on the Struggle

by James McGrath Morris

  Payne questioned Kissinger’s sincerity. She was convinced his vanity was such that he could not believe a part of the world was beyond his diplomatic skills and would not ignore South Africa. Above the Atlantic on the flight home from Paris, Kissinger granted an audience to Payne and Sanders. They did their best to throw specific questions at him, but most of his answers were full of generalities regarding policy and platitudes about the leaders he had met while in Africa. Only once did a query get under the skin of the normally unflappable secretary of state. When asked why he had not taken any black State Department officials with him on the trip, Kissinger bristled. Pointing out that he did at least include an African American ambassador, Kissinger said, “I think it is an insult to blacks to do things for them just because they are black.”

  The same issue trapped Kissinger again a couple of months later. Conversations with Payne during the trip had convinced him to become the first secretary of state to speak before the National Urban League convention. The decision apparently did not sit well with President Gerald Ford’s aides. When his assistant Richard Cheney and campaign manager Stuart Spencer learned of Kissinger’s plans, they worried it would upset their delicate negotiations with Southern Republican delegates needed to secure Ford’s hotly contested nomination bid.

  Kissinger nonetheless went ahead and flew to Boston to speak at the convention. After delivering his speech, he took questions from Payne and other reporters. Once again defending the lack of African Americans in the State Department, Kissinger suggested he couldn’t find enough qualified blacks. “The requirements for entry into the State Department are generally more complicated than they are for other agencies,” he said. “It serves nobody’s purpose to appoint black personnel unless they can meet all the qualifications.” His comments were met with boos and hisses for having referred to “qualifications” three times. “That was like setting off a blast of dynamite,” said Payne. “Kissinger seemed unaware that the word carried for blacks a coded message, implying inferiority which barred them from hiring and upgrading on a par with whites.” When he got back to Washington, President Ford complimented Kissinger on his speech. “The mistake I made,” Kissinger replied, “was to take questions.”

  IT WAS A HEADY SUMMER. After traveling to Africa for the second time in the company of a U.S. secretary of state, Payne’s request for a private interview with Jimmy Carter, following his nomination as the Democratic candidate for president, was rapidly approved. Less than a month after the convention, Payne was in Plains, Georgia, waiting outside of Carter’s house while he finished meeting with California governor Jerry Brown, who had finished third in the race for the nomination.

  Payne began by asking Carter about his plans to reach black voters. The presidential aspirant said that in the past blacks had not turned out to vote because they felt it didn’t matter who was elected. “Quite often candidates have avoided direct relations with blacks and other minorities,” Carter continued. “I’ve done just the opposite.” The interview continued, touching on law enforcement and crime, topics now of great interest to Payne, and education. The interview not only ran in the Defender and other black newspapers but was reprinted as well in the Atlanta Constitution. Payne left Plains happy. “He talked such a good game that I came away enthusiastic,” she said. Yet by October her ardor had weakened. “It’s getting late,” she wrote, “and there are barely four weeks left in the campaign. I have yet to see any meaningful implementation of those fine commitments.”

  In the midst of the campaign, Payne found time for yet another sudden trip to Africa as a guest of Senegal president Léopold Senghor for a weeklong celebration of his seventieth birthday. “I was so excited that I am going half prepared (broke all my nice sculptured nails), but that’s life.” The whirlwind trip took on an added challenge when United Airlines lost her luggage and she had to find suitable clothes in Dakar.

  Next it was back to Asia. Payne accepted an all-expenses-paid trip to Taiwan, which, since Mainland China had reestablished diplomatic ties with the United States, was no longer being called China but rather the Republic of China. She and eleven other female journalists were treated like foreign dignitaries and lodged in Taipei’s Grand Hotel, a fourteen-story palace-like structure with red columns and topped with a gold-tiled roof. They were, in Payne’s words, “dined and wined and yes, propagandized in a manner only Genghis Khan could have matched.”

  After the journey to Asia, Payne went to Washington for two months. The U.S. Information Agency had hired her to serve on its selection board, which reviewed the personnel files of career officers and made recommendations for promotions. However, Sengstacke viewed this assignment as another sign of her disloyalty, especially as Payne had not informed him personally that she would be in Washington. Since he had brought Payne back to Chicago, Sengstacke had become increasingly convinced that Payne was using the paper as a platform for her own agenda of speechmaking, travel, and activism instead of using her skills to benefit the paper.

  “Ethel, we have had a pleasant relationship over the years, and when I requested you to leave Washington and come to Chicago, I stated that we needed your expertise in the home office,” Sengstacke told Payne. “Your other activities have kept you busy and out of Chicago and the help we need from your knowledge at the Daily Defender has not materialized.” Concluding Payne wasn’t going to increase her work, Sengstacke decided that the paper would keep her column but cut her salary in half, wryly asking if that was okay with her.

  Unapologetic, Payne challenged his assessment of her work. Her articles on national and international news and her work with the anticrime coalition had done a lot for the paper, she argued. As for her salary issue, Sengstacke had hit a raw nerve. “I think you will concede that my salary was never sufficient to meet the basic requirements of living; therefore, I have been subsidizing myself and the paper for a very long time. You, yourself, did praise my work. Do you really want to arbitrarily cut it off?”

  For her part, Payne was unconvinced that her frequent absences were the source of the friction between the two. Rather, she believed that each other’s prideful nature combined with Sengstacke’s cold demeanor made them incompatible. “For all the years I have known you, there has been a Berlin Wall of ice between us most of the time, and it is this which has led me to avoid you as much as possible. On those occasions when you were relaxed enough to laugh and banter, it has been a real joy,” Payne told him. “Maybe I should spit fire and say, ‘Now look here, John Sengstacke. I see it this way.’ You might have thrown me out on my ear, but at least there would have been communication.

  “I would like to declare a truce in this cold war long enough to sit down with you, not with your glowering at me across the desk, but maybe for coffee or a drink. I may even have you over for dinner from my poor larder and I promise not to poison you,” Payne said. “Let’s have a little human rights and that’s as far as I’m going in being sweet and kind. After being kicked out.”

  “Respectfully and maybe even tenderly,” she closed her letter.

  But they were both too stubborn to compromise. For the second time in the twenty-seven years since Payne first walked into the Defender offices on Indiana Avenue as a cub reporter upon her return from Japan, her byline was absent from the newspaper’s pages.

  CHAPTER 34

  FINDING A NEW ROLE

  SIXTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD ETHEL PAYNE FACED A DISMAL future as 1978 began. Not only had her ties to the Defender, an association that had sustained her public identity for almost a quarter of a century, been severed, but also CBS had decided not to renew her contract for her broadcast commentaries. It was, as the network periodically decided, time for new voices and faces. But she was spiritually unwilling and financially unable to retire.

  As had happened at other low points in her life, it was a telephone call that offered her a lifeline. An official with the Ford Foundation explained that she had been recommended for a new research program. He told her that the foundat
ion was providing money to George Washington University in Washington, DC, for a variety of research projects and wondered if she might have an idea for one. “So immediately my mind went to the status of black colleges,” Payne said.

  The foundation liked the idea for an assessment of historically black schools and provided sufficient funds to enable Payne to travel to fifteen colleges, to attend meetings of national education organizations, and to pay herself a salary. Working on this project with her usual zeal, Payne wrapped up the report within the year. She concluded that black colleges still played a major role in closing an achievement gap between white and black students but warned that the schools should insist on retaining their traditional cultural identity now that they admitted white students. “Just as blacks who are enrolled in predominately white institutions are expected to adapt to the ways of the dominant culture, so whites who attend historically black institutions need to have the opportunity to learn from black culture,” she wrote. “Pluralism does not preclude the sharing of ethnic traditions.”

  Delta Sigma Theta published the report as a short book entitled Black Colleges: Roots, Reward, Renewal, and it was circulated among black educators, funders, and civil rights leaders. Benjamin Hooks, the executive director of the NAACP, told others it was “an excellent analysis of a very sensitive and complex subject.” For a South Side Chicago kid without a college degree, it was a nice moment. But like many such reports, it did little to alter the challenges faced by historically black colleges.

  The report done and the grant exhausted, the mail brought no encouraging options. The LBJ Presidential Library turned down Payne’s application for one of its grants. Her friend Eddie N. Williams, head of the black-oriented Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, kindly told her that she could make a substantial contribution to his organization’s work. “At the moment, however, your interests and our ability to meet them do not match up.” He even warned that part-time employment at the center was unlikely should she come back to Washington. Harper’s magazine, the New York Times, and the Chronicle of Education were not interested in her proposed articles. Even the University of the District of Columbia passed over her application for the post of “Writer/Editor #78-65.” Adding insult to injury, it did so using a form letter.

  It was dispiriting and frightening, but she persevered. She did receive an offer, one for very little money, to continue her Defender column From Where I Sit under a new name, Behind the Scenes, in the Afro-American and the Miami Times, as well as in a small chain of California weeklies. “And that and my Social Security was enough to, you know, tide me over,” she said. “It wasn’t that much, but it was enough to tide me over.”

  THREE ALLIES IN WASHINGTON finally came to her rescue: Louis Martin, who was finishing a stint working at the Carter White House; Doris Saunders, an old Defender reporter who was heading up the Census Advisory Committee on the Black Population; and John Raye, the black television newscaster who had been encouraged in his professional pursuits when he saw Payne on television in the 1970s. Raye now worked for the U.S. Census Bureau, which was making an effort to bolster the participation of minorities in the once-a-decade count of the population under orders from the president. He told Payne about an opening for a writer and spokesperson in his office. With his help and Martin and Saunders’s support, Payne landed the job and headed back to Washington after an absence of seven years.

  In her new post, Payne put her writing skills and editorial contacts to use for the department. Back in Washington, Payne settled into a third-floor flat in the Rittenhouse apartment building, a multistory edifice looming above Rock Creek Park with four wings jutting off at odd angles from its center portion. Her two-bedroom apartment overlooked the complex’s pool and was well suited to her needs. She converted one bedroom into her office, placing her trusty Selectric typewriter on a table next to her desk. Soon the office was so cluttered with newspapers, government reports, and books that her old friend Catherine Brown, whom she had known since the 1950s, nicknamed it “the CIA room.” On the window were a half dozen potted plants that Payne—as well as her house sitters—doused with water in which Payne placed her used eggshells to reduce the acidity of the soil. The remainder of the apartment was soon decorated with memorabilia such as tribal statues, carvings, her collection of dolls from twenty-nine countries, and photographs of Payne with presidents.

  She reconnected with her friends, picking up her old Washington social life as if she had not been gone for seven years. An invitation to a dinner party at Payne’s apartment became much sought after. For Payne, a meal at her place was a way to bring interesting people to the table. Many well-known people host dinners so they can hold court, but this was not so with Payne. She was the opposite. Her dinner parties were a chance to let others shine.

  She chose her guests carefully and from a wide array of people. “Lord only knows who you were going to meet,” said one guest. Normally no more than six people were invited, all selected with an eye to creating great conversation. Food was, of course, important. Southern food, lots of greens, sweet potatoes, and the like were often on the menu along with nice wines. “You put Betty Crocker, Aunt Jemima, Maxim’s, and the Tour d’Argent all to shame!” wrote one person in a thank-you note.

  AT 2:05 IN THE morning on May 29, 1980, Vernon Jordan, who took over as head of the Urban League after the drowning of Whitney Young, was returning to the Marriott Inn in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the company of Martha Coleman, a younger white woman who had attended his speech that evening and given him coffee at her house afterward. As he got out of Coleman’s Pontiac Grand Prix, an assailant hidden in the darkness shot Jordan in the back, using a high-powered rifle. The wound was serious. As he received medical care in a nearby hospital, the police searched for the shooter, who they believed was motivated by a domestic dispute involving Jordan’s companion. But as it was the first assassination attempt on a major civil rights leader in a dozen years, the media descended upon Fort Wayne. Not far behind were President Jimmy Carter, Senator Edward Kennedy, and Benjamin Hooks. The police finally determined that the shooter was a racist serial murderer who, when he finally confessed, admitted he had been angered by seeing Jordan with a white woman.*

  Payne had known Jordan for years as a journalist and frequently had participated in Urban League conferences. In fact, when she left Washington in 1973, Jordan took the time to tell her how much he regretted her departure. “As you move on to your new assignment in Chicago, you leave behind a record of truly outstanding service to millions of readers,” he wrote.

  Now Payne was not feeling so charitable about him. What was Jordan, a married man, doing out so late at night with a white woman? “If Jordan has a good answer to all the unanswered questions I am sure everything will be forgotten,” Payne told the Chicago Tribune. “Surely, he owes his constituency an explanation. It must be remembered that black men who align themselves with white women strike a very sensitive emotional nerve with black women. It’s part of the whole pattern of rejection of us by black men, and it’s not taken lightly.”

  “There’s one thing that’s a sore point with many black women,” Payne later said, “and that is the trend of black men who have become prominent, who have made it, and who have risen through the ranks, and then the first thing they do is either marry a white woman or live with a white woman.”

  This was not a new note coming from Payne. Matters of the heart remained sensitive for her as she approached her seventies without a partner. She had found that her professional success had been an insurmountable barrier for many black men. “You know, black women have a particular problem,” she told a reporter a few years later. “Some black women have succeeded beyond males to some extent. And that has created some friction because black males sometimes—not often, but sometimes—see black women in competition with them.”

  “The truth is that black women want to be loved and respected by their own men,” Payne had written two years earlier.
“They need to be wanted. If they lash out in fury, it is because there is so much pain from within.” Counting her fiancé in the 1940s, Payne had lasting relationships with no more than three men. “We understood each other and were good company, and that was it,” she said of the men she dated. “But I knew, you know, that there was no percentage in my getting fluttery, you know, because in the first place, I don’t think they were interested to that extent.”

  From his hospital bed, Jordan read what Payne said about him. “As deeply hurtful as her comments were—the most important people in my life, my daughter, my wife, and my mother, were black women—I knew that this was just insane,” he said. “It was nevertheless an issue I had to deal with when I began to give interviews after leaving the hospital.”

  When he was released, one of his first public appearances was before a group of black women attending an Urban League fashion fair. He was asked to make a few brief remarks. When he was introduced, the women gave him a standing ovation. “As I walked across the stage, I thought to myself, ‘Where are you, Ethel Payne?’”

  THE VERNON AFFAIR was soon eclipsed by the news of the election in which the incumbent president Jimmy Carter faced Ronald Reagan, who after several attempts had finally secured the Republican nomination. Payne picked up an assignment to write an assessment of Carter’s chances for Dollars & Sense, a magazine edited by Payne’s friend Barbara Reynolds.