Eye on the Struggle

by James McGrath Morris

  During her years as a reporter Payne retained an ambition that her journalism could help bridge the gap between Africans and African Americans. In the decades since her first trip to Africa in 1957, she had reported from more than a dozen emerging African nations. “Nothing is more ambiguous than the kinship between U.S. blacks and their ‘brothers and sisters’ in Africa,” she wrote upon returning from one of her many trips. “We have a deep emotional attachment to the motherland, but scandalously little true knowledge about the diversity of that vast continent and its people.”

  South Africa, however, remained a nut she couldn’t crack. Her efforts to obtain a visa had been rebuffed while she was working for the Defender. She had highlighted the nation’s refusal to admit her in a CBS Spectrum commentary. If South Africa “really wants to convince the world that it does mean to change, then let it free itself from fear by opening the doors to everyone,” Payne said. But now, as an independent columnist, Payne was planning to do something she could not do as a reporter. With a simple knock on the embassy door, Payne and her companion were admitted. “We managed to penetrate that symbol of apartheid,” Payne told friends, “even though a tight wall of security surrounds it.” If they believed a slow-moving seventy-three-year-old woman and her companion meant no trouble, the embassy staff members quickly learned their mistake. The pair immediately began to harangue the staff, insisting on the release of political prisoners held in South Africa and for an end to apartheid.

  The embassy called the Secret Service, which provided protection to the foreign legations. After an hour, the two women were escorted out in handcuffs and taken away in a police car to face charges of unlawful entry, a misdemeanor under DC law. They spent a few hours incarcerated until lawyers from the Free South Africa movement arranged for their release. Payne kept the plastic handcuffs the police had used on her. As it had been with her 1947 arrest by Chicago police to protest the mistreatment of a group of black men, the handcuffs were jewelry of honor.

  FEBRUARY BROUGHT BACK other memories when Payne got in touch with the subject of one of her earliest Washington news stories. Annie Lee Moss, the Army clerk who had figured prominently in the McCarthy hearings that Payne had covered, was spending a quiet Sunday evening at home reading, her television being out of commission, when her niece called. “Aunt Annie, did you know that you’re on television?” asked the niece. “Well, it’s somebody playing you.” It turned out that CBS was airing the miniseries Robert Kennedy and His Times, based on Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s book by the same name. The producers had not contacted or consulted with Moss. “For Mrs. Moss it was a painful reminder of an ordeal that virtually destroyed her life,” Payne wrote in her column.

  But Payne hardly had time to waste on nostalgia. Her fifteen-year-old Selectric typewriter might have ceased working—“suffering from old age and overuse, I guess”—but not Payne. She spent much of the remainder of the year on the move, traveling to Nairobi, Kenya, for the Third World Conference on Women (“Practically every woman in Washington as well as the rest of the country is trying to go to Nairobi for the end of the UN Decade for Women”); East Lansing, Michigan, for a conference on “The Black Woman Writer and the Diaspora”; Atlanta, for the National Congress of Black Women; Miami, to write a series of articles; and Dallas, Texas, for a convention of her cherished Delta Sigma Theta sorority. There she substituted as a speaker for Shirley Chisholm. “I assured the audience that I shared their disappointment because I had neither the fire nor the figure of the former gentle lady from New York,” Payne said.

  In the fall, her friends at the Capital Press Club honored her again, as they had on several occasions in the 1950s when the club thrived as an alternative to the segregated National Press Club. At its dinner in the JW Marriott Hotel in which the club presented its Pioneer Award to television actor and comedian Bill Cosby, it recognized Payne with its International Award. In accepting the prize, Payne chose to speak about Woodbury Clift, the son of columnist Eleanor Clift, who had won an essay contest sponsored by Africare, on whose board Payne had just been elected. “Young Mr. Clift sees the world as a very sick society bent upon self-destruction,” said Payne. “Tonight I accept this award for Woodbury Clift and for all those who are engaged in the task of assuring that his generation and others will be able to enter the twenty-first century free of the fears that through the neglect of our individual obligations we pass along.”

  SOUTH AFRICA CROSSED her path again in 1986. Since her appointment to the Africare board, she had become a diligent and attentive member at its meetings. The organization, which had projects in many African nations, was struggling with how to deal with the pariah nation of South Africa.

  The topic came up at a September meeting of the executive committee, chaired by Episcopal bishop John T. Walker, who had just returned from South Africa the day before. Kevin Lowther, the longtime Africare employee who had met Payne during her 1982 tour of refugee camps, addressed the committee members. He wanted the organization to look at how it might be able to work in South Africa and Namibia, a neighboring nation ruled by South Africa, so that it would be in a position to work even more productively when apartheid ended.

  Payne was the first to speak up. She asked if pursuing this idea would mean that Africare would have any involvement with the government there. Lowther explained that while the government would have to grant visas, there would be no need for additional contact with the regime. The issuance of visas, however, was a considerable power, said Walker, noting that on his last trip his visa was valid for only five days, and the five days was underlined.

  Further complicating any entry by Africare into South Africa was, first, its own firm policy of working only in those nations in which the government invited the organization and, second, South Africa’s creation of homelands to contain its black population. But, Lowther told the board, several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were operating in the homelands, and one of them, Operation Hunger, would be willing to work with Africare. “I was struck by the amount of self-initiative that the people in the homelands displayed,” Lowther told the board members. “This speaks very positively for the long-term future of the country.”

  Several months later the full board met. Lowther had returned from a trip to South Africa and summarized for the board members a lengthy report he had prepared reviewing the pros and cons of working with indigenous NGOs in South Africa and Namibia. “Bishop Walker stopped us all in our tracks,” Lowther said, “by announcing, very clearly, that if the board agreed to pursue the South Africa–Namibia option, he would resign from the board.” He related how he had come under criticism for supporting the involvement of American colleges and universities in South Africa now that the anti-apartheid movement was gaining steam. If Africare’s action went against this tide, he would have to spend yet more time defending that decision. “No board member believed that Bishop Walker was bluffing,” said Lowther. “That ended the discussion.”

  OUTSIDE OF HER ROLE at Africare, Payne was enlisted in another effort relating to South Africa. In the years of Nelson Mandela’s long imprisonment, his wife, Winnie Mandela, emerged as one of the most internationally visible opponents of apartheid. Since 1982, Payne had championed Winnie Mandela by sending out letters to enlist supporters to free her from detention and permit her to travel. In 1987, leaders of Delta Sigma Theta decided to try to induct Winnie Mandela as a means of raising the awareness of South Africa among American blacks. They turned to Payne for assistance.

  Payne drafted a letter to Mandela and consigned it along with ones from Hortense Canady, the sorority’s president, and Coretta Scott King, to a contact she had at the State Department, with the assurances that they would be delivered by private means. A short time later, a friend called and asked Payne if she could clear her schedule to meet with two South Africans who were in Washington for a brief visit. “I made the quickest chicken casserole on record,” Payne said. Over lunch the visitors related tales of life under apartheid. As
the meal neared its conclusion, they let it be known they were carrying some personal messages to Winnie Mandela, who was to greet them at the airport upon their return. The letters turned out to be the ones Payne had given to her State Department contact.

  In January, Payne received word that the invitation had reached Winnie Mandela. One of her contacts spent four hours with Mandela in her Soweto home. “As you know, she shuns promoting herself or being promoted,” Payne reported to Canady. “She did say, however, that she realizes the need to have more communication with U.S. blacks, and she is pondering the best way to do this.”

  Payne recommended to the Delta leadership that if Mandela accepted, she be made an honorary Delta in absentia. The suggestion was followed, and several months later, in a quiet ceremony at Washington’s Howard University Inn, Mandela was inducted, with Payne standing in for her. “The coup is credited to journalist Ethel Payne,” reported Jet magazine.

  Despite the honors given to Mandela by Delta Sigma Theta, her image was in need of repair. First, she had come under fire for what seemed to be an endorsement of the brutal practice of necklacing, the name given to the burning of opponents alive with tires and gasoline. Second, the Washington Post and other American newspapers were passing on press accounts from South Africa about the lavish home Winnie Mandela was building in Soweto, one of the black homelands.

  Payne rushed to Mandela’s aid. She stayed clear of the necklacing charges and instead took up the less significant charges of her luxurious home indulgences. Suggesting that the Post article, done by seasoned correspondent William Claiborne, was a salvo in a larger attack on the credibility of apartheid opponents, Payne used her weekly column to question the veracity of the piece. “There are many discrepancies,” said Payne, “which suggest that Claiborne did not check his facts, but relied on government propaganda or sources allied to white conservative thinking.” Her own contacts in South Africa reported that Mandela still lived in a smaller house with her extended family and that construction of the larger house had stalled for a lack of funds.

  Nothing would weaken Payne’s devotion to Winnie Mandela. “I don’t have words to convey to you all our caring and concern for you and all our brothers and sisters who so valiantly endure the pain in the struggle for freedom,” Payne wrote to Mandela, addressing her now as “Sister Winnie” because of her induction into Delta Sigma Theta. “We too are in the struggle.”

  IN HER DEFENSE OF Winnie Mandela, Payne called her the “Grand Lady of South Africa.” The honorific of Grand could have been easily applied to herself. In fact, at seventy-five Payne was now regularly introduced as “the First Lady of the Black Press.” While she still cranked out a weekly column, it was her past accomplishments that kept her a visible Washingtonian. For instance, the White House was glad to have her photographed seated at the cabinet table with President Ronald Reagan, housing secretary Samuel Pierce, and Robert Woodson, to whom Payne had been kind at the 1982 dinner in her honor.

  “I hate to talk about myself in these terms,” Payne said in 1987. “But I think you know that I’ve become a celebrity. I have to deal with that celebrity status. I am so much in demand as a sort of an icon.” At a lunch given by George Haley, brother of the famous author, Payne was introduced as “the mother of journalism.”

  “I was so embarrassed,” said Payne. “But that’s the way everybody—everybody started clapping, you know. You know, all this recognition, all this fame. That’s been the thing that I guess I’ve become. I guess now I’m a role model.”

  Kathleen Currie, an oral historian and journalist, came calling that summer. She had been hired by the Washington Press Club Foundation for an oral history project that aimed to collect the remembrances of more than fifty women journalists.

  Sitting in a comfortable chair in her office, sometimes putting her arthritic leg on a footstool, Payne patiently answered Currie’s many questions about her youth, her career, and her views on journalism. During seven sessions over a period of four months, Payne recounted it all, offering many tales now well polished from her many speeches about her career. However, she frequently looked for ways to explain her motivation as a journalist and, in the end, fell back on an admonition of Frederick Douglass, which Payne quoted frequently—“Agitate, agitate, agitate.”

  The Miller Brewing Company commissioned Bryan McFarlane to do a dozen paintings of contemporary and historical black journalists for a traveling exhibit and its annual calendar. “I just couldn’t believe they had picked me to be part of this exhibit,” said Payne when looking over the list, which included John B. Russwurm, who created the first black newspaper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, the journalist who famously chronicled lynchings, and William Raspberry, the Washington Post columnist.

  The exhibit made its second stop on a national tour at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago. In conjunction with a reception, Payne spoke at several of Chicago’s elementary schools and at Medill School of Journalism, where she had taken nighttime writing classes almost fifty years earlier. Then she returned to the Defender office for a reunion. Seeing John Sengstacke, Payne said to him, “You’re the one who really started all of this, John.”

  It was an easier thing to say, now that the two had patched up their relationship the previous year when Sengstacke was inducted into the Black Press Hall of Fame. Payne attended the ceremonies in Baltimore and spoke on a panel. In her remarks she paid tribute to Sengstacke for having hired her and having given her the chance to see the world. She looked to the back of the hall and spotted him sitting there. “There’s John Sengstacke back there, and I want him to stand up, because I want to acknowledge what he has done for me.”

  Afterward, Sengstacke came up and gave Payne a hug. “Can we talk?” he asked.

  “Sure,” replied Payne. The two then sat in the auditorium seats and looked at each other for a long time.

  “You know,” said Sengstacke, breaking the silence, “there’s a lot gone by. Let’s let the past be past.”

  “John, you know, I’ve never held on to it. I’ve never held any prejudice.”

  ALTHOUGH PAYNE WAS VENERATED, daily life presented difficult challenges for her. Her high blood pressure exacerbated by her weight was worrisome. Arthritis, particularly painful in one leg, and uncertain balance required the use of a cane. The lack of money also remained a continual vexation, although she gave no outward sign. When she visited friends in New England, Payne asked the hostess if she would wrap up the leftover Cornish hen from the dinner for the train ride to Washington. Later that night, the hostess’s husband remarked that he surmised their famous guest was struggling financially.

  But Payne’s generosity never faltered. When her sisters Thelma Gray and Avis Johnson sent her some money, Payne used it to take her niece Patricia Boyd, who was on dialysis, and her daughter to the Kennedy Center to see Rex Harrison and Claudette Colbert in a revival of Aren’t We All? by Frederick Lonsdale. “After I have taken care of current bills,” Payne wrote her sisters, “I will be on ‘Lean Cuisine.’”

  “Times were hard for her, but even then she was so willing to share whatever she had with the rest of us who were struggling to make ends meet,” said Shirley Small-Rougeau, the activist Payne had met on the streets of Chicago. The two became fast friends when Small-Rougeau moved to Washington when her husband Weldon Rougeau became chief of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.

  What Payne lacked in money, she made up for in the richness of friends and a devoted group of caregivers. In addition to Small-Rougeau, there was the recently married Rita Bibbs-Booth, the Jackson State University student whom Payne had brought to Washington; Catherine Brown, who as a teenager in the 1950s had met Payne when she visited her mother; John Raye, who had been inspired by Payne’s television commentaries; Herman “Skip” Davis, with whom Payne’s nephew had played; and Barbara Reynolds, the Chicago reporter, among others.

  “We, our little group of friends, included her in all that we did, even going out to the
jazz and blues clubs, organizational and family events, weddings, dinners and whatever,” said Small-Rougeau. “She was our mentor and griot on everything we did back then.” The women took turns ferrying Payne, who had never gotten a driver’s license, to and fro. “We took delight in pleasing her,” Bibbs-Booth said. “She touched the lives of so many of us, and for me changed my life, so it was a small thing to do.” Payne also inspired young rising television newswomen such as Renee Poussaint and J. C. Hayward. One of them sent her cleaning lady over to Payne’s apartment as a birthday present.

  When Payne turned seventy-five years old, Small-Rougeau and Bettye Collier-Thomas, who was director of the Bethune Museum, put together a birthday bash for her at the Hyatt Regency in Bethesda, Maryland. Payne’s sisters Thelma Gray and Avis Johnson flew in for the occasion. The gang gave her a Magnavox VideoWriter. Using it would have to wait for a course of instruction from Bibbs-Booth. Until then, she stuck to her two-finger typing on the repaired and much-treasured Selectric.

  CHAPTER 39

  FORGOTTEN

  IN LATE SEPTEMBER 1987 ETHEL PAYNE, IN THE COMPANY of Afreda Madison, a longtime correspondent who worked for Black Media, Inc., arrived at the Washington Hilton for the annual Congressional Black Caucus dinner, a $300-a-plate event that was among Washington’s premier social gatherings. The evening’s program was of great interest to Payne. The scheduled dinner speaker was Marian Wright Edelman, who headed up the Children’s Defense Fund. Neither woman had tickets but both had been promised admission by the staff director.