Eye on the Struggle

by James McGrath Morris

  On Capitol Hill, California representative Ron Dellums told his colleagues that when he was a young man, Payne’s reporting had exposed him to a world beyond the confines of the Bay Area. Jesse Jackson asked congregants to pause and pray for Payne at a church where he was appearing in Gary, Indiana. Hundreds turned out at the funeral home to pay their final respects. Delta members Rita Biggs-Booth and Shirley Small-Rougeau prepared a sorority Omega Omega Service for their departed sister. Small-Rougeau was given the honor of pinning white lilies on Payne’s garment.

  Small-Rougeau and Payne’s other friends and family wanted to organize a service at the Washington National Cathedral, which sits high on a hill overlooking the city and had been the frequent site of presidential funeral services. But John Walker, the chair of Africare’s board, who knew Payne well, was no longer the bishop, and it seemed unlikely his successor would be amenable to the idea. Stymied in finding a suitable location, the group was relieved when James M. Christian, a loyal friend, provided a solution. He served as chairman of the board of the Zion Baptist Church, on the corner of Sixteenth Street and Blagden Avenue, the northern tip of what old-time Washingtonians referred to as the Gold Coast, where the city’s black elite made its home.

  The service began at 10:00 AM on Wednesday, June 5, when Reverend Donald Vails, a noted gospel choir director, played an organ prelude and Reverend Carlton W. Veazey welcomed the large crowd. This was followed by readings from the Old and New Testament, including 1 Corinthians, chapter 13, with its heartening adage: “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

  Payne’s nephew James A. Johnson, who had come to live with her in 1959 when he attended the congressional Page School, and her great-niece, Felicity Boyd, represented the fourth and fifth generations of the family and provided remembrances. Tributes were offered by television news anchor Maureen Bunyan, Frances Murphy, whose family owned the long-published Afro-American newspapers, and U.S. representative William Gray III.

  Then, from the choir loft, Christian sang. He had chosen to perform the hymn “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” It was Martin Luther King’s favorite and was sung at his funeral as well as that of Lyndon Baines Johnson. “I chose the song because I felt it captured Ethel’s struggle and the fact that she was now at peace,” said Christian, to whom Payne had been an adopted grandmother. He was, however, unaware of another connection he held with Payne. Christian, who had been singing solos since he was in high school, had been a member of the Howard University choir. It was the exclusion of that very choir from a 1954 Republican event that had led Payne to ask her first question at a presidential press conference and discover her power as a member of the White House press corps.

  It fell to James A. Joseph, with whom Payne had recently shared her plans for the Twenty-First Century Fellows program, to provide the eulogy. “It is thus my task to say a word about the meaning of this extraordinary life, the message of this extraordinary woman, and the mission of those who must now pick up the torch and carry on,” Joseph said.

  “She used her skills not to acquire power for herself but to activate power in others,” he continued. “At a time in which our world seemed to be fragmenting into ‘we’ and ‘they’ groups, Ethel was searching for the social glue of civil society, affirming the connectedness of humanity. She made the case in all sectors of our society that the fear of difference is a fear of the future.

  “In her own work, she was not simply reporting the news,” he said. “She was stretching the horizon of the heart, widening the circle of community, seeking to transform the laissez-faire notion of live and let live into a moral imperative of live and help live.

  “People in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere have lost an authentic citizen of the world.”

  SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, VOICE of America broadcaster Maimouna Mills came to Payne’s Rittenhouse apartment to meet with Ethel’s sister Avis Johnson. Mills interviewed her for the VOA’s Africa broadcast department. The now-silent flat overflowed with mementos and awards. “We tried to catalog them,” said Johnson of the awards, “and our last count was more than eighty, and they represent all kinds of organizations, not necessarily newspapers or journalists, but community groups, national groups, that respected the fact that she was out there on the cutting edge.”

  Johnson recounted for Mills the influence of their parents and grandparents, the high points of her sister’s career, her world travels, and the excitement she had felt returning from her meeting with the Mandelas a year earlier. “She has left a wonderful legacy,” Johnson said. “There are people all across the world who have been touched through her interest and her work who I feel will want to carry on some of the things that she dreamed should happen.”

  Indeed, two years later the National Association of Black Journalists undertook such an effort when it launched the Ethel L. Payne Fellowship to fund reporting projects in Africa. Wayne J. Dawkins, a longtime member of the NABJ and author of its history, described the creation of the fellowship as a big move for the organization. The NABJ had regularly complained about lack of coverage of Africa in the American media, he said. “The fellowship was a way of stepping out on our own and not just waiting for the largesse of the newspapers and networks to do something.”

  The first two recipients were Karen Lange, a Chapel Hill Herald reporter, and Michelle Singletary of the Washington Post. For a decade, before the fellowship ceased to be able to raise sufficient funds to operate, the NABJ sent more than a dozen young reporters to Africa to pursue stories of their choosing. Typical of the group was Tracey Scruggs Yearwood, a CNN producer who now works as a producer for Oprah Winfrey. She used the money in 1997 to support a television documentary on grassroots women’s movements in South Africa’s post-apartheid era. Fred Harvey, a longtime journalist, used his fellowship to go to Sierra Leone to pursue his passionate study of African influence in the food, speech, and religious practices in his native South Carolina. The recipients were engaged in the kind of reporting that would have thrilled Payne.

  In September 2002, the U.S. Postal Service selected Payne to be among four journalists it would honor on 37-cent commemorative postage stamps. The other three were Nellie Bly, Marguerite Higgins, and Ida M. Tarbell. Designer Fred Otnes created a collage featuring a black-and-white photograph combined with memorabilia for each of the women. For the Payne stamp he chose a black-and white photograph of Payne surrounded on one side by the nameplate of the Chicago Defender and the headline of the article she wrote about the Montgomery bus boycott.

  The fellowship no longer has funds and the postage stamp remains visible only in the collections of philatelists. Payne’s papers are scattered among three libraries and two museums. The Newseum in Washington maintains a display about Payne’s career in its News History Gallery. But more than two decades after her death, only the rarest of visitors would recognize her name. As is true of much of the civil rights struggle, much is forgotten.

  Civil rights activist Julian Bond has spent many years in the classrooms of American University and the University of Virginia. His time with students confirms what studies have shown about the dismal lack of knowledge of the civil rights era. His students, for instance, could not identify George Wallace, although one hazarded a guess that he might have been a CBS news reporter. Worse, the entire grassroots movement has been replaced by a popular classroom fable, according to Bond, that goes, “There used to be segregation until Martin Luther King came along, that he marched and protested, that he was killed, and that then everything was all right.”

  A decade before her death Payne intuited that the great movement she had chronicled was fading from public memory. On a Sunday in February 1983, Payne spoke to the congregation at St. John AME Church in Nashville. “Ours was a generation which spanned the time when black bodies were on the line,” she said, “and as we struggled to send our children to college, we forgot to tell them about our past.”

  IN 1987, WHEN PAYNE SAT DOWN to record her oral
history, she told Kathleen Currie that she had led a charmed life.

  “Why do you say ‘charmed’?” asked Currie.

  “Because,” replied Payne, “I’ve been able to be such an eyewitness to so many profound things and so many changes, and I’ve lived through it and I’ve witnessed. I’ve had a box seat on history, and that’s a rare thing.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IN AUGUST 1964, WHEN THE WATTS NEIGHBORHOOD OF LOS Angeles erupted into one of the city’s worst race riots, the Associated Press dispatched a twenty-seven-year-old white reporter to the scene. A recent graduate of Columbia University’s School of Journalism, Andrew Jaffe took out his reporter’s pad to write down his observations and record his interviews in hopes of putting together the story. It was then that a young black resident of Watts said something that stuck with Jaffe long after the fires in Watts were out.

  “You can never tell our story,” the youngster said, “because you’re not black.”

  I’ve thought frequently about this moment in Jaffe’s life while writing this biography about Ethel Payne. She was black. I’m white. She was a female. I’m male. She grew up in modest, at times poor circumstances. I grew up in privilege. Who am I to tell her story? I wondered.

  I found my answer in two places: First, I found acceptance and support among family and friends of Payne, who never questioned why I should be the one to write her story. Their encouragement and support was of critical importance.

  Second, Payne’s own approach to writing encouraged me. She never forgot or hid the perspective she brought to her work. She never pretended to be anything other than who she was. As a black person writing about racism, segregation, and the civil rights movement—all matters that deeply affected her life—she said it was impossible to be objective. Instead she adopted a rigid code of fairness. Above all, she believed that journalism—or any form of writing, for that matter—liberates and empowers one to be able to write empathetically about people, events, and ideas outside of one’s own experience. I share that belief.

  WHILE THE ACT OF WRITING is a solitary affair, researching and preparing a book is quite the opposite. I have an enormous cast to thank, and I beg forgiveness should I fail to properly acknowledge someone who rendered me assistance.

  From the world of libraries and archives, I am indebted to Diana Lachatanere and the staff of the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY; Joellen El Bashir and Ida Jones at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC; and the excellent staff of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  Among the many in other libraries and archives who provided a hand were: Valoise Armstrong, Eisenhower Presidential Library; Monica Blank, Rockefeller Archive; Mary Marshall Clark, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, NY; Eric Cuellar, Lyndon B. Johnson Library; Karen J. Fishman, Library of Congress; Valerie Harris, University of Illinois Chicago Library, Chicago, IL; Larry Hughes, National Archives, College Park, MD; Bill Kemp, McLean County Museum of History, Bloomington, IL; Jessica McTague, Geneva History Center, Geneva, IL; John Reinhardt, Illinois State Archives, Springfield, IL; Kathy Struss, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library; Annie Tummino, Civil Rights Archive, Queens College Libraries, CUNY, Queens, NY.

  Individuals to whom I owe thanks include: Jinx C. Broussard, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA; Sandy Cochran, Albuquerque, NM; CM! Winters Palacio, City College of Chicago; Chris Martin, West Virginia University; Janelle Hartman, Communication Workers of America, Washington, DC; Sig Gissler, Pulitzer Prizes, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, New York, NY; Jonathan Marshall, Medill School of Journalism, Chicago, IL; Alan Mather, Lindblom Math & Science Academy, Chicago, IL; Ethan Michaeli, We the People Media, Chicago, IL; Donald Ritchie, Historian of the United States Senate, Washington, DC; Hugh Wilford, California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

  At the St. John AME Church, West Englewood in Chicago, which the Payne family used to attend, I was welcomed by Mildred B. Hays and Gwen Roberts.

  Melvin Cray permitted me to use a portion of his taped interview with Ethel Payne in 1984 for the Dollie Robinson documentary, Media Genesis Productions, LLC.

  Among those who shared remembrances of Payne were Simeon S. Booker, James Christian, Milton Coleman, Ernest Green, Gillie Haynes, Vernon Jordan, Walter J. Leonard, C. Payne Lucas, Robert McClory, Reverend Richard L. Tolliver, and Robert Woodson.

  Additionally Ethel Payne’s friends Rita A. Bibbs-Booth, Catherine Z. Brown, Bettye Collier-Thomas, Skip Davis, Joseph Dumas, Vivian Lee, Grayson Mitchell, Barbara Reynolds, Shirley Small-Rougeau, Jennifer Smaldone, Kevin Lowther, and John Raye never tired of my questions.

  Several researchers lent a hand. They included William R. Cron, Ann Arbor, MI; Molly Kennedy, Springfield, IL; and Jonathan Scott, Smyrna, GA.

  I owe a special thanks to Dr. James A. Johnson, Ethel Payne’s nephew whose battle with the House of Representatives to attend the Page School is detailed in this book. He opened his home to me and shared many valuable documents, photos, and audio tapes.

  Jamal Watson was also very kind in sharing material he had accumulated in his research on Ethel Payne.

  Members of the 2013 Media & Civil Rights History conference kindly commented on a paper I delivered there about Payne’s journalism. The following people graciously consented to answer my email queries or be interviewed for this book, sometimes more than once: Sylvia Hill, Eleanor Clift, Woodbury Clift, Robert Farrell, Gillie Haynes, Grayson Mitchell, and Juanita D. Miller.

  The Chicago Defender provided permission for me to quote extensively from the many articles Payne wrote. The Washington Press Club Foundation also kindly provided permission to use its Ethel Payne oral history transcripts, part of a remarkable oral history project called Women in Journalism begun by the National Women’s Press Club.

  I would be ungrateful not to mention the support from E/TL&DS and its president, J. Revell Carr. This is the second book project of mine honored by the organization. Also the wonderful members of my writers group in Albuquerque greatly improved my prologue.

  Author David Stewart and I continued a long-standing practice of reading each other’s manuscripts when in draft form. David’s thoughtful comments played an immense role in shaping this book.

  This book would not have come to pass had it not been for two believers: the remarkably talented editor Dawn Davis, who acquired the work when she ran Amistad, and my agent, Alan Nevins. Editor Tracy Sherrod and assistant Kathleen Baumer worked hard and brought it to fruition.

  I was saved from embarrassing mistakes and many a dangling modifier thanks to the diligent copyediting and fact-checking performed by Nancy Inglis.

  Finally, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Patty McGrath Morris, my wife of thirty-three years, who was my steady partner in every step of this adventure to chronicle Ethel Payne’s life and gave me honest and valuable editorial suggestions.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  For reasons of space, the publications listed in this bibliography do not include all works used in the preparation of this book, rather only those that contributed substantially and may be of relevance to those pursuing similar research. Newspapers, magazines, and journals used in assembling this book are listed solely in the endnotes.

  Booker, Simeon. Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.

  Bowers, William T., et al., Black Soldier, White Army: The 24th Infantry Regiment in Korea. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2005.

  Branch, Taylor. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

  . Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

  Bushnell, Scott M. Hard News, Heartfelt Opinions: A History of the “Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.” Bloomington: Indiana Univers
ity Press, 2007.

  Chicago Commission on Race Relations. The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922.

  Clark, E. Culpepper. The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the University of Alabama. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

  Daley, Christopher B. Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.

  Ehrenhalt, Alan. The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America. New York: Basic Books, 1995.

  Eldridge, Lawrence Allen. Chronicles of a Two-Front War: Civil Rights and Vietnam in the African American Press. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2012.

  Faber, Michael. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

  Farmer, James. Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement. Fort Worth, TX: TCU Press, 1985.

  Fleming, Cynthia. Yes We Did?: From King’s Dream to Obama’s Promise. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009.

  Gaffen, Fred. Cross-Border Warriors: Canadians in American Forces, Americans in Canadian Forces. Toronto: Dunburn Press, 1995.

  Garrow, David. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow, 1986.

  Giddings, Paula. In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1988.

  Green, Michael Cullen. Black Yanks in the Pacific: Race in the Making of American Military Empire After World War II. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.

  Grossman, James R. Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.