Seaview Club, 62–64, 69, 71–72
segregation and integration, 41, 55, 101, 109, 119, 126, 127, 131, 137n, 173, 176, 194, 197, 201, 212, 215–16, 220, 238, 299, 364, 389; Bolling v. Sharpe and, 132; Brown v. Board of Education and, 81, 111, 121, 129–34, 139, 141, 144, 172, 180, 191, 201, 202, 207, 208, 212; on buses, 177; at Central High School (Little Rock), 209–10, 212–15; in interstate travel, 140, 144–45; in military, 40–41, 49; Plessy v. Ferguson and, 81, 130; at University of Alabama, 177–79, 184–87; Williams on, 227–28; see also civil rights movement
Selma to Montgomery marches, 245–47
Senghor, Léopold, 333
Sengstacke, John H. H., 21, 87, 109, 114, 119–20, 128, 145, 151, 153, 156, 174, 197, 219, 251, 255–56, 274, 308, 333–35, 371; requests to bring Payne back to Chicago office, 223–25, 226, 300–301, 324–25, 333–34
Sheean, Vincent, 163
Sheil, Bernard J., 53
Shigemitsu, Mamoru, 68
Shores, Arthur D., 185, 217–18
Simpson, Billy, 292
Simpson, Carole, 314
Singletary, Michelle, 387
Smaldone, Jennifer, 352
Small-Rougeau, Shirley, 325, 343, 372–73, 381–83, 385
Smathers, George, 206
Smith, Al, 109
Smith, Golden William, 91–92
Smith, Howard K., 199
Smith, Ian, 331
SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), 277, 280
Snyder, Murray, 136, 146
Social Security Administration, 248
Socolow, Sanford, 330
Somalia, 346–48
Sontag, Susan, 318–19
Sorensen, Theodore, 297
Sorrell, Maurice, 311
South Africa, 161, 331, 345, 363–69, 375, 377–80, 388
Sowell, Thomas, 360
Spectrum, 313–14, 364
Spencer, Stuart, 331
Spottswood, Stephen Gill, 227
Spraggs, Venice Tipton, 109, 110
Stans, Maurice, 309–10
State Department, 194, 197, 263, 330, 368
State Training School for Girls, 37–38
Steinbeck, John and Elaine, 259–60
Stennis, John, 176, 205
Stevenson, Adlai, 102, 127, 193, 194, 233
Stokes, Carl B., 243
Stone, Chuck, 360
Streitmatter, Rodger, 380
Sukarno, 162, 166
Supreme Court, 43, 144, 173; Bolling v. Sharpe, 132; Brown v. Board of Education, 81, 111, 121, 129–34, 139, 141, 144, 172, 180, 191, 201, 202, 207, 208, 212, 303; Plessy v. Ferguson, 81, 130
Sylvester, Art, 258
Symington, Stuart, Jr., 124, 233
Talmadge, Herman, 205
Tarbell, Ida M., 388
Taylor, Hobart, Jr., 237
Terry, Peggy, 291
Terry, Wallace, Jr., 213
Third World Conference on Women, 365
Thomas, Clarence, 360
Thurmond, Strom, 98, 205, 207, 244
Tijerina, Reies López, 289
Till, Emmett, 173–75, 191
Till, Louis, 175–76, 192
Time, 189, 198, 213n
Tower, John, 249–50
TransAfrica, 363
Trent, Barbara, 132
Trescott, Jacqueline, 354
Tri-State Defender, 120, 174
Truman, Harry, 60–62, 69, 70, 100n, 105, 112, 113
Tubman, William, 312
Tucker, Bruce, 355
Tucker, Sterling, 290
Turner, J. C., 232
Twenty-First Century Fellows Program, 381, 386
Twenty-Fourth Amendment, 249
Uganda, 200
U Nu, 163–64
United Nations, 69, 167, 349
University of Alabama, 177–79, 184–87
University of Chicago, 37
University of Missouri, 381
University of the District of Columbia, 337
U.S. Census Bureau, 338, 350
U.S. Information Agency, 333
U.S. Postal Service, 388
Vails, Donald, 385
Valeriani, Richard, 331
Veazey, Carlton W., 385
Verne, Jules, 168
Vietnam, 298; Payne in, 251, 255–67, 268–70
Vietnam War, 213n, 249, 255–67, 268–71; King and, 257, 258, 274–76
Voice of America, 132, 387
voting rights, 204, 205, 217–18, 242, 245, 247
Voting Rights Act of 1965, 247, 257, 278, 296, 297
Walker, John T., 366–67, 385
Wallace, George, 296, 314, 388
Warren, Earl, 130–32, 303
Washington, Booker T., 21, 182
Washington, D.C., 109; Payne made correspondent in, 106, 107–18; Payne’s return as correspondent in, 273–74
Washington, Harold, 354
Washington, Val J., 111, 193–94
Washington Post, 116, 127, 145, 172, 180, 189, 213n, 274, 354, 357–58, 368–70, 375, 380, 384, 387
Washington Press Club Foundation, 370
Washington Star, 145, 286
Waters, Enoch P., 3, 87, 110, 126, 148
Watts, André, 309
“We Are Americans, Too,” 48–50
Weaver, George L. P., 250
Weaver, Robert C., 103
Westmoreland, William C., 260, 266–67, 271
Whalen, Grover, 117
Whickam, Katie E., 248
White, Walter, 45, 103, 125
Whitman, Walt, 167
Wiggins, Lillian, 304–7
Wilkins, Roy, 54, 175, 186, 201, 227, 283, 285, 292, 312–13, 343, 352, 359, 376
William and Bessie Payne Memorial Scholarship, 300
Williams, Clara Austin, 10
Williams, Clare B., 227–28
Williams, Eddie N., 337
Williams, Eugene, 18
Williams, Hosea, 290, 376
Wilson, L. Alex, 71–75, 174, 209, 215
Wilson, Leonard, 179, 186
women, 291–92; black, 340–41, 352; rights of, 166–67
Women’s Scholarship Association, 326
Woodson, Robert L., 344, 369
World War II, 40–42, 47, 49, 58, 271; end of, 56–58, 69
WPA, 39, 54
Wright, Richard, 36, 38, 39, 88–89, 152, 195–96; in Indonesia, 155–56, 159, 165–66, 195
Yearwood, Tracey Scruggs, 388
Yorty, Sam, 292
Young, Andrew, 287
Young, Whitney, Jr., 244, 297, 310–12, 327, 339, 343, 352
Youssoufou, Oumarou, 344
Zaire, 313–16, 330, 349
Zhou Enlai, 153, 161–64
Zion Baptist Church, 385
Zola, Émile, 36
PHOTOS SECTION
Ethel Payne sits for an early portrait in 1911 or 1912.
Ethel stands in the snow with her older brother, Lemuel, in front of the family’s South Side, Chicago, Throop Street home.
All photographs courtesy of the Library of Congress unless otherwise noted.
In the 1940s, Payne (on the right) became increasingly active in Chicago’s civil rights movement. She recruited members for the NAACP and in 1941 worked with A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement as a key organizer in Chicago.
Payne sails to Japan in 1948 to work as a hostess in an army service club. On the back of this snapshot, she wrote, “1st day at sea, notice my sea legs.”
On an army base in Japan between 1948 and 1951, Payne enthusiastically takes to her job of creating entertainment for the black servicemen, including arranging birthday parties. (Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center)
Payne leads a group of soldiers out for a night’s entertainment in Tokyo. “We hired 25 rickshaws and did the town up,” she wrote. (Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center)
Payne sits down to interview Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson shortly after becoming a reporter for the Chicago Defender in 1951.
With other reporters, Payne interviews Roy Wilkins, the executive secretary of the NAACP, in the mid-1950s. The journalist on the far right is Louis Lautier, the first black reporter accredited to the White House press corps.
As Payne’s reporting grew to be an important component of the Defender, the paper advertised its association with her. (Courtesy of the Chicago Defender)
Vice-President Richard Nixon gives thought to a question from Payne when he, along with his wife, Pat, came to Payne’s Washington apartment for a party in 1958 reuniting the reporters that covered the vice-president’s trip to Ghana the previous year. (Courtesy of James A. Johnson)
The Nixons gladly pose for photographs during the 1958 party. In this one, Payne and her nephew Joseph Sample stand by the vice-president and his wife.
As a reporter with an interest in world affairs, Payne frequented embassy functions in Washington like this one at the Embassy of Ghana, a country whose independence celebrations she had covered in 1957.
Payne’s nephew James A. Johnson was denied a post as a Capitol page in 1959 because of his race. He was able to attend and two years later graduated from the Capitol Page School when five members of the House each agreed to hire him as a part-time messenger. (Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center)
Payne and President John F. Kennedy enjoy a light moment in the Rose Garden in 1962.
Payne watches President Lyndon B. Johnson deliver a talk to a visiting group of civil rights leaders in 1965.
While Payne had severely criticized Lyndon Johnson when he was the senate majority leader, she became a strong supporter of his when he succeeded in obtaining passage of important civil rights legislation as president.
Payne interviews a soldier from Chesapeake, Virginia, during her three-month reporting tour in 1967. She was the first black journalist to report on the war from Vietnam. (Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center)
Payne stands with U.S. representative Shirley Chisholm in 1972 when the politician became the first black candidate to seek a major-party nomination for president.
President Jimmy Carter greets Payne at the White House. In the course of her work, Payne met every man who served as president from Eisenhower to Reagan.
In 1973, Payne gathers with a group of American journalists that were among the first to be invited inside China since the communist takeover in 1949. The woman staring off in the distance is Susan Sontag, the New York intellectual who was then a contributing editor to the new magazine Ms.
Payne takes to the streets of Shanghai wearing her fake leopard-skin coat.
By the 1970s, when this photo was taken, Payne had become an icon in the black press and was widely sought as a speaker.
Payne demonstrates her polite demeanor encountering President Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. In the spring of 1976, Payne accompanied the peripatetic Kissinger on a 26,000-mile tour of Africa.
Beginning as a young woman, Payne favored hats of all sorts. In this photograph from the early 1960s, she sports one of the most colorful ones from her extensive collection.
Payne calls on Daisy Bates in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1981. Payne had become friends with Bates when she covered the 1957 Little Rock school desegregation battle in which the activist had played a leading role.
At a 1982 gala dinner in her honor, Payne is reunited with Alice Dunnigan who, as a reporter for the Associated Negro Press (ANP), had been the first African American female journalist accredited by Congress and the White House.
Payne found a lot to criticize about President Ronald Reagan’s administration but put her differences aside in social moments because of her unerring sense of civility.
Payne and presidential candidate Jesse Jackson chat during his 1984 bid for the White House.
In ill health and using a cane, journalist Max Robinson accompanies Payne to a Washington event in June 1988. Robinson was the first African American network news anchor. He died of AIDS that December.
Payne traveled to South Africa in May 1990 to interview Nelson Mandela following his release from twenty-seven years in prison.
Payne stands by a photograph of herself at a younger age, part of a special exhibit celebrating her life at the Anacostia Library in Washington, DC, a few months prior to her death.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JAMES MCGRATH MORRIS is an author, columnist, and radio show host. His books include Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power—which the Wall Street Journal deemed was one of the five best books on American moguls and Booklist placed on its 2010 list of the ten best biographies—and The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. He is one of the founders and past presidents of Biographers International Organization (BIO) and makes his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
ALSO BY JAMES MCGRATH MORRIS
Jailhouse Journalism:
The Fourth Estate Behind Bars
The Rose Man of Sing Sing:
A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism
Pulitzer:
A Life in Politics, Print, and Power
CREDITS
COVER PHOTOGRAPH courtesy of the LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
COPYRIGHT
EYE ON THE STRUGGLE. Copyright © 2015 by James McGrath Morris. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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ISBN: 978-0-06-219885-3
EPub Edition February 2015 ISBN 9780062198877
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*Lena the Hyena, regarded as the ugliest woman in the world, was the 1946 creation of cartoonist Al Capp for his Li’l Abner strip; she was a resident of Lower Slobbovia.
*The Federal Fair Employment Practices Committee, which was created by President Roosevelt’s executive order. Truman had sought to make it a permanent commission, but Southern senators had prevented the passage of the legislation.
*Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, an apostle of segregation, was famously the author of Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization.
*“Mr. Charlie” was a term frequently used in blues songs that referred to white men who are regarded as oppressors of blacks.
*Terry would later
become a reporter for the Washington Post and Time. He went to Vietnam in 1967 (the same year Payne would go) and became the first permanent African American correspondent assigned to cover the war. He later published the bestselling Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans. His Missing Pages: Black Journalists of Modern America; An Oral History, which was published posthumously, featured a chapter on Payne.
*Article 15 was the term used to describe confining a soldier to barracks and giving him extra duty for two weeks.
*The name given to the report issued by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by Governor Otto Kerner Jr. and charged with investigating the causes of the 1967 race riots.
*His new name meant “the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake,” according to the Encyclopedia of War Crimes and Genocide (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009).
*A year after the trip to China, Murphy was the victim of a highly publicized kidnapping in which he was ransomed for $700,000. Murphy was able to identify his kidnapper, who was sent to prison.
*A Freedom of Information request obtained a copy of Payne’s FBI file. It was so extensively redacted that most of the information it contained is still being kept classified more than two decades after her death. The author filed successive appeals for two years. The final appeal was denied in May 2014. However, in doing so, the FBI provided a new copy of the contested file. Several sections previously redacted were now visible, intentionally or not. For more, see “US Government Secrecy Making Historical Research Difficult” by James McGrath Morris, Al Jazeera America, October 23, 2013.
*Super Fly was a 1972 film directed by Gordon Parks Jr., one of the earlier blaxploitation films, with music by Curtis Mayfield. “Tricky Dick” was a pejorative nickname for Richard Nixon. Payne was highly critical of most movie portrayals of blacks. “The white cinema structure taps on the desires of blacks to relate to black heroes,” she wrote. “In this identification I say, ‘right on,’ but in the creation of superniggers for this identification process, I say cinemas should cease and desist” (ChDe, 3/9/1974, 8).
Eye on the Struggle Page 45
