DEDICATION
In memory of
Gertrude Keaton
1909–2004
EPIGRAPH
We are soul folks and I am writing for soul brothers’ consumption.
—ETHEL PAYNE, 1967
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
PROLOGUE A Presidential Pen
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1 Throop Street
CHAPTER 2 Red Summer
CHAPTER 3 Driftwood
CHAPTER 4 An Abundance of Nerve
CHAPTER 5 Musketeer
CHAPTER 6 Time to Leave
CHAPTER 7 Japan
CHAPTER 8 Chocolate Joe
PART TWO
CHAPTER 9 Cub Reporter
CHAPTER 10 More Unwanted Babies
CHAPTER 11 A Taste of National Politics
CHAPTER 12 Washington
CHAPTER 13 Feared Negro
CHAPTER 14 Turning Like a Spinning Top
CHAPTER 15 Asking Questions No One Else Would
CHAPTER 16 Irks Ike
CHAPTER 17 Bandung
CHAPTER 18 The Defender’s Nellie Bly
CHAPTER 19 South at the Crossroads
CHAPTER 20 The Gladiator Wears a Reverse Collar
CHAPTER 21 Ghana
CHAPTER 22 A Toothless Act
CHAPTER 23 The Vice-President Comes Calling
CHAPTER 24 The Door Remains Closed
CHAPTER 25 We Shall Overcome
PART THREE
CHAPTER 26 Soul Brothers in Vietnam
CHAPTER 27 Playing Into Their Hands
CHAPTER 28 The Poor People’s Campaign
CHAPTER 29 Resurrection City
CHAPTER 30 Nixon Redux
CHAPTER 31 Africa Bound
CHAPTER 32 China
CHAPTER 33 You Can’t Go Home Again
CHAPTER 34 Finding a New Role
CHAPTER 35 On Her Own African Mission
CHAPTER 36 Professor Payne
CHAPTER 37 Hymietown
CHAPTER 38 Agitate, Agitate, Agitate
CHAPTER 39 Forgotten
CHAPTER 40 Citizen of the World
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
A Note on Sources
Notes
Index
Photos Section
About the Author
Also by James McGrath Morris
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
A PRESIDENTIAL PEN
AS THE SEVEN O’CLOCK HOUR NEARED ON THE EVENING of July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson took a seat before a table at one end of the East Room in the White House. Nine months earlier the ornate room had been a somber place when President John F. Kennedy’s body lay in repose on the catafalque that had been made for President Abraham Lincoln’s casket in 1865. In contrast, the mood on this night was exuberant.
Resting on the table, to the left of a green blotter, was the final draft of the Civil Rights Act that had been approved less than five hours earlier by overwhelming numbers in the House of Representatives. The venerable New York Times hailed the new law as “the most sweeping civil rights legislation ever enacted in this country” and reported that civil rights leaders regarded it “as a Magna Carta in the struggle to secure equal treatment and opportunity for the Negro.”
All that remained now was for the president to add his signature to the bill. For that, Johnson needed an audience. Arrayed before him in rows of gold-colored chairs on the Fontainebleau oak parquetry and awash in klieg light sat two hundred and fifty of the nation’s most powerful and recognizable politicians, officials, and activists whose work, in one way or another, had led to this moment. The remainder of America watched on living room televisions.
When the president looked up through his wire-rimmed glasses he saw a vista of familiar white faces punctuated only occasionally by a dark countenance and almost entirely devoid of women. But sitting six rows back was a figure both female and black. In assembling a guest list suitable to the magnitude of this event, the White House had not failed to include Ethel Lois Payne.
WHILE UNRECOGNIZED BY MANY of the whites in the East Room, fifty-two-year-old Payne was an iconic figure to readers of the nation’s black press. The granddaughter of slaves and the daughter of a Pullman porter, the South Side Chicago native at midlife had inspiringly traded in a monotonous career as a library clerk for one as a journalist at the Chicago Defender, the country’s premier black newspaper. In a matter of a few years she had risen to become the nation’s preeminent black female reporter of the civil rights era, and during the movement’s seminal events in the 1950s it had been her words that had fed a national black readership hungry for stories that could not be found in the white media.
Her unflinching yet personable reporting had enlightened and activated black readers across the country and made her a trusted ally of civil rights leaders. Among those in the White House audience that night, labor leader A. Philip Randolph remembered her as far back as 1941 when she worked with him on his March on Washington Movement. For Clarence Mitchell Jr., the potent lobbyist for the NAACP, she had been a dependable confederate in the White House press corps during the Eisenhower administration. And Martin Luther King Jr. had first been the subject of her perceptive reporting during the initial days of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott when Payne crafted the earliest account of the black clergy’s ascension to the leadership of the civil rights movement.
On this night Payne was in temporary exile from her craft, serving as a Democratic Party functionary. But when she had sat in the ranks of the press, crowded together on the other side of the East Room, she had given black America a voice and presence at the highest reaches of power that could not be ignored. From challenging the white occupants of the White House and courthouses to reporting firsthand on events from Alabama to Africa and Asia, Payne had traveled the length of the civil rights movement that led to the legislative victory celebrated this evening. In doing so, she had served as both an emissary from and a representative for a large group of Americans long neglected by the mainstream media. She was, as she would later be called, “the First Lady of the Black Press.”
DESPITE A STORIED HISTORY dating back to 1827, the black press that employed Payne had unremittingly chronicled racism, eloquently protested injustices, impassionedly educated its people, and remained—like most African American institutions—completely out of sight of white America. “To most white Americans the black press was a voice unheard, its existence unknown or ignored,” said Enoch P. Waters, an editor at the Chicago Defender. “It was possible for a white person, even one who believed himself well informed, to live out his three score years and ten without seeing a black newspaper or being aware that more than 150 to 250 were being published throughout the nation.”
Until the civil rights movement made its mark, African Americans were absent from the pages of the nation’s white newspapers unless they were accused of a crime. When Payne was growing up, her hometown Chicago Tribune chose words like negress or southern darky when it mentioned the city’s black residents. The important events of their lives such as graduations, marriages, and deaths were not commemorated in the white press. The useful news African Americans wanted about church, schools, entertainment, sports, not to mention politics, was nowhere to be found. It was in this capacity that Payne’s employer the Chicago Defender and other members of the black press had found their initial role.
But the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, the New York Amsterdam News, the Pittsburgh Courier, and other black newspapers grew to have circulations beyond their cities and an influence greater than thei
r press runs would lead one to believe. “The most predominant media influence on black people was the black newspaper,” recalled veteran reporter Vernon Jarrett, whose Negro Newsfront was the first daily radio news broadcast in the United States created by an African American. “They were—our internet. They were our cement that helped keep us together.”
DRESSED IN A DARK SUIT, President Johnson faced a bank of four large cameras arrayed in front of the table. Between them stood a blue and black metal box that held within it a glass screen on which the text of his speech was projected. He was the first president to make use of this new technology being called a TelePrompTer.
In a thick voice laced with a Central Texas drawl, the president began by invoking the gathering that 188 years ago had produced the Declaration of Independence, which embodied the American ideals of equality and inalienable rights. But, he said, these rights and these blessings of liberty had been denied to Americans “not because of their own failures, but because of the color of their skins.”
Such unequal treatment was impermissible under the Constitution, he said, “and the law I will sign tonight forbids it.” It will provide no special treatment for any group. Rather, Johnson continued, “it does say that those who are equal before God shall now be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories, and in hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and other places that provide services to the public.”
His speech concluded, Johnson drew the first nib pen from a supply sticking up from a rack like porcupine quills. He dipped it into an ink bottle and began to write. Using each of the pens before him, and more brought by an aide, he inscribed “Lyndon B. Johnson, approved July 2, 1964, Washington, D.C.” at the bottom of the engrossed legislation before him, adding dashes and dots, and putting periods in D.C. so as to extend his use of pens to more than seventy-five, creating with each one he touched a much-sought-after political trophy.
The crowd surged forward and encircled the desk. Johnson gave the first pen to Senators Everett Dirksen and Hubert Humphrey as a reward for their work in breaking the fifty-seven-day filibuster mounted by Southern senators and ending the longest debate in that chamber’s history. House members Republican William McCulloch and Democrat Emanuel Celler were given pens for their work as the bill’s managers in their chamber. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was handed six pens to distribute to Justice Department aides. Then reaching over his left shoulder, grasping Martin Luther King’s hand, and pausing for the cameras, the president bestowed a pen on the civil rights leader.
Ethel Payne too rose from her seat and slowly made her way to the front. Standing five feet three inches tall, she wore a striped skirt and jacket. A small soft white beret, angled to her right side, completed the outfit. As the crowd thinned around the president, Payne moved closer to the desk until she stood at its front edge.
Johnson looked up. Payne smiled, and her face, with its skin a warm shade of nut brown, took on a disarming countenance. In many a time and place, it had been a mollifying power. The president reached his arm across the table and placed a pen in Payne’s hand. The journalist, whose reporting had both chronicled and inspired the movement, clutched the writing instrument and said, “Thank you, Mr. President.”
PART ONE
(Courtesy of Lindblom Math and Science Academy)
CHAPTER 1
THROOP STREET
IN 1901, TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD WILLIAM A. PAYNE MADE his way across the marble floor of the cavernous Illinois Central Station in downtown Chicago. The son of black Tennessee farmers, he had just debarked from the storied Illinois Central Line that ran up from New Orleans. He had made the journey north in search of a better life. He was not alone. Black men and women throughout the South were beginning to drop their tools in the cotton and tobacco fields, abandon their shanties, and join a silent exodus from the feudal life to which they had been confined since emancipation from slavery. One yoke had been traded for another.
A train ticket north held the promise of freedom. But with his one-way ticket clutched in his hand, Payne was among the trailblazers. When he reached Chicago, African Americans made up less than 2 percent of the city’s population. Within a decade the vanguard, of which Payne was a member, would grow into a torrent of six million migrants entirely reshaping the social, cultural, and political landscape of Northern cities.
Well used to hard labor, Payne found work as a cooper assembling barrels in the vast stockyards that stretched over hundreds of blocks in South Side and whose stench spread for miles. The hours were long and Sunday was the only day of rest. Within a year he met and fell in love with Bessie Austin, a Hoosier who had moved to Chicago to join a brother who held a coveted job in the post office. In January 1903, the two newcomers were married.
The newlyweds faced a daunting task in finding a place in Chicago to start their new life together. Landlords and real estate agents conspired to confine African Americans to a few South Side neighborhoods. But the Paynes were blessed with good luck. Nine miles southwest of central Chicago, they came upon a set of tidy freestanding wooden houses open to them, one of the very few enclaves outside what was known as the “Black Belt” that permitted African Americans. Remarkably the four-by-six-block neighborhood, known as West Englewood, was not solidly black. White European immigrant families lived in several of the houses on each block.
At first the Paynes rented a series of places, a block apart, to accommodate their growing family. By the end of 1910, seven years into their marriage, the Paynes had three girls and one boy and Bessie was pregnant with another child. For the only time in their marriage, they left West Englewood and rented a house three miles to the east in West Woodlawn. There, on August 14, 1911, Bessie gave birth to their fifth child, whom they named Ethel Lois Payne, the name suggested by her aunt Clara Austin Williams. Her parents considered their newest progeny so winsome as to enter her into a baby contest at the local church. Ethel came in sixth out of eight contestants and brought home a one-pound box of chocolates.
IT WAS NOT LONG before the Paynes and their new baby were back in West Englewood, renting yet another in a succession of houses, this time on Loomis Boulevard and Throop Street. But their fortunes were improving.
William had left the stockyards and gone to work as a porter on the famed Pullman sleeping cars that each night carried as many as 100,000 pajama-clad travelers along the nation’s rails. Next to working in the post office, it was one of the most sought-after jobs among African Americans. Pullman porters wore suits to work, traveled the length of the land, and became leaders in their churches. The job put one atop the Negro social world in Chicago. The work, however, was hard. Porters seldom got more than a few hours of uninterrupted sleep, were gone from home for long stretches of time, and had their patience tested by wealthy white patrons who alternately called them “Uncle,” “Joe,” “Sam,” or “George” (Pullman’s first name) when not using “Boy” or even “Nigger.”
Earning a Pullman salary and tips, William was able to accomplish a rare thing among African Americans in Chicago at the time. He purchased a home. In late 1917 the Paynes moved into a twenty-five-year-old two-story white clapboard house with a basement at 6210 South Throop Street. “It was one of the very few houses that had electricity when we moved in,” remembered Thelma, the second-eldest child. “One of its wonders was that the upstairs and downstairs front hall light switches worked so that you could turn both lights on or off from either end, and our friends used to come over and play with this marvel.”
ALTHOUGH STRICT WITH their children, Bessie and William fashioned a home full of joy and affection. When he was home between train runs, William loved to take the children to ride ponies at carnivals or to see a parade, and occasionally to Gary, Indiana, where much of Bessie’s family still lived. “He was a big man, both physically and in personality possessing both temper and kindness,” said Ethel. “His temper could be as hot as the desert sands at noon one day; yet he was gentle, with a great sense of the respon
sibility of the strong to help the weak.”
The family’s love of a carnival enticed three-year-old Ethel to wander away from the new house. A mischievous child, she may have been providing a hint of her life to come. But in the meantime she gave her parents a scare. The family frantically launched a search, enlisting neighbors, firemen, and policemen. At last she was located at a street fair four blocks away. Bessie wanted to administer corporal punishment, according to Ethel. “But Grandpa admonished her saying, ‘Ain’t no use in fanning her. Won’t do no good. That child was just born with itching feet.’”
Bessie kept the home on a firm schedule: washday on Mondays, ironing on Tuesdays, baking on Wednesdays, and mending on Thursdays. Saturday mornings began with the children downing a dose of castor oil, followed by a couple of gingersnaps before setting off to do their assigned chores. Sundays were reserved for church.
Bessie’s family had been members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church for generations. As it happened, the Greater St. John AME Church, the oldest Negro church in Englewood, moved from its storefront home a block away and built a proper brick church directly across the street from the Paynes’ Throop Street house. In no time St. John’s became a focal point of the family. “Church, church, church,” recalled Ethel, “she was very strong on church.” Once her mother caught Ethel playing hooky from St. John’s with a boyfriend. “When Bessie Payne caught me, I was marched back to the sinner’s bench, chastised, and prayed over mightily,” Ethel said.
Bessie’s parents, who came to stay for long periods of time, often accompanied the family to services. “When Grandpa would ‘get happy’ in church,” Ethel said, “he would take out his handkerchief and wave it vigorously.” One Sunday, however, the handkerchief he pulled from his pocket was not a go-to-church linen one kept in the dresser drawer but rather one that his wife had made from old sacks with the word sugar clearly stenciled on it. “Mama, who shared his devotion to church,” Ethel said, “was mortified to see the sugar sack floating in the air.”
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