Eye on the Struggle

by James McGrath Morris

  The paper told its readers that the following week it would run a second article by Payne in which, “from her feminine point of view, she gives further evidence of her charge that the Nipponese girls are playing GIs for suckers.”

  The identical headline above the second installment promised more on how Japanese women were taking advantage of black soldiers. But though it was again a disjointed work, the article provided a more nuanced account of the lives of the soldiers. It was indeed true, Payne wrote, that the men had a wide range of choice among “almond-eyed femmes.” But the real issue related to race and the startling experience of the black soldier in Japan. “It all added up to one thing,” Payne said. “Despite the encumbrances of Army policies on racial quotas, restrictions, limitations, etc. he was less of a Negro here than he had been at any time in his life. In his heart, he was an expatriate.”

  Racial attitudes in Japan were hard to fathom because it was, after all, a conquered nation whose citizens were obliged to give respect and obedience to the occupying forces, wrote Payne. But she accused MacArthur of trying to foster an acceptance of segregation among the Japanese, well used to a rigid class system.

  Defender editors ended her article on a far more sympathetic note than the first installment, which had painted the women as self-serving Oriental temptresses. The women and the “crop of sloe-eyed curly topped brown babies” were the first victims of the Korean War, Payne said. The future for the women and their children was dim, left on their own as their men were sent off to battle, probably never to return to Japan. “This means then with the passing of years without a steady income, the mother, unless she has unusually strong love for the child, may not be able to resist the hardships of social ostracism and inevitable abandonment may be the fate of the child.”

  “If there was a storm in Chicago” after the publication of the articles, Payne said, “there was a tornado in Japan and Korea.” It was not long before her white superiors heard about the article as well. The War Department published a weekly “Report of Trends in the Colored Press” that was circulated among the higher ranks of the military. Payne received the dreaded summons to Allied headquarters. Only bad news came with such an invitation.

  MacArthur’s aides gave her a dressing-down. They accused her of disrupting the morale of the troops. From her years on the Tokyo bases, Payne knew that there was no appeal from their judgment. She was removed from her post and shunted away to be a secretary at command headquarters. She hired an American attorney in Tokyo and awaited her punishment.

  ETHEL PAYNE’S RESCUE came by way of one of the century’s greatest lawyers.

  In the early months of the war, both the black troops, who were undertrained and ill equipped, and the white troops were unable to hold back the invaders. But unlike the white regiments, who could draw on vast reserves, the all-black regiments could be reinforced only with black soldiers. “It is a fact that enormous casualties suffered by the 24th Infantry Regiment and the 159th Field Artillery Battalion, both all Negro outfits, might have been lighter had there been replacements for them,” Payne wrote. “The wanton die-hard attitude of segregation has been a costly and needless waste of life.”

  Concerned with survival in the face of overwhelming odds and lacking faith in their white officers, black soldiers deserted. Military police stationed on the roads leading away from the battlefields arrested them. Sixty black soldiers were charged with cowardice before the enemy, and about half of them were convicted in trials that often lasted less than an hour and were given sentences ranging from the death penalty to a term of imprisonment. Only eight white soldiers were similarly charged during the period, and only four of them were convicted.

  When word of the drumhead trials reached the NAACP, it instructed its chief counsel Thurgood Marshall to investigate. At first MacArthur balked at the notion of having a lawyer snooping around his command, but under pressure, he relented. In early 1951, Marshall arrived in Tokyo to begin his work. He soon discovered the Foreign Correspondents’ Club and obtained a guest membership. There he found that over whiskey he could pump members of the press for information. He also found a diversion. “The slot machines at the press club are real one-arm Bandits,” he wrote in his diary.

  At the club, Marshall met Payne and a group of her supporters. She detailed what had happened to her since the articles appeared in the Defender and the threat of further punishment. Marshall used his meetings with MacArthur and his staff to bring up Payne’s case. The command conceded that they would drop the matter and let Payne return to the United States two months before the end of her contract.

  Meanwhile, hearing about Payne’s rough treatment at the hands of the military and that she would be returning home, the Defender’s Louis Martin remained true to his word and called Payne. “Come on home,” he told Payne. “We have a job for you.” The call was well timed. “I was going through a very psychological repression,” Payne said. “I’d been humiliated and chastised and all that, and then I was put in isolation, so to speak. So it was a relief to me. I had been there three years, so I welcomed the opportunity.”

  In early March 1951 Payne asked for a seat on a homebound plane.

  GETTING HOME WAS NO EASY TASK. The eighth day of waiting rolled around and the Military Air Transport Service (MATS) still had no seat for Payne on an outbound plane. With several hours to kill between the check-in times at the MATS office, Payne went out among the downtown crowds. It was a brilliant springtime Sunday full of promise. The day, said Payne, was “so brilliant with sunshine and so intoxicating with the champagne of spring that in a moment of sheer abandon you could forget there was a war and rumors of more war.” The sakura zensen, the name given to the latitudinal line marking the flowering of cherry blossoms, was moving north. The buds on the trees in Tokyo were only days short of bursting open. French sailors with berets, Australian soldiers with slouched hats, and American GIs with garrison caps intermingled with the crowds of Japanese strolling in front of the Imperial Palace, all grateful the warm breezes from the south had come to free the island of its winter cold.

  The MATS office was just down the street from the Dai-ichi, where MacArthur made his headquarters, so Payne decided to take in, perhaps for the last time, what was called the “daily review.” For more than five years MacArthur’s daily comings and goings from the building had grown into a well-attended ceremony of sorts. By the time Payne reached the Dai-ichi, there was already a densely packed crowd of spectators of old hunched-over women and young mothers with their babies, workmen with sweatbands around their heads and students in black suits and peaked caps. “Blue uniformed Japanese policemen importantly waved back the forgetful ones who stepped across the yellow lines back into place.”

  At the front door of the building, a chauffeured 1950 Chrysler Crown Imperial, the largest car made by the manufacturer, stood by, idling. Suddenly a Japanese policeman dashed to the corner and rang a bell, and his uniformed colleagues brought the traffic at the busy intersection to a standstill. The chauffeur opened the Chrysler’s door and two American guards took their positions on the pavement. “The people craned,” Payne said, “and Douglas MacArthur flanked by his aides strode majestically out, erect, proud, disdainful of the admiring glances of his subjects yet fully aware of his role as Destiny’s chosen to rule some 80,000,000 people.”

  When Payne checked next with the MATS office, they reported she had a seat on a flight to San Francisco. Just after midnight on March 19, 1951, Payne’s DC-4 taxied out to a runway at Haneda Army Air Base at the edge of Tokyo Bay and waited for clearance. As the propellers on the plane’s four Pratt & Whitney engines noisily sliced into the night air and the craft ascended into the sky, Payne looked out her window at the twinkling lights and the glimmer of the moon on the bay.

  THOUSANDS OF MILES from the DC-4 making its way across the Pacific that March night, Barbara Rose Johns was also making a change in her life. The sixteen-year-old Johns attended the all-black Robert Russa Moton High Sch
ool in Prince Edward County, deep in Southside Virginia, home of the state’s most isolated and conservative communities. Under any circumstances her school would have been regarded as an inadequate facility for children. But in comparison to the new white high school, it was a galling injustice.

  In enormous disrepair, Moton’s classrooms lacked suitable desks, were dotted with strategically placed pails to catch leaks on rainy days, and were so cold that in the winter the students rarely shed their coats. To cope with overcrowding, the school board had recently consented to erect some tar-paper shacks, hardly sturdier than chicken coops, heated with woodstoves. Anything the board provided its black students was shoddy and deficient. The students were even forced to ride each day in buses discarded by the white school.

  The month before, the board had faced down an angry crowd of black parents at one of its meetings. The board members promised they would buy land for a new colored school but would make their decision known in due time and on their own schedule. In the meantime, they told the black families to stay away from board meetings.

  Johns decided one day to talk to her approachable music teacher about the school’s deplorable conditions. “Why don’t you do something about it?” asked the teacher. The question might have discouraged a less imaginative teenager. Instead, it stirred Johns. Although she was quiet and introspective, Johns was also worldlier than many of her classmates. She knew about what other African Americans in the South were doing to fight Jim Crow laws from her uncle Reverend Vernon Johns, who was an outspoken civil rights advocate in Montgomery, Alabama. “Soon,” she said, “the little wheels began turning in my mind.”

  She secretly enlisted the help of some other students. Meeting on the bleachers at the edge of the athletic field, whose grass was overgrown and unattended, the teenagers plotted. On the appointed day, one of them called the principal’s office and said that students were spotted at the Greyhound station and were in trouble with the police. With the principal out of the building, a forged note went to all the classrooms telling the teachers to bring their students to an assembly.

  When the curtain in the auditorium drew open, rather than the principal, there stood Johns and a group of students. She asked the students to join her in going out on strike. The protest, she said, would aim not merely to win a new facility but to gain the right to attend school with whites. Banging her shoe on the podium, Johns urged everyone to join her. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, “just follow us.” And as a group, the 450 students rose, left the school, and marched to the courthouse, carrying protest signs they had made earlier and stored in the carpentry classroom.

  Johns and another student then sent a letter to NAACP lawyers Spottswood Robinson III and Oliver Hill in Richmond. Coincidentally, the two attorneys had recently met with Thurgood Marshall, from the NAACP’s national office. He had urged them to find a Virginia school to use in a lawsuit against segregation itself, abandoning the years-old strategy of winning improvements in black schools by filing cases based on the separate but equal doctrine of the half-century-old Plessy v. Ferguson.

  Robinson and Hill drove down to meet with Johns and the protesting students. Deeply impressed by the courage of the young strikers and the support they had from their families, the lawyers agreed to go to court on their behalf. The case would eventually reach the Supreme Court, but not under its name. Instead, the justices consolidated four similar cases under the name of Brown v. Board of Education.

  Johns’s actions that spring were only the start. All across the nation, a fuse of impatience was igniting a new form of activism among African Americans. Nine decades after emancipation, the yoke of Jim Crow was being directly challenged.

  THOUSANDS OF FEET ABOVE the Pacific, Ethel Payne’s plane sped out of the night and toward the rising sun. In a few months she would turn forty. After two decades of waiting, she knew that a writing job was finally hers as a reporter on the nation’s premier black newspaper. What she didn’t know was that the biggest story in the history of the black press since the Civil War was breaking. The DC-4 was bringing Payne closer not just to home but to a journey through the civil rights revolution.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 9

  CUB REPORTER

  IN EARLY APRIL 1951, ETHEL PAYNE STOOD ON THE SIDEWALK before the three-story headquarters of the Chicago Defender. Situated on Indiana Avenue in the heart of Bronzeville, the paper’s three-story headquarters was fronted by a brick-and-cement facade that attempted to mask its former life as a synagogue. The halls where worshipers once reverently gathered now echoed with the sound of thunderous printing presses. The rooms reserved for contemplation and study were full of reporters on telephones, editors in conference, composers setting type, and salesmen extolling the virtue of advertising in America’s leading Negro newspaper. If the African American press was black America’s secular church, then the Defender was one of its best-known and -loved incarnations. “Everyone read the Defender,” said the South Side activist and historian Timuel Black. “Every copy was read four or five times. People who didn’t get it would ask others to let them see it.”

  In stark contrast to the Chicago Tribune, the Defender carried information that mattered to African Americans. In a typical issue that April, news of brutal police tactics in Jackson, Mississippi, the election of Arizona’s first Negro state legislators, and the publication of an article in a UNESCO bulletin by the director of the School of Library Science at the historically black Atlanta University all merited space. The flagship of black journalism, the paper was a chronicler of racial injustice and a consummate publisher of ascension stories that provided hope. “Oh, the Defender was Mr. Big,” said a black radio broadcaster.

  Although it covered national news and had readers all across the country, the paper remained loyal to South Side. If you were a black Chicagoan, you could count on the Defender to carry news of your graduation, wedding, job promotion, retirement, and death. It celebrated its city as if it were the capital of all things African American. In particular the Defender supported, and in some instances set up, civic and social Bronzeville organizations, as its readers were excluded from most of the city’s established institutions. “The things the Defender created and sustained were vital to the health of the community,” said Black. “It gave folks something to look forward to. It gave some belief that there was a land beyond this one, and hope beyond this life.”

  As she faced the Defender’s building that day in April, Payne had little idea what the editors had in mind for their new hire. Louis Martin, the editor in chief who had offered Payne the job, had been vague about her potential role. Payne had no training or experience in reporting or news writing, aside from a smattering of writing courses she took at the Chicago Training School and the Medill School of Journalism. This was an almost entirely male trade and certainly the province of the young. But as she had told W. E. B. Du Bois two decades earlier, she had nerve, plenty of it. She opened the building’s glass door, walked in, and made her way to the second-story newsroom and Martin’s office.

  IN THE DEFENDER’S FIRST FOUR DECADES, Louis Martin was among the most successful men to have had the editorial helm of the paper aside from the founder, Robert Sengstacke Abbott. Unlike other African Americans from the South, the thirty-eight-year-old editor had a fortunate upbringing: he was educated in Catholic schools, attended a high school operated by Fisk University, and obtained a college education at the University of Michigan. In 1936, two years after getting his degree, Martin came to work as a reporter for the Defender. John H. Sengstacke, who was being groomed by his uncle Robert to take over the paper, was impressed by the young reporter and enlisted him to launch the Michigan Chronicle, rewarding him with a share of the ownership. In 1947, Martin returned to the Defender to become its editor in chief. By 1951, he was not only a part owner of the growing Sengstacke publishing company but also an important political figure whose advice was solicited by emerging black politicians as well as white politicians looking
to gain support from the black community.

  A natty dresser who favored a straw skimmer, Martin had a flair for the unusual and a keen eye for talent. He had seen Payne’s Japanese diary entries and knew she could write well. As he had learned the trade of journalism on the job, there was no reason to think that she couldn’t as well. He and city editor Enoch P. Waters decided to start Payne out writing features and soft news stories, the bread and butter of the inside pages of the paper and an ideal training spot for her. “All they did,” Payne said, “was to tell me to go ahead and to use my good judgment and to make it factual. That was the main thing that they asked. They didn’t want any big errors or misstatements that they would have to apologize for or even be subject to libel.”

  Pen and pad in hand, Payne set out to rediscover Chicago.

  PAYNE SAW HER NATIVE CITY with the eyes of both an insider and an outsider. Having lived in a different culture, Payne had ceased to take her own world for granted. For despite the continued segregation in the Army under MacArthur and the resolute xenophobia of the Japanese, Payne’s time as an expatriate had been a singularly liberating experience for her. Just as it had been for the soldier she had poignantly described in the Defender, Payne had been less a Negro in Japan than at any point in her life.

  But in Chicago everything conspired to remind one of one’s race. As had been true for decades, the only housing open to African Americans remained in the Black Belt running south from Twenty-Third Street. Despite the continuation of the Great Migration, the city had made no accommodation for the hundreds of thousands of new arrivals. In one apartment house, for instance, a thousand people were crammed into its seven stories, many of the rooms so overcrowded that the tenants had to sleep in shifts.