E. Frederic Morrow, a black Republican who had worked for both the NAACP and CBS, was also moving to Washington at the time. He had served as the liaison between the black community and the Eisenhower campaign in 1952 and had been promised a White House job. He found white cabbies would not pick him up, restaurants would not serve him, and hotels had no rooms. A dark-skinned visitor’s best chance at obtaining lodging in a hotel was to wrap his head in a turban and register using a foreign name, according to a report on segregation in Washington. “This maneuver was successfully employed not long ago at one of the capital’s most fashionable hotels by an enterprising American Negro who wanted to test the advantages of being a foreigner.”
In late November, after unpacking her belongings in a flat on Vernon Street in a black neighborhood in northwest Washington, Payne went to call on Spraggs. “I felt like a child trying to step into grownup’s shoes,” said Payne. The seasoned correspondent received her warmly and, over home-cooked meals, provided her with an introductory course in the ways of Washington. Unlike many other correspondents sent to Washington, Payne did not feel it was beneath her to take lessons. Her insecurity about reporting on national affairs after only a couple of years of local reporting left her open to sage advice. It also permitted her to consider Washington events with a fresh perspective. From Chicago, city editor Enoch Waters praised her early work in Washington and spurred her onward. “Of course it did not measure up to the standard of which you are capable,” he wrote. “Keep up the good work old girl and remember everybody here is pulling for you.”
A FEW WEEKS AFTER Payne settled in, Sherman Briscoe, an alumnus of the Defender who now worked in the Department of Agriculture, came calling. He made it a habit to help members of the black press and had come to escort Payne to a meeting of the Capital Press Club.
That night Maxwell M. Rabb was the guest speaker. A Boston lawyer who had helped organize the movement to draft Eisenhower, Rabb now worked in the White House. “For those of us in the black press,” Louis Martin said, “Max Rabb, short, plump, and personable, was the principal figure in the White House to whom we addressed racial problems.” Accepting an invitation to speak at the Capital Press Club certainly fit his job description. The club had been established in 1944 because membership in the National Press Club was closed to African Americans.
Rabb and other political operatives in the Eisenhower administration were convinced that Negro voters might be drawn away from the Democratic Party. After all, it had been only two decades since they abandoned the Republican Party. “Negroes as a whole admire the President, and with proper public relations this can be turned into votes,” wrote Val J. Washington, who as an assistant to the Republican national chair was the highest-ranking African American in the GOP.
In his talk, Rabb played the Washington game of journalistic flattery. He was a master at the art and could “really butter people up,” according to Morrow, who a year into the administration was still waiting for his promised White House post. Before his largely black audience, Rabb praised the Defender, holding aloft a copy of that week’s issue with Payne’s front-page story on Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., who had written a brief urging that the Supreme Court overturn school segregation in the Brown v. Board of Education case currently before it. With no previous exposure to the duplicitous flirtations of Washington movers and shakers, Payne accepted the flattery as a compliment. “He was referring to the headline and the story on the Brownell brief,” Payne wrote to Waters at the paper. “Gee, I was glad for us.”
In the corridor following his talk, Rabb told Payne he would assist her in obtaining White House press credentials and invited her to come by his office. Press credentials were not routinely granted to a black reporter. In fact, until the 1940s the credentialed Washington press corps had been exclusively white. “Letting a colored reporter have equal news gathering status with white and foreign correspondents in Washington was unheard of,” said an NAACP lobbyist. In fact, according to Payne’s boss, “a black reporter had as little a chance of interviewing a cabinet officer as of getting an interview with God.”
By the time Payne came to Washington, the press committees of journalists that governed access to Capitol Hill and the White House had provided credentials to only two black reporters. The senior of the two was Louis Lautier, a Louisiana native, who worked for the National Negro Publishers Association. White reporters valued the presence of the prim and dapper Lautier. Because of his lengthy service as a legal stenographer for the Justice Department, Lautier was in demand at the end of press conferences by reporters wanting to check the accuracy of the quotes in their notes. The other accredited black reporter was Alice Dunnigan.
DUNNIGAN, A REPORTER for the Associated Negro Press (ANP), was the first African American female journalist accredited by Congress and the White House. The daughter of a Kentucky sharecropper, at thirteen Dunnigan had set her sights on being a reporter and never let any obstacles get in her way.
In 1948, for instance, when Truman took off on a fifteen-day, 9,000-mile train trip that would presage his famous fall campaign whistle-stop tour, Dunnigan paid her own way by taking out a loan after her boss at the ANP, Claude Barnett, refused to approve the $1,000 travel costs. Her boss’s stinginess was a result of sexism rather than parsimony. “I did not think a woman could do the best job on a jaunt of that kind,” he said.
Female reporters had first been seen at presidential press conferences during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, when two women joined the all-male White House press corps. But their entry didn’t signal an acceptance of women on the hard news side of the media. In fact, two years earlier Barnett had only hired Dunnigan to work for the ANP because all the men he approached turned down the pitiful salary he offered. She took the job in return for the title of Washington bureau chief and a low piece rate that was eventually converted to a salary of $25 a week.
To make it work, she moved into a basement apartment of a white family’s house, tending the furnace and hauling the ashes to reduce her rent, eating Sunday meals of pig ears and turnip greens, and pawning her jewelry when her paycheck was late.
When she boarded Truman’s train in June 1948, Dunnigan was the first black newspaperwoman to travel on a presidential trip. She was such a rarity that when the train stopped in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a white military policeman thought she didn’t belong in the phalanx of reporters walking down the street behind the car ferrying the president to the capitol building. “Get back there behind this line where you belong,” the police officer called out. When Dunnigan continued to walk, he grabbed her and tried to forcibly direct her toward the sidewalk.
But before he could, a young correspondent for the Nashville Tennessean stepped in. “I want you to know,” he told the MP, “you are messing with the party of the president of the United States. You know this woman is with us. She has her badge and she has it on.” The MP backed off.
A couple of days later, Dunnigan sat in her train compartment, her shoes off, her bare feet on the seat, and her typewriter on her lap, when there was a knock on her door. In walked Truman. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I tugged at my skirt. I couldn’t find my shoes. I knew I should be standing up, but I couldn’t move.”
“I heard you had a little trouble,” Truman said in a quiet voice. “Well, if anything else happens, please let me know.”
AT FIRST, NEITHER OF THE TWO black White House correspondents welcomed Payne’s arrival. Lautier was a lifelong Republican. “For twenty years of the New Deal,” a reporter noted, “he was the most outspoken defender of the Republican Party in the Negro press.” Now, with Eisenhower in office, he was deferential at press conferences. Payne considered him “a water boy for the administration.” Lautier also held women reporters in low regard and had worked against Dunnigan’s entry into the press corps. For Dunnigan, Payne’s arrival was financially costly. The Defender canceled the unsigned column she wrote for the paper and the subsequent loss of $75
a month represented the reduction by a quarter of her already paltry income.
Payne decided to work on gaining her White House press pass first and then concentrate on obtaining the necessary credentials to cover Congress. The rules governing the accreditation of newspaper reporters, both at the White House and on Capitol Hill, required that the applicant work for a daily publication. The clients of the news services that employed Lautier and Dunnigan included at least one daily newspaper. But Payne’s Defender was still a weekly. However, with Rabb eager to curry favor with African American voters and the changing political sensitivities of those who enforced the rules, White House press secretary James Hagerty assured Sengstacke that Payne would be cleared. By the beginning of 1954, Payne possessed her White House press credentials.
AS SHE ENTERED the Executive Office Building that February day, Payne’s displeasure over the Howard choir incident fueled her every step as she made her way down the black-and-white tiled corridors, She found a seat among the 204 reporters who had gathered in the ornate Treaty Room, in which the president held his meetings with the press.
Despite her fury, Payne was terrified at the prospect of asking Eisenhower a question. “It was just unheard of for blacks to be standing up and asking presidents impertinent questions and particularly a black woman,” Payne recalled. But at a previous press conference, she had learned, “the chances of getting the coveted nod depended upon your dexterity in leaping to your feet and crying ‘Mr. President!’ ”
“Mr. President!” Payne shouted, her voice quavering. “Mr. President!”
Eisenhower looked over, smiled, and gave her the nod.
“Mr. President,” she began, reading the question she had carefully written out, “last Friday evening at the Lincoln Day box supper at the arena, the Howard University choir, which was scheduled to sing, was barred from the hall by District police.”
“Who?” asked the president.
“The Howard University choir,” Payne answered, “even though they had their instructions, and had followed out those instructions. Consequently, they were forced to return to the campus without appearing on the program; but in the meantime, two other singing groups, the Duke and Emory University glee clubs, were admitted without incident. I wonder if you had been informed of that, and if you had looked into it.”
Eisenhower turned to his press secretary. Briefly the two conferred. “I not only had not been informed of it,” said the president, turning back to the reporters, “I am just told, for the first time that I have heard about this, I am told by Mr. Hagerty that the bus driver was instructed to go around to the door by which I entered, and he refused to go around to that place.
“I hope there is no connection between those two facts,” said Eisenhower, to the laughter of the reporters. “But anyway, that is just what I have been informed.” Turning serious, Eisenhower added, “I would say this: if that choir was barred by the reason that you seem to fear, of anything about race or of color or anything of that kind, I will be the first to apologize to them. I just don’t believe that could have happened.”
When the press conference concluded, white reporters swarmed around Payne, wanting to know the details of the incident. One reporter offered some advice. “I know how nervous you were, but keep at it,” he said. “It was a good question, but take a tip, on your next one, don’t read it. They’ll be sure to think it’s planted and then Jim Hagerty will want to have you investigated as a suspected lobbyist.”
Payne’s question to the president about a topic that in the scheme of national and international politics was not a major event revealed her potential power as a member of the White House press corps. By asking the president about the incident, she single-handedly caused the white press to pay attention and publicize the injustice done to the Howard choir. The next day the New York Herald Tribune reported EISENHOWER MAY APOLOGIZE IN MIX-UP ON NEGRO CHOIR and the Los Angeles Times ran an article entitled RACIAL INCIDENT CRITICIZED BY EISENHOWER. Even the Washington Post, which had ignored what was after all a local story, felt compelled to publish an account under the headline OFFERS APOLOGY: IKE BLAMES MIXUP FOR CHOIR “BAN.”
Payne was no longer in the comparatively uncompetitive world of black journalism of her native Chicago. After three months in Washington, Payne was coming to terms with being part of a larger and more combative press corps. “If I was going to succeed at all, I would have to learn to be aggressive and tough as the rest of the persons in the pack,” she said. At first the handicaps of being a woman, being black, and working for a weekly minority newspaper that was not in the same league as the major papers pushed her to the periphery of the press corps. But her success at the February presidential press conference empowered her.
“From then on,” said Payne, “I decided I was going to have the same privileges as anybody else.”
TWO DAYS AFTER THE PRESS CONFERENCE, Rabb welcomed Payne and her boss, Louis Martin, to his office. On their way to Rabb’s second-floor office, Martin, a Democrat, noticed things to like about the Eisenhower administration. He spotted several African Americans, including the first one to ever work as a secretary in the White House, a “pretty lass,” in his eyes. “I also counted three brothers with important looking papers in their hands walking through the corridor on the first floor, and the receptionist is a handsome brother who is as smooth and suave a greeter as Grover Whalen,” said Martin, referring to the prominent New York City politician and public relations figure.
Dressed in a charcoal-gray flannel suit, Rabb conducted himself like a gregarious salesman eager to convince Martin that his initial impressions in the hall were correct. It was his second time making such a pitch to the Defender. Two weeks earlier he had held a private off-the-record meeting with Payne in which the two went over a wide variety of topics from the absence of African Americans in the Department of Agriculture to pending legislation. “Smooth-talking Max has found his lap the repository of some real hot potatoes,” noted Payne.
In both meetings Rabb succeeded in making his case that the President was on their side. “The President is personally determined to clean out racism in the Federal area,” Martin wrote in the Defender when he returned to Chicago. “He is going to put his own house in order and proceed from that point forward.” But Martin, more experienced than his Washington correspondent, added a caveat at this end of his complimentary description of progress under this administration. “Here I suppose I ought to confess that I also believe in miracles.”
Rabb was not the only Washington fixture that caused Payne to lower her journalist guard in the early months of her life as a Washington correspondent. She was transformed into a gossip queen when she attended a reception given by the National Council of Negro Women to honor Pat Nixon, the wife of the vice-president. It was, she told her readers, “the top drawer event of the social season since the beginning of the Republican administration for my money.”
“The sparkle of names and personalities mingling in the Crystal Room of the Willard Hotel,” she wrote, “matched the brilliance of the smart gowns and accessories worn by the throng who turned out to do homage to a very charming woman.” Wandering about, Payne gaped at the cadre of Washington’s notable women who had come for the event, including the “fabulous and almost legendary” Alice Roosevelt Longworth.
A doyen of the group took Payne in tow and introduced her to the wives of cabinet secretaries, White House functionaries, and ambassadors. Payne filled her notebook with details of each woman’s looks, choice of dress, and jewelry. Later, at her desk in her small cramped apartment, Payne gushed about those she had met. The Pakistani ambassador’s wife was “one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen,” the Korean ambassador’s wife sported a dress “with huge butterfly sleeves,” and the wife of the Ethiopian ambassador had “eyes as limpid and deep as clear pools.” The domestic representatives at the event were feted as well. When introduced to Ruth Rabb, wife of Maxwell, Payne saw “a stunning blond woman with classic features
and a flowered cloche atop her waves.”
It was a world far removed from South Side Chicago.
CHAPTER 13
FEARED NEGRO
ETHEL PAYNE WAS PLEASED WHEN SHE WAS TOLD THAT her question about the Howard choir at the February press conference had made her the “most feared” Negro journalist in Washington. At the same time, however, she rushed back to Rabb’s office in case her new reputation damaged her access. “I have tried to emphasize that I intend to be as factual as possible without slanting the news,” she reported to Defender publisher Sengstacke following the meeting.
She was concerned that any rumor that she was to be feared might endanger her request to interview Vice-President Richard Nixon. After a 68-day, 38,000-mile trip around the world, Nixon had returned to the United States publicly convinced that legalized racism at home was hurting the nation’s standing overseas and providing a wedge for communism. “The elimination of racial discrimination in the United States is one of the most important things we all have to do,” Nixon told business and industrial leaders in late December.
Payne submitted twelve questions focused mainly on how the “color problem” was seen from outside the United States and if Nixon was willing to join efforts to desegregate interstate travel and reduce discrimination in employment. To bolster her chances at gaining the interview, Payne emphasized that in addition to the Chicago Defender she now also represented the New York Age Defender, the Michigan Chronicle, the Tri-State Defender, and the Louisville Defender, all owned by Sengstacke. Inside the vice-president’s office the names of these black publications carried little weight. “Dotty, do you know anything about these papers?” wrote a staff member on whose desk the interview request had landed.
Eye on the Struggle Page 11