Eye on the Struggle

by James McGrath Morris

  But as the time on the wall clock neared 12:45 PM, a pneumatic message descended to the pressroom. After reading it, the court’s press officer stood up, put on his jacket, and told the reporters as he left the room that the “reading of the segregation decision is about to begin in the courtroom.” Payne and her colleagues raced up the marble steps and took their seats in the press box.

  AT 12:52 PM, Chief Justice Warren picked up a document before him. Normally printed copies of a court’s decision were distributed to the press at this moment. Not this time. “I have for announcement,” Warren said, “the judgment and opinion of the Court in No.1—Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka.” The Associated Press alerted its newspaper and broadcast clients. Bells on wire machines in newsrooms around the country began to ring. In Chicago, the Defender halted its presses 8,000 copies into the run of its national edition.

  Slowly and deliberately Justice Warren read from the opinion, reviewing the history of segregation, the arguments in the current case, and alternative solutions. Fifteen minutes into Warren’s reading, Payne, the reporters, the lawyers, and the lucky members of the public who were in the audience could not yet tell which way the court was ruling. The first clue came when Warren asked, “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?

  “We believe that it does,” he said. The Associated Press rushed out another bulletin and Warren read on. He reviewed more case law and took the unusual action of referring to the opinions of social scientists, most notably those of Kenneth and Mamie Clark. Their experiments with black and white dolls had revealed a preference for white dolls among all children, thereby buttressing arguments that segregation internalized racism among black children.

  At last Warren came to the point. “We conclude,” he began. Then, deviating from the text before him, he inserted the word “unanimously” and continued reading, “that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” At that moment it was clear to all what had transpired. Even from his bench above, Warren felt the audience’s reaction. “When the word ‘unanimously’ was spoken,” he recalled years later, “a wave of emotion swept the room, no words or intentional movement, yet a distinct emotional manifestation that defies description.”

  For Payne it was beyond belief. “There I was—right in the middle of it and almost out of my mind!” she wrote, trying to explain the moment to her readers. “I’m so excited, like I’m drunk. I’m turning around like those spinning tops.” The Associated Press was finally able to report to its clients the entirety of the court’s decision. In thirty-four languages the Voice of America flashed the news around the world on its network of shortwave stations. Within a few hours, listeners from tiny Albania to the vast reaches of Communist China heard the news in their own languages along with explanations that the issue was settled by law rather than mob rule or dictatorial fiat. In Farmville, Virginia, sixteen-year-old Barbara Trent, a Moton High School student, burst into tears when her history teacher announced the decision. “We went on studying history, but things weren’t the same, and will never be the same again.”

  When the decision was broadcast on the radio in Washington, the mostly black cabbies celebrated their jubilance with a cacophony of blaring horns. Now rolling quietly, a taxi picked up Payne on the steps of the courthouse. She gave the driver an address on Park Place, where Sarah Bolling, a widow, and her two young sons lived. One of her sons had been refused admission to Sousa Junior High School four years earlier. His legal case, Spottswood Thomas Bolling v. C. Melvin Sharpe, was one of the five school desegregation cases that comprised the court’s decision.

  A gangly but athletic boy, the sixteen-year-old Spottswood did not relish the publicity. When he came around the corner and spotted the photographers at his house, he started to back away. “Heck,” he said, “I thought those guys would give up and go home.” Payne won admission to the house and sat down to talk with Sarah Bolling, who had been let off early from her government bookbinding job when word of the ruling came down.

  “At first,” she told Payne, “I couldn’t realize that it had really happened.” She had been anxious during the ordeal. Some had tried to discourage her from using her son as a test case, and she didn’t want to stir up antagonism among her neighbors. Happy the matter was at an end, she told Payne, “I wish that all the people could understand that we want for our children the same rights as any other human beings.”

  EVEN THOUGH ITS ATTORNEY GENERAL had filed a brief in support of the NAACP’s case, the White House puzzled over how to react to the unanimous decision. The first indication of the president’s public sentiments came at his weekly press conference two days after the ruling. He stayed clear of recognizing Payne, Dunnigan, or Lautier. The white reporters he selected launched into questions about the McCarthy hearing. At last a correspondent from South Carolina asked Eisenhower about the Brown v. Board ruling. “Mr. President,” he said, “do you have any advice to give the South as to just how to react to this recent Supreme Court decision banning segregation, sir?”

  “Not in the slightest,” Eisenhower replied. “I thought that Governor Byrnes [of South Carolina] made a very fine statement when he said, ‘Let’s be calm and let’s be reasonable and let’s look this thing in the face.’ The Supreme Court has spoken and I am sworn to uphold the constitutional processes in this country; and I will obey.” Two more questions on the case followed. But again reporters asked only about the political implications of the ruling and how it might affect the administration’s standing in the South, coming, as it did, under a Republican administration. The president curtly replied, “The Supreme Court, as I understand it, is not under any administration.”

  Given a chance to call on members of the press who represented readers most directly affected by the Supreme Court ruling, Eisenhower opted not to. Given the opportunity to use the presidential bully pulpit to urge citizens to follow the court’s edict because it was morally right, Eisenhower demurred. He said only that he would obey the decision. In seconds, it was back to the McCarthy hearings. The chasm between the black reporters and the white ones was so deep that the person constitutionally obligated to enforce the court’s edict—the most significant advancement of civil rights since the Emancipation Proclamation—could escape a press conference with only a few light questions on the most important court ruling for African Americans in sixty-one years.

  CHAPTER 15

  ASKING QUESTIONS NO ONE ELSE WOULD

  PRIOR TO MAY 19, 1954, THE PRESIDENT HAD BEEN TAKING Ethel Payne’s questions at press conferences. “Eisenhower was probably very democratic, probably the most democratic, because he gave recognition to the smaller newspapers,” Payne said. “He didn’t just deal with the titans.” In April she had put an elaborately composed query to him. “Mr. President, in your housing message to Congress on January 25th you said the administrative policies governing the operations of the several housing agencies must be, and will be, materially strengthened and augmented in order to assure equal opportunity for all of our citizens to acquire, within their means, good and well-located homes. Then there was a further reference to the misuse of slum clearance laws to dislocate persons. I would like to know what administrative regulations have been issued by the housing agencies to implement this part of the message?”

  “You have asked a question,” Eisenhower replied, “that I will have to ask Mr. Hagerty [Eisenhower’s press secretary] to look up for next week. I know this: I know that every administrative part of government knows my policy and is trying to do it. Now, they may be slow getting around to it, sometimes.”

  A few weeks later, a tenacious Payne followed up on her housing pursuit. “Mr. President, I would like to refer to the question asked you on April 7th, as to whether the several housing agencies had issued any
regulations to implement the statement in your housing message to Congress, that everything should be done to assure good and well-located homes for all citizens. You said then that you would have an answer later for this. So far as we have been able to learn, no such specific regulations have been forthcoming. May I cite to you the situation at Levittown in Pennsylvania as an example where members of minority groups are being barred. I would like to know if you have any information at this point on this matter.”

  “Just a minute,” said Eisenhower. He leaned over and conferred with Murray Snyder, a former New York City reporter who had come on board as an assistant in the press operation. “Mr. Snyder,” Eisenhower resumed, “tells me that there have been some reports come to the White House, but they are of a general character; and the only hope of getting a detailed report, such as you describe, is to go to the FHA [Federal Housing Administration] people themselves, that department.”

  Payne’s two attempts to pin the president down on a matter of federal housing policy, clearly an issue important to her readers, failed to elicit much of an answer. But she had no plans to cease trying. Just asking paid dividends. In the six months she had been in Washington, Payne had learned, no matter what assurances Rabb—Eisenhower’s point man on race issues—gave privately, that matters of importance to black Americans remained absent from the public agenda in the capital. “The white press was so busy asking questions on other issues that the blacks and their problems were completely ignored,” she said. Presidential press conferences offered a national forum at which these issues could be raised. “So therefore I would think carefully about what kinds of questions I would ask the president, and before I did, I would research it and I went to the one man who I considered an authority and that was Clarence Mitchell Jr., the director of the Washington Bureau of the NAACP.”

  PAYNE COULD NOT HAVE SELECTED a better ally. Mitchell was an old hand in Washington who was also press savvy, having once worked for the Baltimore Afro-American. He first came to Washington in 1941 to take a job in the Negro employment and training branch of the Office of Production Management. The work, he said, quickly gave him a taste of what he was up against. “After a long conference with the vice-president of Goodyear Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio, about the importance of using all the nation’s manpower in defense plants without racial discrimination, he concluded the meeting by asking me, ‘Do you know where I could find a good cook?’ ”

  Following his stint with the government, Mitchell moved to the NAACP’s Washington office, eventually rising to become, by the time Payne met him, the organization’s chief lobbyist and director of the bureau. In the halls of Congress, the sight of dark-skinned, professionally dressed Mitchell—like the sight of Payne and her two black press colleagues—was rare. It had been only a few years, said Mitchell, since “on the floor of the U.S. Senate, the voice of Bilbo* could be heard yelling ‘nigger’ as often as the prayers of the Senate chaplain.”

  Payne made it a habit to frequent Mitchell’s office in a small brick building on Massachusetts Avenue a few blocks from the Capitol. Wise now to political journalism, she rewarded Mitchell with a long and flattering profile in the Defender, a typical favor that journalists routinely do when forging a relationship with an important source. Regardless of her intent, her description of Mitchell’s skills was spot-on. “Mitchell has developed an uncanny instinct for behind the scenes maneuvering and he knows the habits and background of most of the government officials that it is hardly necessary for him to consult the unique and extensive card file in which he keeps voting records and other pertinent facts relating to each.”

  “You know,” she would say in her meetings with Mitchell, “I want to raise a question next week at the press conference. What do you think I should ask the president about?” Mitchell would then brief Payne on the status of legislation important to African Americans, and the two would craft a question that might draw out the president’s sentiments, reluctant as he was to show his hand in matters of civil rights. Unknown to Payne, Mitchell was playing the same game with Dunnigan, although she was far more timid than Payne in pursuing her quarry.

  Payne appreciated the help. Unlike her white colleagues in the press corps who had offices with desks and support staff, she was a one-person shoestring operation. “My office,” she quipped, “was the cluttered living room of my small apartment and the murky depths of a battered bag.” She slept little and kept a grueling schedule of cranking out three, four, or even five stories at a time to make up for the paper’s lack of wire services. Sometimes she had to head out into the night at two or three in the morning to get her stories into the mail in time to reach Chicago before the weekly’s deadline. “I got to be known among the cabdrivers and they sort of formed a benevolent protective association,” she said. “One of them, one of this crew, would wait for me until I came out. ‘Come on, it’s time for you to go home. You shouldn’t be out by yourself.’ ”

  But Mitchell was rendering more than just assistance. His counseling and eventual partnership with Payne provided a sense of a mission larger than reporting alone did. “I really, actually, became the conduit for getting questions directly to the president and then the information would come back,” said Payne, “and I felt I was doing a real service that way.”

  LOUIS LAUTIER DIDN’T SHARE Payne’s view of her work. In fact, he used his column in the Afro-American to sarcastically chastise her and Dunnigan for competing with each other as to who could ask the longest question. While he was right about the length of their questions, the pair weren’t in a competition. Rather, they were working together. “Alice Dunnigan and I,” Payne said, “put our heads together and decided to team up so that each week there would always be a question on some phase of civil rights.”

  Mitchell publicly rebutted Lautier’s criticism. He published a letter in the Afro-American expressing the NAACP’s delight with the pursuit of the president by Payne and Dunnigan. Specifically he explained that Payne’s questions on housing were of vital importance because nothing had been done to act on the president’s promise to reduce discrimination in the assisted housing program. “I am grateful that these questions have been asked,” wrote Mitchell, “and I hope that they will continue because, after all, that is what a press conference is for.”

  The president resumed taking Payne’s questions when Brown v. Board ceased to be as newsworthy. In mid-June, Eisenhower told Hagerty that he had deliberately called on Payne during the spring because he didn’t want to give the impression he was ignoring the black press even though he considered many of her questions foolish. “You know, Jim,” said Eisenhower, “I suppose nobody knows how they feel or how many pressures or insults they have to take. I guess the only way you can realize exactly how they feel is to have a black skin for several weeks. I’m going to continue to give them a break at press conferences despite the questions they ask.”

  Two days later he did just that. Getting the nod, Payne once again pursued her line of questioning about civil rights. On her mind was a recent incident on an interstate bus bound for Atlanta. Police officers had forcibly separated a white student from Italy from his seat next to his black friends in the Jim Crow section of the bus. After telling the president about the incident, Payne said there were several pending measures in the House to ban segregation in interstate travel. “I understand that the attorney general was asked to render an opinion on this. I would like to know if you plan to use any action to get these bills voted out of committee?”

  “The attorney general hasn’t given me any opinion on the bills; I haven’t seen them; I know nothing about them,” Eisenhower answered. “I think my general views on this whole subject are well known, and you also know that I believe in progress accomplished through the intelligence of people and through the cooperation of people more than law, if we can get it that way. Now, I will take a look. I don’t know what my opinion is, really, at this minute on that particular law.”

  And so the president and Payn
e resumed their cat-and-mouse game.

  CHAPTER 16

  IRKS IKE

  THE BROWN DECISION FIRED UP THE CIVIL RIGHTS COMMUNITY, who had grown increasingly impatient with the pace of change. The NAACP was the hero of the day, while the more accommodation-minded organizations came in for criticism. Inside the National Urban League, one of the organizations whose approach was now being questioned, a behind-the-scenes battle broke out for control. Unfortunately for Ethel Payne, she took an interest in the story.

  For forty-four years, this civil rights organization had focused its energy on opening up employment opportunities for black Americans, a tactic that now seemed docile in light of the NAACP’s legal victory. The Urban League’s executive secretary, Lester Granger, came under attack from critics who believed he kowtowed to white business leaders, especially as so many members of the organization’s board were white. His defenders argued that Granger was simply remaining true to the league’s original mission. In fact, they said that Granger’s close relationship with industrialists, and now with the Eisenhower administration, had opened thousands of new jobs for African Americans.

  If for no other reason than it gave ink to Granger’s opponents, any reporting Payne did on the dispute would strengthen their hand. But she went further. Payne published accusations about James E. Dowling, Granger’s most important ally, without checking on their veracity. In an unsigned column, Payne referred to Dowling as “one of the nation’s biggest real estate manipulators” who had financially supported the construction of a housing project that excluded blacks. She reported that he was closely connected to U.S. Steel, which was resisting efforts to increase its minority hiring, and threw in a charge, for good measure, that he got into Who’s Who only by virtue of his connection to the league.