“Why, that’s half the human race!” she exclaimed when she finished reading the article.
“Exactly,” said Wright. “And that is why I want to go.”
On the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who represented Harlem, rose to urge that the government pay attention to the conference. Although the United States was not invited, Powell pleaded with the Eisenhower administration to send an integrated team of observers as a sign of support. “We need to let the two billion colored peoples on the earth, without whom we cannot continue much longer as a first-class power, know that America is a democracy of the people,” Powell said.
It was the last thing Eisenhower’s secretary of state wanted to hear. When the conference was first announced, John Foster Dulles saw it as a threat to U.S. interests, particularly since Zhou Enlai, the premier of the People’s Republic of China, was expected to attend. Simply put, the conference was a rejection of the Cold War division of the world into two camps. Instead these nations wanted to fashion a third, nonaligned way.
The administration told Powell he should not go. Until that moment he had not yet decided if he would attend. Furious, he now told the White House he was going even if it meant paying his own way. “Immediately all hell broke loose,” Powell said. The State Department tried to buy him off with a red-carpet trip to Asia and Africa if he would stay clear of Bandung. But nothing would dissuade him. “Bandung was a pilgrimage to a new Mecca,” he said.
THE BLACK PRESS JOINED in Powell’s enthusiasm. By the time Sengstacke called Payne, the National Negro Publishers Association had declared it was sending Louis Lautier to cover the conference. Marguerite Cartwright, a Hunter College professor and columnist for the New York Amsterdam News, also made known her plans to go.
The flurry of announcements of Bandung travel plans made by black reporters was no accident. Figuring it could not block Powell and others from attending, the White House had adopted the course of trying to make sure the “right” journalists got to Bandung. As one memorandum put it, “State is aware of the leanings of all who plan to attend. The plan seems to be to balance out representation rather than refuse permission.”
On the suggestion of Marquis Childs, chief Washington correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the White House focused its attention on Lautier, the lone black reporter loyal to Republicans. An idea was submitted to Nelson A. Rockefeller, who served as special assistant to the president for foreign affairs charged with developing a regime of psychological warfare against the Soviets in the international arena. Why not pay for Lautier’s trip and obtain the services of a friendly Negro reporter on the scene? “Lautier is aware that in order for him to make the trip, some financing will have to be arranged because the National Negro Press Association cannot afford to send him,” said an aide. He suggested that Rockefeller’s brother John pay or that money be taken from the American International Association for Economic and Social Development, a philanthropy run by Rockefeller. “If both of these previous suggestions cannot be worked out, it is not impossible for the CIA to finance it indirectly,” added the aide.
Meanwhile, unaware that the administration was already at work on damage control, C. D. Jackson, a former member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and now a Time-Life executive, wrote Rockefeller an anxious letter. The correspondence, labeled personal and confidential, was one that would catch Rockefeller’s attention because Jackson, who had been his predecessor in the job, had not entirely left government service. He was part of Operation Mockingbird, a secret CIA project to support the anticommunist attitude of the American media.
“One of Life’s editors, an old friend of mine who also happens to be a Negro, called me over the weekend in a state of considerable agitation,” Jackson told Rockefeller. According to his source, Jackson claimed that “three American Negroes”—Powell, Cartwright, and Lautier—with communist sympathies were heading to Bandung. “Maybe he had changed his beliefs,” Jackson said of Powell, “but there was a time not so long ago when his Communist flirtations were pretty shocking.” In Cartwright’s case, her husband “is reported to be at best a Fellow Traveler, at worst a card holder.” About Lautier, Jackson had little to say except to remind Rockefeller that he “was the one who recently got into the Press Club after considerable furor.”
Rockefeller turned to his aide and asked him to look into the matter. The man reported that nothing could be done about Powell that the State Department had not already tried. And nothing should be done about Lautier because he was on their side. Nor, as it turned out, would he need financing. “He has been highly recommended to attend by other responsible newspapermen,” the aide said, “and is endorsed by Lester Granger of the National Urban League, one of the most conservative Negro organizations, which is financing his trip.”
IF NOT MONEY, political pressure was being brought to bear to make sure the “right” black reporters would make the trip to Indonesia. In the eyes of the government, Carl Rowan was the dependable anti-Communist they wanted. He was the Minneapolis Tribune’s star black reporter and had entered journalism about the same time as Payne had, beginning at Minnesota black newspapers before being hired, with considerable fanfare, by the Tribune. In 1951, when the Newspaper Guild cited Payne for her work, Rowan was the other Negro writer they honored.
He had just returned from a State Department–funded tour of South and Southeast Asia. Allen Dulles, head of the CIA and brother to the secretary of state, called Rowan’s publisher John Cowles Sr. After hanging up with Dulles, Cowles got Rowan on the phone and asked if he knew about the Bandung conference.
Of course, replied Rowan.
“Dulles called me to say it would be a service to the nation if you were there,” Cowles said. “Allen says you would have access to the key people who will be there well beyond the access available to anyone in the Foreign Service. Think about whether you want to go.”
“Mr. Cowles, I don’t have to think about it,” Rowan replied. “I could never pass up a chance to cover a meeting as important as this one will be.”
Even Richard Wright’s trip from Paris to Bandung was being made courtesy of the U.S. government. Unable to obtain backing from an American foundation for his trip, Wright turned to the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Founded five years earlier by a group of internationally minded intellectuals, the congress had put on gatherings “in defense of culture” so pleasing to the CIA that it indirectly funded the congress to combat communist propaganda. The congress agreed to provide support for Wright’s travel expenses, and in turn, the writer obtained a pledge from the organization that he would attend the meeting as an independent journalist and not be censored in any manner.
Cartwright, the Hunter College professor and columnist, got wind of the behind-the-scenes machinations. Writing about the journalists with plans to go to Bandung, she disclosed, “One rather dramatic elaboration on the story was the rumor that the trips of both Mr. Lautier and Miss Payne were being financed by Nelson Rockefeller, to make certain—the story goes—that an ideologically ‘pure’ report would be disseminated in the Negro press.”
With all this government money flowing surreptitiously to reporters and writers, it was likely that the Defender was among the beneficiaries of the government munificence. A few months earlier Sengstacke had accepted a promise of a $2,000 payment from the Haitian embassy in Washington to support the paper’s coverage of President Paul Magloire’s visit to the United States. Payne knew about the Haitian payment and was aware that her colleagues were now using funds from various sources other than their newspapers to support their travel to Bandung. In fact, she reported to editor Louis Martin that Lautier and his wife’s journey was not being paid for by the National Urban League, as Rockefeller’s aide believed, but rather by the Crusade for Freedom, an organization that raised money for Radio Free Europe but also served as a conduit for CIA funds.
But if it was true that the government was helping to p
ay Payne’s $1,428.15 airfare, and for hotels, food, and taxis, she remained blissfully unaware. Payne publicly assailed Cartwright for having published the rumor that her travel had been paid for by the government. “Bunk pure and simple,” said Payne. And, in a private note to Martin, Payne wrote, “The remarkable thing is that the Chicago Defender is sending somebody on its own with no strings or under the table deals with somebody else.”
ON APRIL 13, 1955, Payne found herself once again on a plane above the Pacific Ocean. But what a difference four years made. In 1951 she had ridden in a military transport; now she traveled in the Pan American Clipper Polynesia, an 86-passenger Douglas DC-4. Instead of being an obscure employee of the military, Payne was now a highly regarded journalist whose departure had been covered on the front page of the Defender and touted in display advertisements.
As the plane gained altitude, Payne felt she was on her way to a rendezvous of great personal and historical significance. “As a reporter, it was my assignment to relay the events of the Asian-African conference,” she said. “More important, as a black American, it meant the emotional experience of interrelating my own ethnic background with those individuals of other ‘colored’ origins.”
The conference also fed one of Payne’s long-term passions. Ever since she wrote her award-winning essay at Crane College on “Interracial Relationships as a Basis for International Peace,” Payne had maintained a steady interest in the world beyond America’s borders. As a Washington correspondent, Payne had taken every opportunity she could find to write about issues that surfaced in the capital relating to Haiti, Liberia, and African colonies.
Attending the Bandung conference would put Payne in the midst of the world’s majority, quite unlike being a black reporter in white Washington. “The impact of that realization profoundly affected me in ways that are hard to describe,” she wrote later. “From henceforth, I would be in search of that newly found ego and the linkages between it and the ethos of the larger community of the darker races of the world.”
Including a refueling stop in Hawaii, Payne’s flight took almost twenty-two hours to reach Manila, where she was to spend the night and change planes. As soon as she debarked, the first thing she spotted was Adam Clayton Powell speaking with reporters. “He was talking about the conference and what a great thing this was,” Payne said, “because this was going to be strictly all colored people, colored people of the earth, and no Western nations were included, and he thought this was a phenomenal thing, which it was.”
In the short time in Manila, Payne found time to file a short dispatch highlighting the enthusiasm in the Philippines for the Bandung meeting. “Here in Manila,” she wrote, “there are impromptu discussions in parks, street corners, clubhouses, and other gathering places. The consensus will be an opportunity for the Republic to assert itself strongly as a vital force in world affairs.”
At the airport the next morning Payne ran into Carlos Peña Rómulo, a Philippine Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who now served as his nation’s ambassador to the United States. A dapper man, barely five feet four in shoes, Rómulo was leading the Philippine delegation. He invited Payne and Powell to fly the next leg of the journey to Jakarta in a plane provided by his government. Payne boarded the craft and found it already contained the prime ministers of Pakistan and Ceylon, among other dignitaries. In awe, Payne moved quickly past the group. “I kind of shrank up into a little ball in the back of the plane,” she said.
Under an array of the twenty-nine flags of the participating nations, musical bands greeted the plane as it landed in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital city. Payne waited patiently for the prime ministers, their entourage, and the delegates to debark. Through the window she spotted what looked like students with pads and pencils waiting around. She presumed they were at the airport to take notes during the welcoming ceremonies. At last Payne came out of the plane, but before she reached the bottom of the stairs, the young crowd surrounded her. “We want your autograph,” they yelled in English.
“Autograph?” replied Payne. “Well, I’m just a reporter. I’m not a VIP. There are all the VIPs over there.”
“No, no, no! We came to see the American Negro,” said one member of the group. “We heard you were coming, and we want to talk to you. We want to learn all about you, we want to learn about what’s happening in your country, to Negroes in your country.”
Reaching the tarmac, Payne obligingly answered their questions. Powell stood not far away. He was fuming that no American diplomat had met his flight. “Never to my knowledge has the United States government let down a member of the United States Congress more completely than it let me down,” Powell said, “and in doing so, let down all the American people, on Friday afternoon, April 15, 1955, in Indonesia.”
Nor were the students tending to Powell. “As light-skinned as he was,” said Payne, “there was some skepticism on the part of the locals about his true identity.” In fact, as Richard Wright observed, Powell was whiter in color than many whites. Here, far from America’s racial divide, Wright said, “the congressman had to explain that he was ‘colored,’ that his grandfather had been branded a slave.” After taking only so much of the group’s adulation of Payne, Powell came over. He put his arm around Payne and, according to her, said, “Me colored, too!”
CHAPTER 18
THE DEFENDER’S NELLIE BLY
AS THE SMALL PLANE FERRIED ETHEL PAYNE ON THE last short leg to Bandung, a stunning scene unfolded before her. The mountains that rimmed the city were green—yellow green if in the sun, blue green if in shadow. “But sometimes,” noted a reporter, “the blue green would darken to gray and be indistinguishable from the heavy, wet clouds that shrouded the peaks, producing a continuity of land, air, and moisture that seem peculiarly tropical.”
The city of 165,000 had been working for months to prepare for the gathering. Many streets had been repaved and the houses along the main thoroughfares repainted. Those students who spoke passable English were enlisted to serve as guides. A white-helmeted militia carrying submachine guns made its presence known in the hopes of controlling the crowds, warding off the guerrillas said to be in the nearby hills, and comforting the arriving luminaries.
The city’s fourteen hotels, all spruced up for the occasion, and thirty houses were commandeered for the 2,000 delegates, observers, and members of the press. Payne was given a room in a house about five blocks from the conference center. Three others shared the house with Payne. In the room next door was Valentina Scott, Moscow correspondent for the London Daily Worker, who was married to an African American and had lived in the Soviet Union since the Great Depression.
The purpose of the conference, as Payne explained to her readers, was to promote cooperation between Asia and Africa, to examine the problems nations on the two continents faced, and to look for cooperative ways to achieve world peace. The organizers were an independent-minded bunch. They recognized and invited China but excluded the South African government because of apartheid.
The work got under way in earnest on Monday morning when the delegates made their way to the Gedung Merdeka, an aging Dutch club that had been remodeled for the occasion. When the bulk of them had found their seats, the most prominent attendees paraded in: the Philippines’ Rómulo, in a Barong Tagalog; Iraq’s Muhammad Fadhil al-Jamali, in a morning coat; Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser (“the most handsome man I’ve ever seen in my life,” gushed Payne), in a khaki uniform; and China’s Zhou Enlai in a Sun Yat-sen tunic suit.
Without question the star attraction was Zhou, the drama of whose participation was heightened by the fact that assassins had blown up a chartered plane heading to the conference on which they mistakenly assumed he was a passenger. “Of all the great world figures who came to the conference,” Payne said of Zhou, “his was the most towering personality.” A New Yorker writer described the amount of attention lavished on the Chinese leader as “very reminiscent of the way they rushed Great Garbo any time this actress shows up on F
ifth Avenue.”
The excitement of the opening ceremonies seized Payne. “A freedom fever swept the 29-nation African-Asian conference on its opening day at this mountain resort,” she wrote, beginning her first dispatch from Bandung. The fever took hold, Payne wrote, when the African National Congress and the South African Indian Congress, whose nation was not invited, delivered a thirty-two-page document asking that the conference provide aid against apartheid. The call for freedom continued as observers from Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria, all parts of France’s empire, presented a document demanding their independence.
Payne’s enthusiasm turned her prose purple when Indonesian president Sukarno welcomed the assembled delegates. Delivering his speech in English, apparently only the second time he had ever done so, and with a sparing use of gestures, Sukarno captivated his audience for a full hour. “For sheer eloquence and artistry, he is a master,” Payne told readers. “He plays with words like an organist coaxing crescendos and pianissimos and blending them together in a tremolo which sends the blood tingling through your veins.”
She was charitable in her reporting, holding the authoritarian Sukarno to a standard that back home Eisenhower would have been grateful for. Deferential to a fault regarding the conference’s leading figures, Payne was more on her game when writing about the issues before the gathering. The presence of the Chinese at a conference from which Western nations had been excluded led to the assumption that the Reds would gain the upper hand at Bandung. This notion became even more prevalent when the South African anti-apartheid activists announced they would accept communist aid. But Payne correctly perceived that the delegates were no more interested in being dominated by the Chinese than by the Americans.
For Payne, the drive for self-determination was most evident when on the first day Iraq’s prime minister Muhammad Fadhil al-Jamali opened the conference by denouncing communism as “a new form of colonialism much deadlier than the old one.” During al-Jamali’s speech, Payne looked over at Zhou. He was listening but remained silent, betraying no annoyance. On the other hand, Jawaharlal Nehru of India stormed out. He complained to reporters that baiting Zhou could cause the conference to turn into a Red versus anti-Red battleground. His fears were unwarranted. The real challenge for the conference was finding common ground. After all, as Payne told her readers, “a colonial history is about the only thing the conference members have in common.”
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