Eye on the Struggle

by James McGrath Morris

  The optimism Payne felt in May 1954 when the Supreme Court handed down its Brown v. Board ruling was fading. Under the headline IKE’S ANTI-BIAS RECORD ALL TALK, NO ACTION she offered a dour assessment of the administration she had previously praised. Payne recounted in detail the key civil rights questions put to Eisenhower during her two years of attending his press conference. “The record,” she wrote, “shows that although President Eisenhower has spoken out against using federal funds to promote and continue discrimination, no concrete steps have been taken to halt the practice.”

  Even the Supreme Court let Payne down. In May it had issued its much-anticipated order concerning how the nation would be required to desegregate its schools. Payne’s front-page story did not mask her displeasure. Calling the court’s plan that states should proceed in desegregating schools with “all deliberate speed” a “poor compromise,” Payne made it clear that in her view the justices had capitulated to the South by failing to set a firm deadline.

  In the midst of this gloom, events in the South caught Payne’s attention. For more than two years she had tried to persuade the Defender to send her on a tour of the South on a larger scale than the one she took in 1953. Her editors remained uninterested. But suddenly the South turned into a Chicago story.

  Emmett Till, a teenager from South Side Chicago, had gone to spend his summer with relatives in rural Mississippi. Familiar with segregation Chicago-style, Till was woefully unprepared for Mississippi’s feudal system. One evening, dared by other boys, Till entered a store and either wolf-whistled or made some sort of comment to a young white woman who had been a local high school beauty queen. The story of his impudent behavior spread rapidly in the white community. Several nights later two men came to the house where Till was staying, dragged the boy to their car, and sped off into the darkness. Three days later his decomposing body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River.

  Till’s body was returned to Chicago in a sealed casket that his mother, Mamie Bradley, ordered opened for four days of viewing. The disfigured head shocked Chicago and—after Jet magazine published photographs of the mutilated corpse—blacks across the nation as well. (No major white newspaper published any of the photographs.) The South, from which so many Chicago blacks had escaped, had come north.

  The Defender opened its pages to coverage of every aspect of the funeral. As Jet had done, it too published the horrifying photographs of the dead boy. Few mourners had ever heard of the young man until they read about the crime. The marks of the barbed wire by which he was bound to the weight used to sink him in the river were still visible on his corpse. “The people saw them and grew angry,” reported the Defender. “Most of them were thinking it is no crime for a boy to whistle at a pretty woman. They were thinking, ‘My son might do it—or yours.’

  “And thinking that, they suddenly felt ‘Bo’ Till belonged to them. And they came to see him. Many of them talked to him.

  “They all swore they’d never forget him.”

  THE TWO WHITE MEN who had dragged Till from his great-uncle’s house were put on trial before an all-white, all-male jury in a small backwater Mississippi town. Every lawyer in town donated his services and a pot of money was raised for their defense. Mamie Bradley, Congressman Charles Diggs Jr., and the national and black press headed south to attend the trial. The Defender editors refused to send Payne, saying they feared for her safety. “So I had to stay in Washington against my will,” she said. “It’s not that I am brave. My curiosity and an insatiable desire to be on the scene simply overpower any fear I may have.”

  Instead the Defender assigned L. Alex Wilson, the tall cerebral reporter who had discovered Payne’s writing ability in Japan and now ran the Memphis Tri-State Defender, which Sengstacke had launched four years earlier. The trial was short and the two men were acquitted of murder. The only possible charge hanging over the two would be if another grand jury, this one in the county where Till’s body had been found, rendered an indictment on kidnapping.

  In Washington, Payne was left to pursue the federal angle on the story. First she covered attempts by civil rights leaders to get the Justice Department to act in the matter. The chief of its criminal division declined, saying the department had no jurisdiction over the crime. But he assured Roy Wilkins, Thurgood Marshall, Clarence Mitchell, Medgar Evers, and Ruby Hurley during an hour-and-forty-minute meeting that the department would pursue instances of murder and threats in Mississippi that related to voter intimidation.

  Following the meeting, Wilkins told Payne that the federal government should not escape its responsibility to prevent further bloodshed in Mississippi by shifting the obligation to the state government. That, however, is exactly what the federal officials were doing, leaving the last remaining hope for justice in the hands of a Mississippi grand jury. While it pondered indicting two men for kidnapping, segregationists worked on the outside to make it easier for the jury to choose not to.

  It had been believed that Emmett Till’s father, Louis, had served and died as a private in World War II. Roy Wilkins planned on inserting remarks about the dead boy’s father’s service to his country in the speeches he was preparing for rallies. But on October 14, 1955, the Jackson Daily News published a copyrighted story entitled “Till’s Dad Raped 2 Women, Murdered a Third in Italy,” revealing that Louis Till had been tried, convicted, and hanged by a military tribunal for raping two Italian women and murdering a third in Italy during the waning days of the war. None other than General Dwight D. Eisenhower had signed the execution order. What more proof did one need, was the insinuation of the news trumpeted by the Southern newspapers: Black son was like black father, unable to restrain himself around white women.

  Mamie Bradley had not previously known the details of the death of her husband, from whom she had been separated before his enlistment. The Army merely sent her a telegram notifying her of Louis’s death that listed the cause as “due to willful misconduct.” She wrote inquiries to everyone she could, even to the president, but to no avail. By 1955, Bradley had decided she would never learn the full story. “I never imagined I would find out like this,” she said.

  Payne immediately sought to identify the source of the story. Certainly the reporters had not just happened upon it. She started with Bradley’s attorney William Henry Huff. An NAACP lawyer, Huff had been confronted about the story by reporters from the white press. It “may be true,” he told them, “but it has no bearing on the case.” But in actuality he knew how damaging the report was on the effort to get Till’s killers indicted. When he talked with Payne, he told her that he believed Mississippi senators James Eastland and John Stennis, iconic defenders of segregation, were behind the leak.

  Payne contacted the Army. Its spokesman denied it had released the records. After more digging, Payne learned from officials in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the office that oversees military justice, that Senator Eastland had used his position as chair of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to get the information from them. But on the record, a spokesman for that office backpedaled rapidly when confronted by Payne. He said that it was “a rigid policy of the Army never to permit records to be shown, but questions of inquiry on cases are answered.”

  On October 19, Payne published her revelations in a front-page story titled ARMY GAVE TILL FACTS TO EASTLAND. Outraged that Eastland had been able to obtain the story of her husband’s demise when she hadn’t been able to in all her years of inquiries, Bradley was immensely grateful to Payne for disclosing the identities of the leakers.

  A LITTLE OVER A MONTH LATER, in December 1955, Payne and other reporters got word of a new kind of civil rights protest. In Montgomery, Alabama, forty-two-year-old Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, had electrifyingly inspired the city’s black community when she was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger as required by city law. Three out of four bus riders in the city system were black, and for years they had endured onerous segregation laws that forced them t
o the back of the bus. Adding to the humiliation was that four black passengers could be made to stand in order to seat one white person, as no black was allowed to share a row with a white.

  The arrest of Parks sparked a boycott of the bus company. In place of the buses, a vast network of car pools and taxis, offering reduced group fares, ferried the boycotters to work and shopping. Meanwhile, a hundred miles northwest of Montgomery, in Tuscaloosa, another woman was threatening the racial order of the South. Twenty-six-year-old Autherine Lucy, who held a BA in English, was enrolling in the University of Alabama’s graduate library science program, having won a three-year court battle to be the first black student to win admission. Under the watchful eyes of police, Lucy’s first day of classes passed without incident. But over succeeding days white protesters began to mass on campus. By the third day she could safely reach her classes only by car, and later she escaped an angry crowd of 2,000 by lying hidden in the backseat of a police squad car. Rather than face the mob, university trustees suspended Lucy “for her own safety.”

  Payne was convinced that an important new front in the civil rights struggle was opening in Alabama, but her previous pleas to Chicago to be sent south had been rebuffed. She remained miles from the action. On Monday, February 6, 1956, however, her luck changed. The Defender’s ambitious publisher had turned the paper from a weekly into a daily, becoming after the Atlanta World the nation’s second black daily newspaper. The paper would now need a lot more copy. At 7:00 PM Louis Martin called and told her to get to Tuscaloosa and cover the Lucy admission fight. The next morning Payne went to National Airport.

  ON TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, Payne landed at the Birmingham, Alabama, airport. She learned that the main roads leading to Tuscaloosa were blocked to black lawyers, civil rights activists, and reporters. So instead Payne went into the city, where she found Lucy, who was staying with her brother-in-law and fending off anonymous threatening calls. Relatives stood guard with rifles and revolvers. “I’m not going to have her snatched from my care as they did the Till boy,” said her brother-in-law. Lucy told Payne that she was shocked at the violence directed toward her. “If the outsiders would leave the students alone,” she said, “I will definitely be able to make friends. I pride myself that I have always been able to make friends and to get along with people.”

  Publicly the students in Tuscaloosa expressed no interest in Lucy’s offer of friendship. Gathering around a Confederate flag at night, they sang “Dixie” and chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Autherine’s gotta go.” Press cameras captured the protests, in particular sending down the wires a photograph of a white student stomping on top of a car full of terrified black passengers. “The picture,” noted one observer, “gave the nation an accurate portrait of blacks engulfed in a sea of white rage.”

  The next morning, Payne and James Hicks, whom she had first met in Japan and who was now the executive editor of the New York Amsterdam News, rented a car and successfully made the drive to Tuscaloosa. There they met up with Emily Barrett, a reporter for the Alabama Citizen, a local black weekly, who had accompanied Lucy during her first days on campus. The three entered the University of Alabama campus. At the office of the public relations director, they asked permission to interview students. The officials turned down their request. The dean of women and the president also refused their requests for interviews.

  “You are in real danger,” warned the public relations director. “The mob is in control here. You are Northerners and considered outsiders here.” Turning to Barrett and Payne, he added, “You women might be mistaken for Miss Lucy and trouble can start all over again.” If they insisted on questioning students, the university would not be responsible for what might happen. The warnings issued by the public relations director may have been intended to scare Payne off, but at the same time, the danger was very real. Already Payne could see a small group of students gathering outside and looking into the office through the window.

  Before escaping from the hostile campus, Payne did manage to talk to some students, including Leonard Wilson, one of the leaders of the demonstrations. Prior to becoming a student at the university, Wilson had gained attention by introducing a measure at the Youth Legislature during his senior year of high school that called for sending Negroes back to Africa. Obsessed with segregation, he spent an hour a day compiling a scrapbook of newspaper clippings.

  “It is for the long-range benefit of this great institution that it remain an all-white school,” Wilson told Payne. “Lest it fall from its present standards, keeping ’Bama white is the only solution satisfactory to the great majority of taxpayers of Alabama.” Another student blamed the NAACP for putting Lucy’s life at risk. None of the students with whom she talked supported Lucy’s right to attend the university, but several were critical of the mob reaction.

  The Defender’s editors topped Payne’s dispatches with ETHEL PAYNE ADVISED TO QUIT CAMPUS and ETHEL SEES HATE IN STUDENT EYES.

  HICKS AND PAYNE RETURNED to Birmingham and then turned south, driving the hundred miles to Montgomery. The protesters welcomed them. The bus boycott, now entering its tenth week, was holding firm. But Payne found that hostility on the part of whites was on the rise. In fact, in her first report from the site of the protest, she said organizers were promoting a voluntary curfew. They urged that black citizens remain in their homes on the night that Mississippi senator Eastland, whom Payne referred to as a “racebaiting senator,” spoke to a rally of the White Citizens’ Council.

  As her first order of business, Payne sought out Ralph Abernathy Sr. The outspoken young minister had been the first religious leader that Nixon approached at the start of the boycott. The protesters believed that a boycott would fail without support of the city’s black ministers. In turn, Abernathy worked to include other ministers and contacted the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., a twenty-six-year-old minister who had come to town the previous year and with whom he had become good friends. At their first meeting, organizers created the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and selected King as president. In a short time, Abernathy and King were working as a team and becoming the public face of the campaign.

  Only a few out-of-town reporters had preceded Payne and Hicks to Montgomery. Carl Rowan, the African American reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune whom Payne had first encountered in Bandung, and his colleague, a white reporter named Richard Kleeman, had stopped in the city while on a tour of the South to write a series of articles for their paper in the wake of the Brown v. Board decision. From Bandung to Montgomery, Rowan and Payne were increasingly chasing the same stories and prizes. On their own, the two had made civil rights their main beat. They and their editors also saw them as competitors. In fact, the month before, their bosses had entered each journalist’s coverage of the Bandung conference in the Pulitzer Prize competition. Neither won.

  Beyond attracting Rowan and Kleeman, the story of the bus boycott had not yet gained traction in the mainstream media. Most newspapers and magazines had relied so far on wire copy, and the stories had run in the back pages. Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post had sent a reporter to the scene. The story still belonged to the black press.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE GLADIATOR WEARS A REVERSE COLLAR

  FOR ETHEL PAYNE, MONTGOMERY BROUGHT BACK MEMORIES of the 1941 March on Washington Movement. In fact, Edgar D. Nixon, one of the veterans of the march whom Payne knew, was a boycott organizer. But unlike her experience with the fractious Chicago march organization, what she saw in Birmingham was quite different. “The most impressive thing about the boycott is the absolute unity of purpose,” Payne told her readers. She found that the MIA had built a superb organizational structure that oversaw its finances, coordinated the alternative network of transportation, and possessed a steering committee that could respond quickly when needed.

  Payne shadowed Ralph Abernathy because Martin Luther King was in Chicago. The second-in-command struck her as “a soft-spoken rugged man with a pleasant smile.”
Over a series of days she watched as he made his round of nighttime meetings around the city, where he was greeted with cries of “Don’t get weary, son, we’re with you.” After the last evening meeting, Payne followed Abernathy home, where he talked late into the night with her and a handful of reporters. Even at this late hour his house was like a command center.

  Payne left Montgomery and flew to Chicago. There, in the offices of the Defender, she took stock of what she had seen in Alabama. Whatever she wrote would be mostly new to her readers. The boycott had barely been covered in the white newspapers. Abernathy’s and King’s names had only begun to be mentioned. The Defender, like other black newspapers, had given increasing attention to the story. But even then, it only made it to the front page when it was connected to violence.

  Payne was convinced there was more to the story than the boycott, though it was a new, exciting, and potentially potent weapon. But behind the protest’s facade, she perceived that an important and fundamental change was taking place in the leadership of the civil rights struggle. The key leaders of the boycott—from Fred Gray, the group’s lawyer, to its most visible commanders, Abernathy and King—were all men of the cloth.

  “A NEW TYPE OF LEADER is emerging in the South,” Payne wrote as she began her report under the headline THE SOUTH’S NEW HERO that appeared on February 15, weeks before the rest of the press would begin profiling the protest organizers. “He is neither an NAACP worker, nor a CIO political action field director. Instead, the gladiator going into battle wears a reverse collar, a flowing robe, and carries a Bible in his hand. This new, vocal, fearless, and forthright Moses who is leading the people out of the wilderness into the Promised Land is the Negro preacher.”