Eye on the Struggle

by James McGrath Morris

  At length, almost as if she were writing a legal brief, Payne spoke of the enhanced reputation of the paper since she had come to Washington. “A check of the Congressional Record would show that the Defender is more often quoted than any other Negro paper,” she said. “This is not mere happenstance. It means that we have national respect.”

  On top of her good work, said Payne, she had come cheap. She had not received a raise in four years and supplemented her $5,200 to $5,400 annual salary from the Defender with freelance work. But her hometown offered no extra work of the sort she had been able to get in Washington. “Therefore to come back to Chicago now would mean a real financial hardship.”

  Payne consulted her Newspaper Guild contract with the Defender. It included a clause that prohibited transferring employees to work in another city without their consent and stated that employees should not be penalized for refusing to accept a transfer. Frostily addressing her note to “Mr. Martin,” Payne declined the transfer.

  The conflict was bizarre. For years the paper had touted Payne’s presence in Washington, had used her name in advertisements, and, most tellingly, had built its headlines around her rather than the news. Now it was treating her callously.

  John Sengstacke was taciturn as to his motives. A strong Eisenhower supporter, he may have grown discouraged with Payne’s drift away from her positive coverage of the administration to her now-disparaging articles. If this was not the cause of Sengstacke’s unhappiness with Payne in Washington, money was certainly an issue. Since going daily two years earlier, the hoped-for additional advertising and increase in circulation had not materialized; meanwhile, editorial costs had risen substantially to meet the need for more news copy. Sengstacke had also purchased a new building and a new press, which by his own admission that spring was an ill-timed decision, as the nation was wallowing in a recession. Cutting costs was an imperative.

  However much she argued, Payne knew that Sengstacke’s decision, for which Martin was only the messenger, was irreversible. In her entreaties, Payne revealed both her gratitude and affection for Martin. “If I have amounted to anything in the world of journalism, it has been because you have guided me and I have always had the greatest confidence in your advice, even though some times we may have irked each other. I should have qualified that to say I did most of the irking.”

  The answer to her appeal came swiftly. The Defender sent her a formal announcement that it was closing its Washington bureau. Payne was flummoxed. She turned to the guild for help. Unfortunately, the union couldn’t do anything beyond determine that she would receive payment for severance and vacation time. Because she had refused to go back to Chicago and the Washington office was being closed, the paper “reluctantly considers that you have resigned,” explained a guild officer.

  In August, Sengstacke sent Payne a letter along with a check for $1,004.60, the balance due her. He added a postscript: “I know that you are and will always be a Defender booster.”

  CHAPTER 24

  THE DOOR REMAINS CLOSED

  IF THE CHICAGO DEFENDER NO LONGER WANTED HER IN Washington, Ethel Payne decided to find someone who did. She turned to organized labor. The CIO, which earlier had given Payne freelance work, had merged with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The resulting labor behemoth found a place for her in its new ten-story modernist edifice on Sixteenth Street overlooking St. John’s Church, known as “the Church of the Presidents.”

  In June 1958, less than a month after leaving the Defender, Payne was installed as the first black employee at the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education (COPE), which worked for the election of candidates friendly to the labor movement and tried to ensure their subsequent loyalty by monitoring and publicizing their voting records once in office. With a salary of $170 a week, 60 percent more than what she had earned at the paper, Payne became the highest-ranking African American women in organized labor.

  Payne put her pen to work promoting the agenda of the labor movement, particularly among African Americans and women. She channeled her journalistic experience into producing two biweekly publications, one that went to the wives of union members and another for minority leaders in and out of the labor movement. She also prepared press releases for black newspapers.

  But the union had hired more than a writer. In Payne, COPE found someone who could carry the union’s message to previously impenetrable black organizations. Within a year, Payne logged more than 100,000 miles in travel attending such varied gatherings as the Imperial Court Daughters of Isis, an auxiliary to the Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order Nobles Mystic Shrine of North and South America and Its Jurisdictions, and the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks of the World, both African American versions of the white fraternal orders better known as the Shriners and the Elks. Payne even attended the annual convention of black beauticians in Cleveland, which welcomed civil rights activists, especially a female one.

  With the hike in salary Payne converted her membership in the NAACP, dating back more than twenty years, into a life membership. The $500 gift, however, went astray and it wasn’t until months later that the organization acknowledged it. “No voluntary organization chooses to offend anyone,” Roy Wilkins wrote in a contrite letter. “But if I had a choice, you would have been the last person to be accorded this treatment.” A month later, wearing one of her distinctive feathered fascinator headbands, Payne went to the house of the Right Reverend Stephen Gill Spottswood, a member of the NAACP national board, to receive her life membership plaque.

  After years of being on the outside of Washington, Payne was on the inside.

  WORKING FOR A LABOR UNION removed any remaining fetters on Payne’s partisanship. In early 1959, Clare B. Williams, the assistant chairman of the Republican National Committee, returned from a tour of the South and proclaimed that moderation, understanding, and time would be required to end segregation. “To say that I was indignant is an understatement,” Payne wrote to Williams, making sure to send copies to the GOP’s Val Washington and others. “Seldom have I seen a more contemptuous attitude displayed in your quoted statements on the integration question.” The word moderation has the connotation to black Americans of “never never,” Payne said. “Worse still, you have committed the Republican Party to condoning lynchings, violence, and defiance of the law.”

  Payne also found herself freed from the conventional journalistic restraint on seeking personal favors from those one covers. Back in Chicago, her nephew James A. Johnson, who was a good student and ambitious, worried that his public school’s rough-and-tumble student culture was endangering his dream of becoming a doctor. Payne’s years on Capitol Hill and her network of contacts gave her an idea. During the 1957 Christmas holidays, Payne talked with Congressman Barratt O’Hara, an avuncular member of the Chicago delegation and a onetime newspaperman, about the possibility of nominating Johnson, who lived in his district, for a position as a Capitol page. If the plan worked, Johnson would come and live with Payne and attend the Capitol Page School, benefiting from its topflight instruction. The idea excited her nephew, to whom Payne had been the “mysterious aunt who was always doing exciting stuff.”

  In the summer of 1958, Johnson had reached the minimum age of fourteen and O’Hara pushed ahead with the nomination for the congressional session beginning in January. O’Hara was under the impression that there had been black pages in the past. “I did not want to push the boy into an integration battle that might prove embarrassing,” he said. He was mistaken. At the time, neither the Senate nor the House believed it had ever had a black page.

  In a chamber in which everything from committee assignments to parking and stationery allotments was in the firm control of veteran Southern representatives, the nomination of a black youngster as a page remained out of the question in 1959. But the committee that made the decisions regarding pages was under the misapprehension that O’Hara and Representative Thomas O’Brien, the state’s senior member of the congressional delegation
, were sponsoring the same page candidate, a white teenage boy. The staff only glanced at O’Hara’s letter before letting him know his nomination had been approved. Then the trouble began.

  THINKING EVERYTHING WAS ALL SET, O’Hara’s staff telephoned Payne several times to plan for Johnson’s arrival and provide a list of the clothing—blue suit, white shirt, black tie—that the youngster would need when he reported for work. Payne called her sister and told her to put herself and her son on a plane.

  Only when the two arrived did O’Hara and Payne learn that the chair of the patronage committee, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, had declared the young boy was not in line for a page position, nor would he get one. The Southern leadership of the House had put the kibosh on Johnson’s nomination and was surprised and furious at O’Hara’s gumption. Both O’Hara and Payne acted dumbfounded, although they had to have known of the potential roadblocks. While leaders claimed the denial was procedural in nature, no one was fooled. “Most Negroes are firmly convinced that Jimmy Johnson was knocked out by the Dixiecrats,” wrote Louis Martin in his Defender column.

  Meanwhile the press, white and black, glommed onto the story. The Chicago Tribune’s Washington correspondent persuaded Johnson to be interviewed on the steps of the Capitol, where he posed for an Associated Press photographer. “The Southern congressmen don’t want me,” Johnson said, almost in tears.

  With the Page School’s door apparently solidly locked shut, Payne enrolled Johnson in a Washington public school “while,” she told reporters, “we continue to try for a page position.” But none materialized. Instead, O’Hara and Payne came up with an alternative plan. According to the rules, one did not have to be a page, only an employee of Congress, to attend the Page School. So five members of the House agreed to each hire Johnson as a part-time messenger. By March, Johnson was attending the Page School; he dressed and worked like a page, but remained barred from the floor of the House.

  With a partial victory achieved, Payne had a new concern. At age forty-seven, she suddenly found herself in charge of a youngster for the first time in her adult life. Fortunately she found help. The pastor in Johnson’s Chicago church contacted his counterpart in a church in Payne’s neighborhood. A meeting was arranged at which Payne and Johnson were introduced to the Davises, an African American family who were members of the mostly white congregation of the Augustana Lutheran Church. In fact, their teenage son Herman “Skip” Davis was the church’s first black acolyte. The pastor explained to the Davis teenager that Johnson would soon be the first black page on Capitol Hill and that his aunt was one of the first black White House correspondents. “But as young kids fourteen years old,” said Davis, “all you are thinking about is how we can have fun together.”

  The two boys immediately became fast friends and the Davis family relieved Payne of the worry about what to do with her nephew while keeping up with her busy schedule and travel. If the two were not at Payne’s apartment they could be found in the Davises’ house. “But we knew what rules were,” recalled Davis, “and because Aunt Ethel traveled a lot, we never caused any problems at all out of respect for our parents and Aunt Ethel.”

  Johnson did well with his schoolwork. “He’s faithful to the books. He’s never allowed the frustrations to discourage him,” Payne told Ebony magazine. “He should be made a page—just for one day—under suspension of House rules.”

  THE CONTROVERSY OVER Payne’s nephew died down in the press, but its lingering effect had national policy implications. In late January 1960, civil rights legislation intended to plug some of the holes in the weak 1957 Civil Rights Act was bottled up in the House Rules Committee. Payne’s friend Clarence Mitchell, the lobbyist for the NAACP, was searching for signatures, particularly Republican ones, for a discharge petition that would pry the bill out of the committee and send it to the floor for a vote.

  Representative William H. Ayres, a Republican from Ohio, saw a golden opportunity to needle the Democrats, whose members were divided on civil rights issues. He informed the Democratic leadership that he would sign the petition “as soon as they do justice to little Jimmy Johnson” by giving him his promised job as a page. “If they can’t keep their word to one Negro,” he added mischievously, “how do they expect to handle the problems of eighteen million?”

  Mitchell was beside himself. “I too believe that it is a national disgrace when Congress finds it impossible to give one little boy a job simply because of the color of skin,” he told Ayres. But it wouldn’t help Johnson or other victims of racial injustice if civil rights legislation remained held up in committee. “It amounts,” Mitchell said, “to punishing those who need legislative protection of their civil rights because of unjust discrimination against one member of the racial group most effected by segregation.”

  Eventually the bill found its way to the floor and was passed. But as with the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which this one was intended to improve, the law was mostly a symbolic gesture that did little to strengthen the federal government’s hand on matters of racial discrimination. Its passage, as well as that of the 1957 law, revealed that Southern lawmakers could no longer halt legislation abhorrent to them, but they could still gut the bills that endangered their beloved segregation.

  TWO YEARS INTO HER NEW LIFE at the AFL-CIO, Payne found her job increasingly intolerable. The work was dull in comparison to her former life. Instead of being able to dash off to some trouble spot in the South, she now had to fill out travel requisitions weeks ahead of any trip. She had become a bureaucrat.

  More odious to her was organized labor’s dismal record on race in its own affairs. In Washington, for instance, black workers were barred by union rules from working on a major restoration project to the U.S. Capitol. Union president George Meany refused to fix this injustice. A. Philip Randolph, with whom Payne had worked side by side on the March on Washington Movement, sought to create the Negro American Labor Council to put pressure on the AFL-CIO to end segregated locals. For his actions, Randolph became a Meany target and was censured by the AFL-CIO’s executive board. “Who the hell appointed you guardian of all the Negroes in America?” Meany yelled at Randolph during the union’s annual convention.

  “Now the letters are pouring into headquarters here in protest of this latest business,” Payne told her mother. Inside the AFL-CIO headquarters, Meany’s inaction in regard to the racist behavior of its member labor unions put the spotlight on Payne and the handful of black employees. “It means,” said Payne, “that we have literally become ‘sacred cows,’ so afraid are they of offending us any further!” But Payne was trapped. With her lack of a college degree, she couldn’t walk away from her high-salary job without some alternative, especially with her nephew living with her.

  But that did not mean she had to remain loyal. She bit the hand that fed her when the AFL-CIO turned its attention to the 1960 election. It sought to strengthen its hand within the Democratic Party by winning coveted seats on the Democratic National Committee (DNC). In Washington, the AFL-CIO believed it had a lock on getting J. C. Turner, a prominent white Washington labor union official, onto the DNC. Payne, however, had a different plan.

  She and several other women formed the Metropolitan Women’s Democratic Club to, in Payne’s words, “give the girls a chance to flex their muscles in the political action field.” The club was an affront to traditional political organizers. Women were counted on to work in politics but not to take on leadership roles.

  Payne was elected the club’s first president. For its initial foray into the political arena, the women decided to work to elect to the DNC underdog Frank D. Reeves, a Canadian-born black NAACP attorney. With their help, Reeves pulled off an upset, denying the AFL-CIO its seat on the DNC and becoming the first African American on the party’s governing board.

  The Metropolitan Women’s Democratic Club and other similar organizations connected career-minded women, particularly black women. At the time, women were expected to find fulfillment in domesticity, not a
ctivism. In these sororal organizations they could be appreciated for who they were. Payne valued the support all the more because she remained alone in life. She had not married and had not sustained any serious relationship with a man. Her success and stridency was off-putting to African American men. But club friends, such as Arabella Denniston, Mary McLeod Bethune’s former right-hand person, provided important companionship. The two single women played the board game Scrabble, often into the wee hours of the morning, fighting furiously over words. “She’d grab her dictionary,” recalled Payne, “and I’d say, ‘Your dictionary is no damn good!’ So I’d bring my own dictionary. We used to have a lot of fun.”

  Payne was soon at odds again with her bosses over their support of the leading Democratic Party candidates for the nomination, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Stuart Symington, and Adlai Stevenson. Payne knew from firsthand experience on Capitol Hill that even Richard Nixon, the likely Republican nominee, had a better civil rights record than any of the Democratic contenders. In particular, Payne retained serious reservations about Kennedy. “My doubts grew out of the senator’s switching positions in a crucial test on a civil rights vote in 1957.”

  IN JULY PAYNE WENT to Los Angeles for the Democratic National Convention. It was the first time she had sat with the party activists rather than in the press box at a convention. The morning after Kennedy secured the nomination on the first ballot, rumors circulated that he was going to pick Lyndon Johnson as his vice-president. Seeing a South that was growing hostile to the Democratic Party, Kennedy wanted a Southerner, especially one who could secure the electorally rich state of Texas. Payne, like many other blacks, was leery of the choice. She was willing to forgive Kennedy’s transgressions in the fight over the 1957 Civil Rights Act, but she still blamed Johnson for the evisceration of the act.