Payne put on her striped skirt and jacket and made her way to the White House in the late afternoon sun. She returned that night to her apartment bearing a pen that had made the act a law.
THE FOLLOWING SPRING, the civil rights movement made it clear that its legislative business was not done. On Sunday, March 7, 1965, protesters in Alabama seeking to draw attention to the state’s insistent use of Br’er Rabbit–like trickery to keep blacks off the rolls of registered voters began a march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. State police used deadly force to halt the march as it crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, only hundreds of yards into its planned fifty-mile journey.
A week later, President Johnson came to Capitol Hill to address a joint session of Congress. Payne secured a seat. She did not want to miss this moment. As a voting rights organizer for the Democratic Party, she was anxious to see what the president was willing to do to back up his stated intentions of following up the 1964 Civil Rights Act with a federal voting rights law. The violence that met the group drew national attention to their cause and was forcing his hand. When Johnson rose to the dais on the floor of the House, more than seventy million Americans tuned in on their televisions to see what he had to say. In the gallery above, Payne listened in amazement.
In sonorous tones and in his distinct drawl, Johnson spoke in almost religious terms of the right to vote, making almost no reference to the Constitution or laws. Rather, he focused on an elusive idea of the “American Promise” and represented it in a narrative in which the time had come to grant the final act of freedom to its black citizens. “As a man whose roots go deeply into Southern soil, I know how agonizing racial feelings are,” Johnson said. “I know how difficult it is to reshape the attitudes and the structure of our society.”
All who listened knew the speech was unlike any the president had given before. They witnessed a rare moment in politics where quiet eloquence silenced noisy opposition. The events in Selma, Johnson said, were part of a movement that reached into every part of the nation. African Americans were securing for themselves the freedom they had long been denied. “Their cause must be our cause too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.” Then, pausing and leaning forward, Johnson repeated the words of the movement’s anthem, “And we shall overcome.”
Payne could not find words to describe her feelings at the end of his speech. Two days later, in her office, she sat at her typewriter. “I would like every schoolchild in American to have a copy of this speech,” she wrote the president. It ranks in importance, she said, with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. “I am proud and grateful for your leadership and I pledge to give my best efforts for the implementation of your program.”
Taking her pledge to heart, Payne flew to Selma to join the third attempt to make the march to Montgomery, but this time with the backing of a federal judge, who enjoined the police from stopping the marchers, and federal troops summoned by the president. Nonetheless, it was like stepping into the lion’s den. “You could just feel the hatred,” Payne said. “It was just like an enveloping cloak around you.”
At the spot where the earlier marches had been halted, hundreds of angry white Southerners, infuriated by the presence of federal troops, watched as 3,000 marchers crested the Edmund Pettus Bridge and descended toward them while army helicopters hovered above. Held back by a line of soldiers with bayonet-tipped rifles, the angry whites waved Confederate flags and racist placards. “I’ll never forget the faces, the contorted faces of housewives, standing out and screaming like they were just lunatics from the asylum, you know, just screaming such terrible epithets and hatred,” said Payne. They called out “Nigger, nigger, nigger!” and “Go to hell,” and cursed President Johnson. “The reaction of the people was so vitriolic,” Payne said. “You never realized how deep human hatred can be. And that was the way it was all along the march.”
Another life was taken. Klan members murdered a thirty-nine-year-old Detroit mother of five, Viola Liuzzo, for having given a ride to a young black protester. “This was a madness, just a total madness,” Payne said. “This was a time when all—it was a purging of the white South, all the venom that came out, and perhaps it was good, because it was just boiling over, and it was such an excess. It was a preparation for later acceptance of what they knew was inevitable.”
The police attack on the marchers and the ultimate success of the march impressed Capitol Hill. The Senate minority leader, Republican Everett Dirksen, joined the majority leader, Democrat Mike Mansfield, in supporting a bill like that demanded by the marchers in Selma. By August a bill was on the president’s desk granting the federal government immense judicial powers to end Southern methods of keeping their black citizens from the voting booth.
A Johnson aide was dispatched to deliver to Payne one of the pens the president used in signing the Voting Rights Act. Aside from Martin Luther King, she became one of the very few people who were not lawmakers to have a pen from the signing of both the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the two most seminally important legislative victories of the civil rights movement. She put both pens on display in her apartment.
THE DNC CHRISTMAS PARTY that year held a surprise for its employees. Despite the huge election victory the previous year, the party was broke. In fact, it was $2.5 million in debt. Of the eighty-five DNC employees, forty would lose their jobs. Payne’s job hung in the balance. “Is it possible that the Democrats are wiling to drift back to the nearly lily-white participating level the party had prior to Miss Payne’s arrival three and a half years ago?” asked Rosemarie Brooks, in her weekly Washington Round-Up column.
Payne deftly skirted the axe by taking a leave of absence to serve as a consultant to the Social Security Administration. Of the 19 million Americans eligible for the new Medicare program, almost 3.5 million had not signed up for the low-cost supplementary portions of the program. The administration put Payne on a twenty-two-city road trip to speak in churches and to civic groups to reach those who had not yet signed up before the annual deadline on March 31.
Payne returned to the DNC in time for an April conference of volunteers put on by the Democratic Party’s women’s division headed by Price. The gathering reflected the mood of women across the country. They were growing restless. It had been three years since the publication of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, and Pauli Murray were making plans to meet in Washington with other women to launch the National Organization for Women.
Payne could see the frustration among the women she worked with in the Democratic Party, particularly black women. Letters such as one from the president of the National Beauty Culturists’ League, an African American organization of cosmetologists, made it clear women felt unappreciated. “I see no future for the Negro women of the South,” wrote Katie E. Whickam, who was the first woman officer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “We are forced to believe now that we are not wanted for anything but to get out and get the votes during the campaigns.”
Unrest among the troops contributed to an already anxious atmosphere at the DNC in the summer of 1966. After his landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, President Johnson had steadily lost favor with the public as the war in Vietnam escalated. The midterm elections, always challenging for the political party that holds the White House, loomed ominously that fall. It was time for the DNC to dispatch its troops from Washington. Party officials decided to send Payne to Texas, where more than 400,000 black voters could conceivably be lured to the polls in the wake of the recent ratification of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, repealing the poll tax.
THE ELECTION IN THE LONE STAR STATE was a high-stakes personal grudge match. After Johnson’s election to vice-president, the Democratic governor appointed a fellow party member to fill the Senate seat. But in the ensuing special election, seventy-one candidates created a plethora of choic
es. The diminutive Republican John Tower, a college professor from Wichita Falls, emerged on top and went on to win the runoff when he was paired against a conservative Democrat who gave Texas liberals no reason to come out and vote.
Now, five years later, Tower was running for reelection. The Democratic establishment from President Johnson on down to Texas governor John Connally wanted to restore the normal order of things and pinned their hopes on Waggoner Carr, an established Democrat with a conservative record. Under normal conditions, simply being the Democratic candidate would have been enough to put Carr in the Senate. But times had changed, and Tower avoided being identified with the extreme conservatism of Goldwater. In fact, his only liability was his party label. “If Tower were running under the Democratic symbol,” noted pollster Louis Harris, “he would have little difficulty winning a second term.”
On August 28, Payne flew to Texas, charged by the party to get out the black vote. She crisscrossed the state in commercial and private planes for six weeks straight. “You should see me,” she told friends, “crawling in and out of a Piper Cub.” But no matter how hard Payne exhorted black voters to support the Democrats’ standard-bearer, it was an impossible task. “On the surface,” Payne said, “it would seem that job should be simple, just to get people to go to the polls and vote that man out.” But infighting destroyed any hope of party unity. “The liberals are mad at everybody and some Democrats instead of Republicans get confused and slug at other Democrats and so it’s a real can of worms, I’ll tell you,” she reported.
Moreover, her candidate was weak on minority issues and Tower’s campaign skillfully tapped into the state’s anti-North and anti-liberalism vein, further complicating Payne’s efforts. The Informer and Texas Freeman, the oldest black newspaper published west of the Mississippi, broke the code of black newspapers and attacked Payne, one of their own, someone who had been an icon of the black press. Noting that she was a “big shot Democratic official from Washington via Chicago” working in tandem with another outsider, George L. P. Weaver of the AFL-CIO, the paper said “Texas Negroes resent this intrusion and interference.”
“It will be smart,” continued the columnist, “and the exercise of good judgment and wisdom by Texas Negroes to repulse, resent, and repel these outsiders who think Texas Negroes are so dumb and stupid to slit their own throats by voting for Carr simply because these Negro big shots or any other Democratic big shots ask that they do.”
On Election Day, an exhausted Payne settled into a room at the Sheraton-Lincoln Hotel in Houston, where the Beatles had stayed the summer before. There was nothing left to do but wait. “There’s a worried air because this is a close election—this morning’s polls showed the candidates 49–49,” Payne wrote, finally finding time to send a letter to her family and friends.
Tower won handily, with almost 57 percent of the vote. But the election still yielded dividends for black Texans. For the first time in modern times, African Americans held legislative office, two men had won seats in the statehouse, and a young woman named Barbara Jordan was going to the State Senate. “I’m leaving Texas,” said Payne, “with a pack full of memories and high hopes for the future.”
BUT THE END OF the campaign season left Payne jobless. It had been eight years since she had left the Defender. Now, for the second time in her exile from journalism, she was without employment. A few weeks later, the phone rang in Payne’s Washington apartment. It was her old publisher, John Sengstacke. “How would you like to go to Vietnam?” he asked.
PART THREE
CHAPTER 26
SOUL BROTHERS IN VIETNAM
AFTER AN ABSENCE OF MORE THAN EIGHT YEARS, ETHEL Payne was back on the front page of the Chicago Defender. DAILY DEFENDER TO HAVE ITS OWN “MAN” IN VIET NAM, read the headline announcing Payne’s new assignment. “The facts behind the hardships and dangers Negro GIs are encountering at Christmas time in the Viet Nam jungles and in Saigon will be brought to Daily Defender readers firsthand by a woman correspondent,” heralded the article. While Payne would not be the first woman to cover the war, the assignment made her the first black reporter to do so.
The publisher told Defender readers that he was dispatching Payne to the war because he knew “that Negro mothers, wives and other kin are overly anxious about them during the holiday season.” Payne, he said, was to report on the activities of Negro soldiers and send messages back home from them. Asked about the dangers of the assignment, Payne admitted that her family and friends were worried. “But if colored soldiers and other military men can face it, I can too.”
Even before agreeing to a salary for her return to the fold, Payne began planning for her tour. She booked a flight on Pan American out of San Francisco that would reach Saigon on Christmas Eve. “I don’t mind going Economy,” Payne told Sengstacke, “except that you are limited to forty pounds as against sixty-five pounds first class and frankly I don’t know if I can make it, especially with a typewriter which is pretty necessary I am told.” In either case, the airfare was not cheap, but she assured him that once she reached Saigon, the military would provide her with all her transportation and cover a lot of her expenses.
In consultation with Pentagon press officials, it was decided she would visit the main base camps of each branch of the military and make a side trip to Korea to interview General Benjamin O. Davis Jr., the first African American Air Force general, whose father had been the first African American Army general. Robert Komer, the president’s aide in charge of the American efforts to gain the allegiance of the South Vietnamese population, briefed Payne. Komer, she said, “is particularly anxious to have more stories on the pacification mission which would explain more about why we are in Vietnam.” Pacification, the military’s euphemism for its efforts to weaken the insurgent Viet Cong by cutting off its access to the population, was coming back into fashion. The administration figured it could use some favorable press.
AHEAD OF THE WHITE PRESS on matters of civil rights, the black press had been woefully behind on the Vietnam War story. Foreign news was thought by Defender editors to be of little interest to their readers. Sengstacke said he had no need for foreign correspondents. “I think we’ve got enough issues to fight right here in this country.”
But with each passing year, ignoring the war became harder for the black press. African Americans made up a disproportionate number of the draftees. “Knock on any door and you will probably find a family that has a son, nephew or cousin in Vietnam,” a priest said about his Chicago parish. Blacks also supported the war at a higher rate than whites and looked favorably upon military service. In fact, in 1966, two-thirds of black servicemen reenlisted, a rate twice that of whites. Certainly military pay, housing, and the promise of a more meritocratic life appealed to many young African Americans. “Denied the rights and opportunities to advance at home,” Payne said, “they flock to the Armed Forces in search of a ‘better shake’ than they can get in civilian life.”
On the other hand, Vietnam was a risky story. By 1966 the nation was becoming polarized, and black publishers feared earning the wrath of a president who had delivered the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Not only were the editorial pages devoid of commentary on the war, but also the news side stayed clear of anything beyond routine items from the war front. That state of affairs prevailed until a sound of disquiet could be heard from among African Americans.
The White House also heard the same rumblings, especially after March 1965, when Martin Luther King told reporters that the war was “accomplishing nothing” and that he advocated a negotiated settlement. Louis Martin, Payne’s old editor, was then working as a Democratic National Committee official. He was worried about the potential collapse of support for the war among African Americans. Martin found a solution in the mail one day. In a letter marked “confidential,” Simeon Booker filled him in on the reporting trip he had just taken to Vietnam for Jet magazine. “A lot of guys here thought I was a fool to make such a risky trip,” he wrote to Mart
in, “but really I feel that as a Negro reporter, Vietnam is [as] important to our U.S. future as civil rights.
“For the first time, perhaps, the U.S. has fielded a truly democratic team in Vietnam,” Booker continued. “I feel with such a wonderful project of democracy in action and the first confrontation with commies—democracy using country tools of propaganda, work projects, and affection to halt the cave in of a nation—should get far more play in our Negro press.”
Martin forwarded a copy of Booker’s letter to Bill Moyers, who had just been appointed Johnson’s press secretary, and to three others in the White House. “Since Dr. Martin Luther King and a few of the civil rights leaders are trying to get into the Vietnam act, I think the information in the attached letter from Simeon Booker, who just returned from Vietnam, might be helpful,” Martin wrote in the accompanying memo.
“The central point,” Martin said, “is that Negroes should know what Negroes are doing and how well they are doing it in Vietnam. This could be a source of great pride to American Negroes and at the same time strengthen their support of the policies of the administration.” Moyers took out his pen, marked the corner of Martin’s memo with “This is interesting,” and passed it on to Art Sylvester, the Pentagon’s press chief.
Eye on the Struggle Page 24