Eye on the Struggle

by James McGrath Morris

  Payne and her two sisters created the William and Bessie Payne Memorial Scholarship in memory of their parents and as a tribute to their belief in the importance of education. In August, Payne put on a gathering to present a $250 check to Mamie Harriday, a shy, slight young woman with big black eyes, who was attending Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. Thirty friends came, including journalist Sarah McClendon, the cantankerous reporter who had been getting under the skin of presidents since Truman was in office, and Ofield Dukes, who had just opened his public relations firm, with Motown Records as his first client.

  When it came time to present the check, the person with the responsibility for the envelope couldn’t find it. Payne had to substitute a blank piece of paper. “At least five people told me afterwards that they were prepared to stay all night to find that check as they weren’t going to have it said that with all those colored people, wouldn’t you know this would happen.” The check was found.

  Meanwhile Defender publisher Sengstacke was once again mulling over the idea of bringing Payne back to Chicago to work out of the office rather than in Washington. It was a reprise of the plan that had led to Payne leaving the paper in 1958. When he raised the subject, Payne bristled. “After sixteen years in Washington,” she said, “my roots are here and it is difficult to pull up.”

  Payne told Sengstacke and Louis Martin, who had resumed his post as the Defender’s editor, that she had been away too long and become too oriented to national reporting to work effectively at the paper in Chicago. But more important, the paper needed her in Washington. The wire services do not provide the kind of coverage that relates to the interest of black Americans, she wrote. In fact, she continued, they ought to be thinking about creating a larger consolidated Washington bureau to represent the black press. The administration ignored black reporters at press conferences and has failed to live up to the policy promises made during the May meeting with black publishers. “Both of these separate incidents reflect the general lack of respect for the black press and our failure to marshal the strength to command it.”

  Sengstacke withdrew his idea of bringing Payne home, but only for the time being.

  PAYNE’S FRUSTRATION with the Nixon administration came to a boiling point in March 1972. She was certain that Nixon purposely avoided her and her colleagues in the black press. The Congressional Black Caucus, which feuded steadily with the president, invited Payne to testify at a hearing on the mass media and the black community. She used the moment to describe three years of stonewalling by Nixon and his press staff. “He has given preferential treatment to individual reports or select small groups, granting them exclusive interviews,” Payne said at the widely covered hearings. “No such privilege has ever been given a black or minority reporter, nor has the opportunity to question him during a formal press conference arisen.”

  Almost immediately following her testimony, Payne got on a plane for Gary, Indiana, for the first National Black Political Convention. The gathering, which included just about every black elected official and activist in the country, including radicals and Muslims, was organized like a convention with delegates. But unlike meetings of the two major political parties, it sought to agree only on an agenda rather than on a candidate.

  The Defender gave the gathering a billing equal to the quadrennial political conventions, including running a two-page spread of photographs. In her first report from Gary, Payne said the convention “could be likened to a fast race horse at the post, restless, impatient, pulling at the bit and challenging its rider to run with it or get off its back.” Gary mayor Richard Hatcher, whose 1968 swearing in as the first elected black mayor of a major metropolitan city Payne had attended, opened the gathering with a speech that she found to be a “ringing challenge to the older order of things.”

  “We reject the role of advisor to the parties’ governing circles,” Hatcher said. “Advisors are impotent. We are strong.” Instead, Hatcher claimed, as did the following speakers, they wanted to foster a black political unity. “If we are to support any political party, the price will now run high . . . very high,” he said. The anti-party sentiment was high, according to Payne. “Perhaps the most significant remark came not from a dashiki-clad black militant but from a modestly suited ‘establishment member’ who said ‘to hell with both parties.’ It was a theme taken up by Jesse Jackson. In his speech, which brought the convention to its feet, he warned the Democrats and Republicans ‘cut us in or we’ll cut out.’”

  THE 1972 POLITICAL CONVENTIONS played themselves out as they had in 1968. The Democratic gathering in Miami was almost as chaotic as the last time the party had met. Payne found black delegates divided on whether to support Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman in Congress and now a candidate for president, or switch to the front-runner George McGovern, or stick with the old standby Hubert Humphrey. In the end, when McGovern won the nomination with 1,729 delegates, Chisholm retained only 152 delegates.

  As she had felt with the 1968 convention, Payne believed “blacks came out of this convention with greater bargaining power than they had as delegates.” In fact, Payne believed that the activism of blacks at the Democratic Convention might spur on blacks in the Republican Party. It ended up being wishful thinking. When Payne returned to Miami Beach for the Republican Convention she found that black delegates had made no progress and were divided even about selecting a strategy to get a black member onto the party’s national committee.

  That autumn Nixon won his landslide reelection over McGovern, but 90 percent of black voters remained in the Democratic fold. In Payne’s view, the loyalty paid off. “Despite the debacle of the McGovern defeat, blacks have gained considerably more political power nationally,” she wrote, detailing the increase in black members in the U.S. House of Representatives.

  Still, the tone of Washington, set by the White House, was frosty if not hostile to African Americans. The change that Nixon had brought to the capital was never more evident than in December, when Payne was among a thousand people invited to a two-day symposium at the LBJ Presidential Library, which had recently been completed in Austin, Texas. Former chief justice Earl Warren, the architect of the Brown v. Board decision, gave the keynote address. But all eyes were on the former president when he reached the speaker’s platform. To do so, he was defying the orders of his doctors, who were worried about his weak heart. Payne watched as Johnson popped a nitroglycerin capsule into his mouth. “Lady Bird strained forward in her front-row seat and Luci’s hand flew to her mouth, suppressing a gasp of concern,” said Payne. “Nevertheless, his performance was as great as the most famous Shakespearean actor.”

  Johnson lamented that he hadn’t “done enough” for the cause of equal rights, repeated the peroration of his famous 1965 speech to Congress, “We shall overcome!” and called for a renewed thrust for civil rights. “It was a signal to the bench,” wrote Payne, “the coach has signaled Congress, the administration and the country that the struggle for equal opportunity is not over.”

  CHAPTER 31

  AFRICA BOUND

  AS WASHINGTON PREPARED FOR THE CHANGEOVER IN administrations, Ethel Payne received an invitation that put her on the path of fulfilling a lifelong dream of widening the scope of her reporting to beyond the shores of the United States. Since her days as a student in Chicago, Payne had believed there was a connection between the struggle for freedom at home and that abroad. Whenever she could, she would drive the point home to her readers. But with the exception of two trips in the 1950s, one to Bandung and the other to Ghana, she had done it from Washington. Now this would change. To readers, the byline of Ethel Payne and a foreign dateline, particularly one in Africa, would become inextricably linked.

  This began innocently enough with a request from Lillian Wiggins, who worked for the Afro-American, that Payne accompany her to a meeting with Nigerian ambassador Joe Iyalla. It was not a social call. The ambassador wanted help from the two reporters. Iyalla’s native country,
the largest black nation in Africa, was in its second year of a civil war that had started after a 1966 coup attempt broke the fragile postcolonial unity among hundreds of tribes thrown together into one nation by European mapmakers. Essentially the Igbo tribe, which lived primarily in the southeastern portion of the nation, had declared its homeland an independent state named Biafra. The Nigerian government launched a military attack to bring the region back under its control.

  Although a military underdog, the renegade state was winning the public relations war and gained sympathetic support from the public and politicians in many European nations as well as in the United States, especially after the rebels circulated photographs of children with distended stomachs who were starving as a result of a government blockade.

  An immensely frustrated Iyalla told Payne and Wiggins that his government’s side of the story was not being told in the press. “He felt,” Payne said, “that they just weren’t getting a break.” He invited the two women to visit Nigeria as his government’s guests to report on the war.

  In late January 1970, Wiggins and Payne left Washington. After a layover in London, where they were ferried about in a Rolls-Royce with a white chauffeur, and lodged in the Royal Garden Hotel courtesy of the diplomatic representative to England known as the high commissioner for Nigeria, the women flew 4,200 miles south to Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, on the Atlantic Coast of Africa.

  Unlike life in war-torn Vietnam, the situation in Lagos seemed quite normal to Payne. “Except for a few minor inconveniences, one would scarcely know there was a war going on here,” she said in her first dispatch. “Nobody from the vendor on the street corner to the residents of the palatial homes on Victoria Island or Ikoyi is really suffering.”

  But as far as Ethel Payne was concerned, she had not traveled halfway around the world to report on a war from the safe confines of the capital city. She pressed her hosts to send her closer to the fighting. The government agreed to fly Payne and Wiggins to Port Harcourt, which had been recaptured by the most notorious of its military commanders, a soldier with the moniker of the Black Scorpion. Colonel Benjamin Adekunle’s nickname was only a small part of the lore surrounding him, as Payne soon learned. “He is wily and a master in guerrilla tactics as well as espionage,” Payne said. Once he disguised himself as a fisherman to rescue his wife and children marooned on an island under siege by rebels. “Three times the rebel radio has reported him killed,” said Payne, “and he is constantly the target of would-be assassins.”

  Excited by the prospect of meeting this wartime legend, Payne and Wiggins climbed into a small plane. On board they found their press party had grown to three, as they were introduced to Winston Churchill, the grandson of the wartime British prime minister. A member of the Conservative Party and a supporter of Biafra, he had come to Nigeria on assignment for the Times of London.

  UPON LANDING IN PORT HARCOURT, the three reporters were immediately taken by car to Colonel Adekunle’s house, traversing no fewer than five checkpoints before reaching it. The colonel, in white slacks and a maroon pullover, greeted them in his living room. While chain-smoking cigarettes and offering his guests drinks from a well-stocked bar, Adekunle pored over maps and barked out orders. When he snapped his fingers, his staff began showing The Outsider, an American film in which Tony Curtis portrayed Ira Hayes, the Native American who was among the Marines who raised the flag at Iwo Jima and later died as an alcoholic.

  “Adekunle’s particular reason for running this film was to make a point to Churchill on the white man’s bias,” said Payne. The plan did not displease her. She found Churchill to be argumentative and pompous. “Oh, he was so arrogant, so brash,” she recalled. “He came over with a fixed idea, and it was almost like it was British colonialism reasserting itself.” Churchill had the same effect on Adekunle. “It wasn’t long before he came smack up against the leash of the colonel’s temper who damned the ‘bloody British baaastards’ to hell,” observed Payne.

  The following morning, the reporters were taken by dusty roads into the bush country to visit government brigades and tour a Red Cross refugee camp. A troop commander showed them two young boys who he claimed were rebel spies because they bore special markings on their toes. Their interrogator, apparently the only one who spoke the captives’ language, was but a child of fourteen. He had been given a job as a military gofer upon the death of his father, who was killed in action. “War is hard on women and children,” Payne wrote in an article about the boys, “especially when they become the pawns and the victims of conquest.”

  After two days in the field, Wiggins, Payne, and Churchill returned to Port Harcourt covered in dust and exhausted. But the two women’s dreams of a bath and rest were thwarted when they reached the Presidential Hotel. An army captain who was waiting for them told them to get into his lorry and go directly to the officers’ club, where Colonel Adekunle was waiting for them. When they disembarked, two women in traditional Nigerian garb escorted Payne and Wiggins upstairs and instructed them to disrobe. “At this point,” said Payne, “I was beginning to wonder if we were being prepared for the sacrificial offering!”

  It was nothing of the sort. The colonel did not want Payne and Wiggins to come into his club garbed in Western attire. In a matter of a few minutes, the two women were wrapped in skirts, helped into exquisite cloth blouses, and topped with large turbans. “Well,” said Payne, “we walked downstairs and there was a whole company of officers, with the colonel in the middle, all who arose and applauded.” The band struck up a tune and Wiggins and Payne were ushered onto the floor for a dance.

  Later that night the reporters retired to the colonel’s house for another movie. Soon Churchill and Adekunle were arguing about the role of the Red Cross. The evening came to an abrupt halt, said Payne, when the Brit “made the mistake of saying something about nobody wanting to come out to this stinking country.” Within twenty-four hours, Churchill was told he was no longer welcome in the region and he flew back to London. Adekunle apologized to the women for the display of his temper and took them back to Lagos in his private jet, where they caught a flight back to the United States.

  THE ARDUOUS TRIP to Nigeria was only the first of a dozen such journeys to Africa for Payne. A year later, she returned to the continent to cover Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, William Rogers. His fifteen-day, ten-nation trip would mark the first time ever a secretary of state had toured Africa.

  Payne raised the $2,500 she needed for the trip by apportioning the cost to the five members of the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Each of its five members—the Sengstacke publications, the Cleveland Call & Post, the Philadelphia Tribune, the Afro-American, and the Michigan Chronicle—paid $500 to cover her expenses. Sengstacke increased his contribution to $600 to cover incidental expenses. “Bless you love,” Payne wrote back. “You’re the greatest.” This was a different tune than the one she had been singing the month before.

  The group traveled across Africa at a rapid pace, sometimes spending only twenty-four hours in one country. Nothing of substance transpired beyond the novelty of having an American secretary of state come by for a visit. As soon as she was back in her Washington apartment at her IBM Selectric typewriter, Payne used what she learned in her travels to churn out a lengthy article and a commentary. In the article published in the widely circulated weekend edition of the Defender, she provided readers with a crash course on the economy, education, and health needs of African nations and a description of what black Africans wanted from the United States and how Africans felt about American blacks. The commentary offered a dim view of the Nixon administration’s policy toward Africa. Rogers’s policy statement, produced following the trip, fell short of any expectation that it might contain new commitments of aid and an increase in sanctions on white supremacist countries. It was clear to Payne that neither the concerns of African Americans nor those of Africans were on Richard Nixon’s mind.

  Unbeknownst to her, the White House tape rec
ordings proved her correct. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was jealous of the good press Rogers had received on his trip and shared his annoyance with the president. “Henry,” the tape caught Nixon saying, “let’s leave the niggers to Bill and we’ll take care of the rest of the world.”

  WHEN CONGO PRESIDENT Joseph-Desiré Mobutu came to Washington soon after Rogers’s African tour, Payne was among those invited to the White House for a state dinner. It was not her first encounter with the African ruler. During the trip with Rogers, Payne and her colleagues had floated up the Congo River in President Mobutu’s luxurious steamer, eating a meal of beef and asparagus flown in from France. After the White House meal, the guests retired to the East Room to hear pianist André Watts perform. Following custom, members of the press were permitted to mingle with the guests. Payne took a seat behind Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, who had just returned to work after being ill. Pat Nixon made a point of coming over to greet Payne. Her husband, the president, was now rumored to be planning a trip to Africa in the next year. “It’s easier for him to show interest in Africa than it is to take care of urgent problems about blacks here,” Payne wrote to her sister Thelma Gray.

  Payne soon torpedoed the administration’s efforts to appear African-friendly when one of Nixon’s cabinet members handed her the necessary ammunition. Maurice Stans, Nixon’s commerce secretary who also served as head of the administration’s Office of Minority Business Enterprise, had gone to Chad on a three-week safari. Upon his return he got professional help to edit and narrate his homemade movie of the trip. After showing it to his neighbors, he put on screenings at the Commerce Department and at the Women’s National Press Club, where Payne was in the audience. That’s where the trouble began.