In Shanghai, Payne’s blackness stopped Chinese in their tracks. In her fake leopard-skin jacket, vinyl boots, and dark glasses, she went out for a walk down the busy Zhongshan Road that runs along the Huangpu River, where ships docked. In minutes traffic was backed up and hundreds of pedestrians began following her. “A black woman in China is a rare apparition,” Payne concluded. “I guess there have been so few that it is a sensation.” But she appreciated the honest curiosity of the Chinese. “None of the sidelong glances, the nudges and furtive giggling behind hands that I used to get in Japan. These people just come up and stare in innocent wonderment.”
Reg Murphy, an Atlanta Constitution editor who was a member of the delegation, figured that in the land of the Mao jackets, the crowd had mistaken Payne for an African empress. Murphy hustled his colleagues to gain a position ahead of where she walked. As she came past, the reporters began a slow and solemn salaam. “The crowd of Chinese following Miss Payne turned big-eyed in wonder,” Murphy said. “Their suspicions had been confirmed: This was the potentate of some rich country visiting the land of militant equality.” Payne nodded her head at her court and swept past. “Only when the troupe was back in their cars did she finally lose control and laugh until great tears rolled down her cheeks,” Murphy said.*
In addition to their curiosity about her looks, the trustworthiness of the Chinese she met enthralled Payne. Once, for instance, when she was leaving the Minzu Hotel in Beijing, a member of the hotel staff caught up with her and handed her a worn-down yellow pencil she had left in the room. “Such scrupulous accounting of personal items happens wherever you travel in China,” Payne observed. “One American relates how he tried in vain to discard a pair of worn socks, only to have them follow him from city to city.”
As it had been for other Western reporters getting their first look behind the Bamboo Curtain, it was all a marvel for Payne. After all, here was a country that less than a quarter of a century ago had been destitute after three decades of revolutionary warfare. Quite unlike its communist neighbor the Soviet Union, it had transformed itself into a seeming paradise where workers were promised an “iron rice bowl” of lifetime employment, housing, health care, pension plans, and education for their children.
“You can’t help but be impressed,” Payne wrote to her family from her hotel in Xi’an. “There are so many things our American system could take note of.” Child care was the best she had seen. Everyone, including the elderly, had a place in society. “I am finding that is the most orderly society in the world—never mind the ideology,” she said. “The point is that they have built a stable society where no one goes hungry or uncared for.”
For their work as tour guides, the Chinese government officials obtained news coverage of the sort American politicians could only dream. But Payne was hardly alone in dropping her journalistic caution. “The total effect of this hostmanship,” said New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield, who had accompanied Nixon, “is like a powerful tranquilizer, enough to make otherwise rational and intelligent people suspend disbelief.”
IT MAY HAVE BEEN the fact that Payne toured a communist nation from which most Americans were barred, or merely a coincidence, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation became interested in Payne.
On April 11, 1973, the acting director of the FBI, Louis Patrick Gray III, was sent a memo from the New York City field office stating that the agency should take a look at Ethel Payne. “A confidential source who has furnished reliable information in the past” was alleging subversive behavior on her part, the memo said. It requested that the Washington field office identify Payne “and conduct appropriate investigation.” They warned, “Extreme care should be exercised in utilizing this information. It must be suitably paraphrased in any communication and, if disseminated outside the bureau, it should be classified at least ‘confidential’—no foreign dissemination.”
Payne, of course, was not the only American in the crosshairs of FBI investigators at the time. Among its many domestic surveillance activities, the FBI ran a Ghetto Informant Program that had grown beyond its original goal of recruiting informants to even include visiting “Afro-American-type bookstores” to see what kind of militant literature was sold. The FBI targeted black lawmakers as well, such as Representative Ron Dellums, whose office phones were wiretapped, and Representative Ralph Metcalfe Sr., who had been spotted at meetings attended by militant black leaders. And even though the FBI had shut down its most notorious program, COINTELPRO, which had infiltrated an endless array of political organizations, the bureau’s spying activities continued to include journalists such as Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam. No one, it seemed, was beyond the interest of FBI field agents.
The investigation of Payne came under the purview of two undercover operations then being run by the FBI. Her file, at least those portions that have not been redacted, show the investigators were worried she might be a “key black extremist” of “black nationalists.” One presumes none of the FBI memo writers read the Defender.*
In June, the Washington agents reported to their superiors that the subject of their investigations was indeed a bona fide member of the press, was a past president of the Capital Press Club “composed of approximately 100 black news representatives in WDC,” and was scheduled to be a moderator at an upcoming National Urban League convention. Hardly the activities of a subversive. Wisely, the agency called off its investigators.
CHAPTER 33
YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN
AS THE SUMMER OF 1973 APPROACHED, ETHEL PAYNE reluctantly gave in to John Sengstacke’s repeated requests that she move back to Chicago and serve as associate editor of the paper. “I hope that it will work out all right,” she told her sister Thelma Gray. “I am not enthusiastic, but when I weigh all the options, I’ve elected to go.” Leaving Washington was hard. “After twenty years of covering the national and international scene,” she said, “the accumulation of books, papers, memorabilia of all sorts and just plain junk, the order of packing up baffled even the movers!”
Members of Washington’s black elite, such as the former chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Clifford Alexander, public relations guru Ofield Dukes, and Washington television anchor Max Robinson, put together a farewell party for Payne at the National Press Club. The selection of the venue was a moment to savor. When Payne had first arrived in Washington, the club had barred blacks and women from membership.
Payne put the best face possible on her exit, promising to be “popping in and out of Washington frequently.” She warned readers, “Fasten your seat belts, folks, it’s going to be a swinging ride. Seriously, I hope to be able to give some input to the kind of fighting journalism upon which the Chicago Defender was founded.”
By early August, Payne was unpacking her 5,400 pounds of belongings in a luxurious two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise building on Lincoln Park West overlooking Lake Michigan on which the Defender paid the rent as an inducement for her return to the city. The upscale North Side neighborhood, only beginning to be integrated, was a social and economic distance from her native Englewood on the city’s South Side. But the move to Chicago not only took Payne away from her active life in national politics, it also sped up her transformation into an icon.
Instead of writing stories about Capitol Hill, she now penned speeches for dinner gatherings. Rather than raising questions at White House press conferences, she was receiving awards for those she had asked in the past. In rapid succession she was solicited to contribute a chapter to a book about black journalism, invited to join a magazine’s advisory board, inducted as an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority, selected for the Ida B. Wells Media Woman of the Year Award, requested to give commencement addresses, and asked by Howard University to donate her papers to its archive.
One day on the street below her apartment, Payne was reminded of her growing stature. Shirley Small-Rougeau was walking with a friend after taking their children to the zoo. As a black
civil rights activist in the South, Small-Rougeau had read Payne’s work in the Defender and admired her courage and tenacity. The two women spotted Payne on the street carrying her groceries, and Small-Rougeau’s companion, who knew Payne personally, offered to introduce her. “I felt like I was meeting the president of the United States,” recalled Small-Rougeau.
“When I finally regained my composure,” she continued, “I started babbling about Daisy Bates, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and all the other folks from the movement that we knew in common. She looked at me and was probably thinking, ‘Who is this silly child from Hicksville?’ However, she was such a lady, she would never have said that to me verbally.”
Payne felt the change from her days as a reporter covering important civil rights fights to becoming the reporter who had been there. When she was selected for a tribute from the Women’s Scholarship Association, Payne lamented in wistful tones the end of an era using words that could well have been applied to herself: “The great coalitions that formed the peaceful protest movement that have added such dignity to the cause of human freedom have come apart and are but past phases of history.”
However, she was hardly idle. If she wasn’t in San Diego delivering a speech at a meeting of the National Council of Negro Women, she could be found talking before the Studies of Afro American Life and History conference in Atlanta. She developed an inventory of dinner-speaker jokes and polished a repertoire of journalism tales drawn from covering the Bandung conference to following Nixon to Ghana, from challenging President Eisenhower in White House press conferences to meeting Martin Luther King. While she had a desk chair in the Defender’s office, it seemed almost as if her preferred seat was one in an airplane.
AFTER AN ABSENCE from Chicago of more than twenty-five years, Payne was unnerved by the crime in her hometown, particularly black-on-black crime. “It seemed that everyone was living in fear—fear of being mugged, raped, robbed or killed,” Payne said. “Homes were not homes. They were fortresses with locks and bars. Gone were the days when we used to sit on front porches and exchange pleasantries with neighbors.”
Statistically speaking, Payne was right. In a typical year in the 1960s, Chicago averaged 400 murders. “The death toll in the city by the lake topped 800 in 1970 and 1971,” reported the Chicago Tribune. “And in 1973, the city hit a cruel new record of 864 homicides.” Following two particularly heinous murders committed by teenage black youths, Payne offered a plan of action that she called a “March on Crime.” To unveil it, she spoke at a meeting of the Chicago alumni chapter of Delta Sigma Theta, the sorority into which she had recently been inducted, and used her position at the Defender to put her plan on the front page.
“Super Fly and Tricky Dick* are about all that the kids see in examples of making it big,” Payne said. “This country is ready for some mass exorcism to drive out the evil that has fallen upon us, beginning with a purge at the top.” Her actual suggestions, however, were more modest. They included developing a pact of cooperation between the police and the community, creating a neighborhood alert system, urging those who walked at night to do so in groups, launching an education campaign that would include stickers (“We support the war on crime by doing our part”), and sponsoring essay contests for schoolchildren.
Payne was entering tricky territory. Since President Nixon’s call for “law and order,” African Americans had grown suspicious of efforts at crime control. It struck many of them as a cover for increasing repression. “Used this way, ‘law and order’ means that Afro-Americans should get back in their place,” said a writer in Crisis. Even Whitney Young, one who would never be grouped with extremists, had voiced concern. “Shrill calls for law and order,” he said, “have resulted in greater oppression and denial of justice.”
Payne wisely enlisted the help of Cardiss Collins, who was serving her first year in a House of Representatives seat that had been held by her husband until his death in a plane crash, and Connie Seals, the executive director of the Illinois Commission on Human Relations. With the two allies, her effort could not be linked to the right wing’s odious law-and-order campaign.
ON SUNDAY EVENING, February 24, 1974, more than forty women, many representing community groups, came to the Defender offices for an organizational meeting. Collins and Seals were selected as co-chairs and Payne agreed to serve as coordinator. A week later the Defender included an application form to join the “war on crime,” and the paper promised to publish the name of each reader who joined. Within months, thousands had joined and eventually the group landed nearly $90,000 in grant money from the state.
“This could not have happened ten years ago,” Payne told Reg Murphy, the Atlanta Constitution journalist with whom she had traveled in China. The success of her organization, Payne said, reflected the changing mood in the black community; it no longer believed that calls for law and order were racist. “As long as the black community felt it was being singled out by racist white folks, there was no hope of forming an effective coalition,” Murphy wrote. “Now there is hope, and one of the heroines of the struggle is Ethel Payne, a woman of strength and poise.”
Despite her crime-fighting efforts, Payne’s heart was not in Chicago. The mail reminded her of the past and increased her sense that she had left the center of the action. Letters came from Coretta Scott King, thanking her for writing about the new King Center; from Lee Lorch, who had reread her coverage of Little Rock (“[Your words] made me think again of the warmth and kindness you showed us”); from Daniel “Chappie” James, the first black four-star Air Force general (“Just wanted you to know we still love you and miss you very much”); from Lady Bird Johnson, thanking her for a radio commentary reminiscing about LBJ; and from Hubert Humphrey, who had bumped into her on one of her trips (“It was like old times”).
Given the chance, Payne headed to the airport. In short succession she went off to Mexico for the first World Conference on Women, part of the United Nations Decade of Women, where she ran into Betty Friedan, and then to Nairobi for another meeting of the World Council of Churches.
IN THE SPRING OF 1976, the peripatetic secretary of state Henry Kissinger prepared to embark on a 26,000-mile tour of Africa. A list of potential reporters was put together for a press pool to accompany the secretary. As the departure date neared, someone looking over the list noticed that it lacked any black journalists, as had happened with the press delegation chosen for the 1973 trip to China. According to Payne, Kissinger suggested she be included. “You know that woman who gives me hell on CBS?” said Kissinger. “Let’s ask her.” In addition, an invitation was rushed to Charles Sanders, the managing editor of Ebony magazine.
To pay for travel costs as a member of the press pool, Payne turned once again to the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Carlton Goodlett, its president, was excited by the prospect of Payne’s representing the member newspapers and told his editors that he considered Payne’s inclusion in the press pool a “unique breakthrough for the black media.” For a long time, Goodlett and other editors in the black press had chafed in their exclusion from State Department matters. Of course, his enthusiasm also reflected his need to persuade member papers to carry a prorated share of Payne’s $5,300 travel costs.
The strategy worked and she received a pledge of funding. To supplement her funds, Payne had worked out a deal to file reports for the Mutual Black Network, a four-year-old venture of the Mutual Broadcasting System for African American radio stations. Payne had not considered how her bosses at CBS might react to her plans. When they learned of her deal with the Mutual Black Network, they sent word to Payne and Kissinger’s staff, already en route to Africa, that her contract strictly prohibited her from doing work for other networks.
An undersecretary took up the matter with CBS. He requested that a high-ranking State Department official in Washington contact CBS bureau chief Sanford Socolow. “Please explain to Socolow that important factor in making selection of news organizations to be represented on tr
ip was fact that Ethel Payne was to be black pool media reporter for both press and Mutual Black Network,” read the cable to Washington. Reluctantly CBS, who had its own reporter on the trip, agreed to permit Payne to do up to three broadcast reports for the black radio network.
The problem resolved, Payne filed both radio and print dispatches as the delegation continued on its cross-continent dash, stopping in Zaire, Liberia, and Kenya before escaping the continent for a rest stop in Paris. The close quarters gave Payne uncommon access to Kissinger. She found the secretary to be gregarious and inquisitive, frequently asking her questions when he learned she was on her eighth African trip and had been to all the countries on the itinerary. In turn, Kissinger read Payne’s dispatches and—like a savvy politician—complimented her on her work.
AT ITS VARIOUS STOPS, the small delegation was frequently included in official dinners and receptions, unlike when Kissinger’s entourage traveled through more developed nations. On board Mobutu’s yacht, on which Payne had been with Secretary of State Rogers six years earlier, the group ate wild boar with manioc leaves washed down by French wine, and later at Jomo Kenyatta’s dinner table, they almost sampled impala. That delicacy was withheld after the State Department sent a telegraphic warning regarding Kissinger’s culinary preferences. “You should find suitable substitute for impala, Secretary not a fan of venison at all and finds the prospect of eating impala saddening.”
At one point Kissinger fell ill after one of these repasts. Hearing this, the press pool became suspicious. “We remembered,” said NBC television’s diplomatic correspondent Richard Valeriani, “that it was under the cover of gastroenteritis that Kissinger had slipped secretly into China in 1971, and now we wondered if he were off in the bush meeting with Ian Smith or one of the guerrilla leaders still fighting in Angola against the Cubans.” But instead of fretting about the possibility, the reporters instead headed off on a tour of Kinshasa’s open-air ivory market led by Payne. There she acquired a delicate carved figure with a cracked crown. “An old man assured me in halting English that it was the careless slip of the apprentice knife, but the face was by the master carver,” she said. “What else could one do with such a beguiling performer?”
Eye on the Struggle Page 31