When they first met in the mid-1970s, Reynolds, a Chicago Tribune reporter, had been at work on a biography of Jesse Jackson, with whom she had been a close friend. “The more I dug, the more an unflattering portrait of Jackson emerged,” recalled Reynolds. The result, when it was published, brought the wrath of Jackson supporters down on her. “I was accused of using a white ghostwriter to destroy Jackson,” Reynolds said. “I was accused of being his lover, who turned mean after he spurned me.” Books disappeared from store shelves despite having been on the city’s bestseller list, television bookings were canceled, and death threats prompted police protection. Payne came to the book’s launch. She had never forgotten Payne’s gesture, and now as a magazine editor was able to assign to her occasional articles for $400, money Payne could certainly use.
Payne predicted in the article that Carter could win reelection if he took a number of steps, including paying attention to the black vote. “To do this,” she wrote, “he will have to knock some staff heads together and make them understand that arrogance and insensitivity towards blacks, no matter how inconsequential they may seem, will only add to the president’s problems.”
Payne’s optimism, however, was founded more on hope than reality. By fall, like most observers, she knew that Carter’s chances of earning another term in the White House were slim. The result, predictable as it was, terrified her. “Along towards midnight of November 4, the emotional reaction among blacks across the country to the landslide victory of Ronald Reagan came close to a massive breakdown,” she said. In her own case, the election caused her to wake up in the middle of the night from a dream in which the Ku Klux Klan, the Moral Majority, and the Christian Voice—the latter two being conservative groups that triumphed in 1980—were conducting a purge of undesirable blacks.
IN AUGUST, PAYNE TURNED SEVENTY. “The numeral seventy scarcely perturbs me,” she said. “I am blessed with good health and energy enough to continue my normal peripatetic style of living.” She even found inspiration in the current occupant of the White House, whose policies she held in contempt. “Thanks to Ronald Reagan, seventy no longer carries with it the stigma of being ancient.”
Like the president who had gone from Hollywood to the White House, Payne embarked on a professional transformation. In May 1981, the Fisk University board of trustees adopted a resolution to create a chair in journalism for Payne. The germ of the idea took seed the previous year when Payne’s friend Barbara Reynolds visited Fisk University president Walter J. Leonard. He was eager to create more opportunities for women on his campus and to provide his students with inspirational models of strong, successful women.
Leonard and Reynolds developed a scheme of creating a chair, to be funded by a proposed endowment of $300,000, which would bring Payne to the campus in Nashville to strengthen the study of journalism and recent history. “When such names as Adam Clayton Powell, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and Mary McLeod Bethune draw blank looks from high school kids, we’re in trouble,” Reynolds said.
Payne’s friends John Raye and Shirley Small-Rougeau joined Reynolds in the cause. Raye put together a forty-five-minute documentary on Payne’s life called Portrait of a Queen: The Legacy of Ethel Lois Payne. Small-Rougeau took on the planning of a tribute dinner for June in Washington to raise $30,000 toward the endowment and provide Fisk president Leonard with an event at which to announce the endowed chair that Payne would be the first to hold. Billed with the unwieldy long title of “A Tribute to Ethel L. Payne on Her Selection as the First Recipient of the Ida B. Wells Chair in Journalism and Mass Communication at Fisk University,” the dinner took place at Washington’s Capital Hilton.
“They came from all points of the country—relatives and friends some six hundred strong to demonstrate their faith in an idea,” said a gratified Payne, who basked in the adoration. Comedian Dick Gregory told a reporter at the dinner, “I feel her energy, honesty, and integrity. She represents the lives of all black women, and the beauty of this night is that no one has to tell any lies.”
As she was escorted around the room in the company of a prominent television news anchor, Payne paused before a table at which sat Robert L. Woodson, an African American community development leader whose conservative views made him unpopular among many in the civil rights movement. “Would you come and see me sometime?” Payne asked Woodson. Believing that Payne was only being polite, Woodson was noncommittal. “No,” replied Payne, “I’m serious.”
“The very fact that she made the appointment in such a public place and she said it in front of a television anchor says a lot,” recalled Woodson. “There were some people who were shocked.” Several days later, Woodson did go to Payne’s apartment for breakfast and a vigorous discussion of his ideas, including his opposition to busing. Payne never debated him and only asked questions. “It was refreshing that someone of her age and experience was not full of herself,” Woodson said. “She truly thought of herself as a vessel that sought to be filled.”
After the screening of Raye’s film, organizers put on a version of This Is Your Life, an immensely popular television show from the 1950s and 1960s that took a surprised guest through his or her life by means of cameo appearances by friends, family, and professional acquaintances. Ten speakers in all—including her sister Alice Samples, her former boss Louis Martin, former colleague in the White House press corps Alice Dunnigan, and Organization of African Unity ambassador to the United Nations Oumarou Youssoufou—recounted tales of Payne’s life in politics, journalism, family, foreign affairs, and civil rights.
“Come fall, when I report to the Fisk campus to take up my duties,” said Payne after the soiree, “I shall be remembering the love and support of so many relations and friends who made this dream possible.”
CHAPTER 35
ON HER OWN AFRICAN MISSION
BUT BEFORE SETTING OFF FOR HER NEW LIFE IN NASHVILLE in the fall of 1982, Ethel Payne had yet another African journey to make. By this point she had been to Africa ten times. Everything African interested her, from the struggles of the newly independent nations to the fight to end apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia. She followed all the news she could get about African countries and made friends with all of their legations in Washington. But over the years, what she had actually seen of the continent was more often than not a blur that came while traveling in a tightly guarded press corps following an American political leader. On other visits, she had been the guest of African potentates and had been offered only flattering views of the country. While she had briefly escaped her handlers in both situations, she had never taken a trip of her own design. That was about to change.
She had been staggered by the growing plight of African refugees. Looking into it, Payne found that 5 million of the 17 million refugees in the world were in Africa, 700,000 in Somalia alone. The hardened reporter decided that she needed to return to Africa, but this time on a journey of mercy.
In March, Payne contacted C. Payne Lucas, a returning Peace Corps volunteer who headed the multimillion-dollar black-run Africare organization, which he had launched twelve years earlier. Payne, who had known Lucas since the 1960s, had been an ardent early supporter of the nonprofit. Only a few years after its founding in 1970, she began urging her readers to contribute. “We were struggling in those days and Ethel Payne played a major role in getting our story told,” recalled Lucas. And Payne continued to find ways to report on Africare. “Ethel never moved on, she came back time and time again.”
Payne told Lucas that Africare should send someone with journalism experience to inspect African refugee camps, in particular those in Somalia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. If the attention of media on the plight of African refugees could be increased, then Payne believed the amount of aid might also improve. She recommended herself for the task.
Lucas bought into the idea, and the United Methodist Church agreed to pay Payne’s travel costs. For additional funds, Africare turned to supporter Vesharn Scales, a successful Maryland builder who ha
d benefited from the new government minority set-aside procurement programs, including the construction of the subway in the nation’s capital. He provided the money for his wife, Patricia, who was active with Africare, to join the mission along with Juanita Miller, who would serve as videographer.
Payne, the veteran African traveler, gave Scales instructions. Start taking your malaria medicine now before leaving; don’t drink the water there, not even to brush your teeth; bring baby powder for chafing, a wide-brim hat that can be folded up, and as little jewelry as possible. “Things do have a way of disappearing and there is no recourse against theft.”
An overnight flight from Rome brought Payne and her two companions to Mogadishu, Somalia. To inspect their first camp in Jalalaqsi, the group elected to travel by Land Rover rather than taking a small United Nations plane that flew only when weather permitted, “We made the five-hour journey over rough roads, arriving with our spinal columns still intact!” said Payne. Despite having traveled extensively in Africa and Asia, Payne admitted she was unprepared for what she faced when she got out of the car at their destination. “No matter how much one has seen through the eyes of the camera or read about the refugee camps, the sight of human misery is a shock.”
“Sprouting like mushrooms in the dry, dusty surroundings were row upon row of makeshift huts—put together with twigs and branches covered with tarpaulin,” she said. “Here was the habitat of the world’s most neglected, the wanderers fleeing from circumstances beyond either their control or comprehension.” In minutes Payne and her companions were engulfed in a sea of malnourished children, women who looked years beyond their age carrying infants, and old men and women staring through sunken eyes at the Americans. It was only the first of such sights.
The Somali government did its best to limit what Payne and her group could see. A couple of days later, for instance, the Americans tried to inspect a refugee camp near Qoryooley. But an official thwarted their plans by bringing them instead to his office in time to witness a demonstration by refugees in support of the government. Payne’s suspicion about the genuineness of the demonstration was heightened when she noticed that the women were better dressed than the refugees she had seen at Jalalaqsi and many wore gold bracelets and earrings. Meanwhile, on a nearby road, refugees frustrated with the Somalia government were forming their own counterprotest. The Africare guide grew uncomfortable and loaded the group back into the Land Rover to return to Mogadishu. Crossing a bridge on the way out of the area, Payne looked out the window and saw the carcass of a hippopotamus with carrion posed nearby and waiting. It was as if the wildlife was mounting a tableau vivant of the human desperation in the camps.
The trip was unlike any Payne had made to Africa. Before this journey Payne the ardent advocate for Africa had seen the continent mostly from the vantage of conference halls, Western hotels, presidential palaces, and the protective bubble of a traveling American government official. She had no worries this time about offending some less-than-honorable African leader or organization who had paid her way. She was free to use her journalistic skills on an unfettered mission of mercy.
FOR FIVE DAYS, Payne visited those camps she could reach, meeting with doctors, relief officials, and three African American women working among the refugees. “As black Americans, the three of us were both a novelty and a curiosity,” Payne said. On their last day in Somalia, Payne, Scales, and Miller were admitted to the well-guarded presidential compound for a meeting with President Mohamed Siad Barre, who had seized power in a 1969 coup. In the years since, he had accumulated one of the worst human rights records on the continent. Remaining on her best behavior, she listened silently to Barre defend his creation of one of the largest militaries in Africa, claiming the forays into his nation by Russian-backed Ethiopians on Somalia’s western border posed a continuing danger.
The visit to Somalia concluded, the group flew south to Nairobi, Kenya, and then north to Sudan. “In five days, we had been introduced to another world, another way of life, as gray as the storm clouds that we encountered on our arrival, yet as hauntingly beautiful as the sun that broke through on our departure,” Payne said.
They landed at Khartoum’s airport at the peak of Ramadan. With temperatures nearing 120 degrees, the group went straight to the air-conditioned Meridien Hotel. The following morning, despite the oppressive heat, Payne headed off for a meeting with the commissioner of refugees. Power was out throughout downtown Khartoum and she had to scale five flights of stairs. The commissioner greeted her with hot tea, which she accepted while he and his assistant did not drink in observation of their fast.
Sudan consisted of more camp inspections similar to those they had made in Somalia. Next it was off to Zambia. It was Payne’s third visit to the country, the two previous occasions with Secretaries of State Rogers and Kissinger. In the company of a Peace Corps member, an Episcopalian pastor on leave from a Washington, DC, church, and the Zambian commissioner of refugees, Payne found herself once again in a Land Rover bouncing its way across a barren landscape. Their destination was the Meheba refugee camp, which the United Nations had opened in 1971 for refugees fleeing the war in Angola. It took three days to make the 500-mile trek to the camp, which was near the borders of Zambia, Angola, and Zaire.
The camp now held 10,500 settlers in an area approximately that of a good-sized county in the United States. Most were still refugees from Angola, and many had been there for ten years. They feared for their lives if they returned to Angola and were unwilling to risk living under Mobutu’s rule in Zaire. “The life of refugees is one long struggle for survival and a semblance of security,” Payne wrote to her family. “By their standards, the people on welfare in the states live like kings.”
At the end of her daylong tour of the camps, as the Land Rover passed by houses lit by fires cooking evening meals, Payne was absorbed in reflection. “Chickens, pigs, a goat here and there and children, including babies carried on their mothers’ backs, and of course, the elders, reminders of Alex Haley’s visit to the ancestral home of Juffure where ‘Roots’ began,” she wrote. “This was Africa!”
CHAPTER 36
PROFESSOR PAYNE
UPON HER RETURN TO THE UNITED STATES, PAYNE HAD only a brief respite before packing her bags and heading to Nashville to take up her duties as a professor of journalism at Fisk University. “Outwardly, I am cool,” she told her readers. “Inside, I am churning with mixed emotions and anxiety and elation.”
Yet she was fully prepared for what lay ahead. The year before, at the urging of her friend Doris Saunders, who had chaired the Census Advisory Committee on the Black Population and now was a member of the fledgling journalism program at Jackson State University, Payne accepted a one-semester teaching appointment at the century-old historically black university in Mississippi.
In January 1981, as Reagan prepared to move into the White House, Payne left her Census Bureau job, which had been only a temporary posting, and packed her bags and headed south to Jackson, Mississippi. “It is a rediscovery of the black experience in America, and a veritable gold mine of literati, past and present,” Payne wrote to her family. She also delighted in the Southern politeness of her students with their “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am,” confessing “that the sounds are strange to my urban ears.”
Payne was assigned to teach three courses: editorial writing, semantics and journalism style, and advanced reporting. Prepped by Saunders about Payne’s accomplishments, students eagerly signed up for her classes. They were amply rewarded by their decision. Payne, who had never taught before, inspired the students by providing lessons laced with stories from her life. “It opened my mind and eyes that there was more beyond being in school,” recalled Gillie Haynes, one of her students in the advanced reporting class.
Payne took a shine to Haynes and the pair went out to dinner several times, including to a nearby mall, where the worldly Payne introduced Haynes to her first spinach salad. “She never made you feel uncomfortable or
out of place or that you didn’t deserve to be there,” said Haynes. Payne made time for Haynes and other students and encouraged them to pursue careers despite the dominance of whites in the media. The advice she gave Haynes was similar to that she had given other young African American women she had inspired. “She told me,” said Haynes, “to always carry myself like I was supposed to be where I was.”
In class, Haynes was so moved by Payne’s account of covering Little Rock in 1957 that she took on the idea of creating a Daisy Bates Day on campus and inviting the civil rights activist to receive an award from the students in the Jackson State Department of Mass Communications. Bates, however, was unable to make the trip, so in May, after commencement, Haynes and Payne traveled together to Little Rock to make the presentation in Bates’s home.
Haynes was not the only student that Payne befriended and inspired that spring. Rita Bibbs first heard through her Delta Sigma Theta sorority that Payne was coming to teach. “We were so excited,” she recalled. Entering her class, Bibbs was also nervous about whether she and the other students could live up to the expectations of a world-traveling correspondent. Instead, she encountered a warm, supportive teacher. “She always made you feel smart,” said Bibbs.
At the end of the spring, Payne obtained an internship for Bibbs at Delta Sigma Theta’s Washington offices and provided her lodging by insisting she house-sit her apartment. Bibbs arrived in Washington when Payne had already left on a trip. But the front desk of the Rittenhouse apartment building had been given instructions to let the young woman in. Payne’s note referred to Bibbs as her niece, denoting that she had joined a coterie that held a special place in Payne’s heart.
Eye on the Struggle Page 33