After waiting for more than an hour in the pressroom for the promised tickets, Payne and Madison made their way downstairs to the ballroom and walked past the area where television crews had set up their cameras. Behind the press area there were no seats, so the two women sat on empty seats in front. At seventy-six and walking often with the aid of a cane, Payne had to have a seat. But when the crowds filed in and the program was about to start, two security guards came up to Payne and Madison. They would have to give up their seats and stand in the back or they “would be locked up.”
There were no other empty seats by this time. Payne picked up her cane and made her way back to the lobby. Madison at first refused to leave but eventually consented to exit through a pantry door. When the Afro-American got wind of what had happened to the two women, the Black Caucus had a public relations nightmare on its hands. “It makes my stomach turn to think that two women who have done so much to promote the Black Caucus, who have paid so many dues in their struggle to rise to the top of their profession, could be insulted in this way,” wrote Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy. He blamed the profusion of corporate money and the caucus’s growing dependence on the funds. “It is a classic case of black people losing control, and their purpose, because money has become more important than the people that are supposed to be served.”
Payne told caucus officials that in her thirty-six years in Washington she had never been threatened with being locked up while gathering news, although she proudly pointed out she had been arrested for her protest at the South African embassy. “The harsh manner displayed by security on Saturday is reminiscent of the Afrikaner way of handling protesters of apartheid,” Payne told U.S. representative Mervyn Dymally, the chair of the Black Caucus. “The euphoria I took away from the spiritual uplifting at the Saturday-morning prayer breakfast was shattered by the Saturday-evening ugliness.”
Dymally was quick to apologize. In fact, he had posted a letter to Payne before receiving hers. He placed the blame on the temporary personnel hired for the event. “Needless to say,” he wrote to Payne, “there are far too many young people today who are not aware of the history of our struggle and the people who made their jobs possible.”
THE 1988 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN fired up Payne. It was the seventh campaign she had watched with a journalist’s eye. She chastised the Democratic Party over its treatment of Jesse Jackson in one of her now occasionally published syndicated columns. As Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis closed in on the Democratic nomination, Payne said everyone could see that leaders were shutting Jackson out of party affairs before the convention. The consequence would be dire, predicted Payne. If the party deserts its loyal black voters, they will stay home in the fall.
Attending the convention in Atlanta, Payne reported on the latest political gossip. At the lunch counter in Paschal’s restaurant, one of the city’s most famous soul food restaurants, she listened as Dukakis’s treatment of Jackson was discussed. “That Greek is going to need a lot of olive oil,” said one patron, “before he can convince black folks that he’s for real about Jesse.” Back in the convention hall she talked with Hosea Williams, the longtime activist. He told Payne he had forgiven Jackson for his claim to being the last person to hold Martin Luther King in his arms when he had not been. “I told Coretta it’s time to forget. We need to support Jesse. She looked at me and said, ‘Hozee, he’s the same Jesse. He hasn’t change a bit.’”
But the forty-seven-year-old Jackson was the new face of what remained of the civil rights movement. Williams was sixty-two. So was Ralph Abernathy. Coretta Scott King was sixty-one. Roy Wilkins, Clarence Mitchell, and A. Philip Randolph had all died. The movement that Payne had chronicled was now being taught as history in classrooms.
Payne was keenly aware of the passage of time. There were now only three of the six Payne children still alive. At a family gathering in San Diego she presented to her nephew David Payne Johnson the carved ivory figure with the crack she had bought in Kinshasa during the trip to Africa with Kissinger while the secretary of state lay ill in bed. “I am the last direct descendant to bear the name Payne,” she said, explaining that she hoped he would then pass on his middle name and the carved figurine to future generations. A year later, Payne shared with Johnson her growing recognition of her age. “At seventy-seven years,” she said, “one becomes more aware of limitations of the life span.”
But the cane-toting Payne remained a reporter to the last. Mayor Marion Barry, once a well-known and militant civil rights leader, was in his third term as mayor of Washington, DC. The city government was in shambles and the murder rate had reached record levels. Under investigation for his connections to a drug suspect, Barry continued to vehemently deny his not-yet-publicly-known addiction to cocaine. He agreed to speak to the Capital Press Club, perhaps believing he would avoid the kind of questioning he had been receiving from the white media. “Mr. Mayor,” asked Payne, who had known Barry for decades, “if you had it to do over again, what mistakes would you acknowledge?”
Barry replied that he had no errors to admit. Instead he asked Payne for her opinion of him. The question was a mistake. “I think,” she said, “you have a whole pile of stuff to contend with.” An uncomfortable silence descended on the room and the mayor smiled uneasily.
IN THE FALL OF 1989 Payne applied to the South African embassy for a visa to travel to Namibia, hoping perhaps they would not remember her arrest in 1985. Forty years after witnessing the first sub-Saharan nation win its colonial independence, Payne wanted to be on the ground again in Africa for the launching of the continent’s newest independent nation. In November, Namibia, which had long been ruled by South Africa, was scheduled to hold elections for what would become its parliament upon achieving its independence in the spring.
“It will be history-making and high adventure for me if things work out successfully,” Payne wrote to a friend. She figured she would need $4,000 for the airfare and accommodations, and a month before her planned trip she had already obtained a pledge of $1,200 from the United Methodist Church. The black newspapers that remained her clients endorsed the idea but could provide no funds. Payne also kept her plans under wraps in case anything she said in print might anger the South African officials.
In the end she managed to raise the money and the South African embassy granted her a visa to join some 1,200 other journalists converging on Namibia. In early November, Payne was in Windhoek, Namibia, on the eve of the vote. For the twelfth time, Payne filed reports with an African dateline for the few remaining black newspapers than ran her column. It was no easy feat. At seventy-eight, downing pills for her high blood pressure and navigating about with a cane, she had to endure hours under the blazing African sun to get her story. Outside a cemetery, the burial site of the white Namibian Anton Lubowski, who had been killed while supporting the main liberation movement, Payne witnessed a massive election-eve rally.
Thirty years earlier, Payne had stood in a Ghanaian field and heard the chant of “Freedom, freedom, freedom” echo into the night as that nation celebrated its independence. On this day, as Namibia neared a similar moment, Payne was again on a field in Africa. “Patriotic songs and shouted slogans and the signatory dances of the liberation movement went on for more than three hours until the exhausted participants wended their way home to prepare to rise at dawn for the first of the four days allocated for voting.”
She remained for three weeks, filing stories for the black newspapers still carrying her column, which for the past two years had included Louis Farrakhan’s the Final Call. But it, like many of her client newspapers, was slow in paying and sometimes didn’t pay at all. Her longtime relationship with the Afro-American newspapers hit a shoal. The previous year her weekly commentary was cut to biweekly and its size reduced by half. Other articles she submitted were published but not paid for because the newspaper seemed to be under the impression that Payne had submitted the articles gratis. “I don’t have that luxury as a single se
nior citizen whose livelihood depends on earned income,” Payne told the president of the newspapers.
Yet Payne would not utter a public word about her maltreatment at the hands of the black press that had sustained her for four decades and provided her with a platform and a window on the world. “We defend our newspapers so protectively from criticism the same way we do for black colleges and black churches as part of our heritage,” Payne wrote at the time. “We gloss over the warts.”
AFRICA BECKONED ONE last time in the spring. In February 1990 the South African government had released Nelson Mandela from prison after a twenty-seven-year detention. Soon after, there was talk of a June visit to the United States. Delta Sigma Theta wanted to make sure that Winnie Mandela included its Miami Beach convention in the itinerary if the trip were to materialize. As it had done several years ago when the organization wanted to recruit Winnie Mandela as an honorary member, it turned once again to Payne for help. Would she be willing to travel to South Africa and meet with the Mandelas?
The trip was set for May, a month before the Mandelas’ scheduled visit to the United States. “A palpable elation suffused her spirit as the trip’s logistics began to materialize,” recalled Joseph Dumas, a young journalist whom Payne was mentoring at the time. Fatima Meer, an Indian-born South African anti-apartheid activist with whom Payne had corresponded over the years, made all the arrangements. She had been imprisoned with Winnie Mandela in 1976 and had just published Nelson Mandela’s biography.
At ten on the morning of May 24, Payne arrived at the Mandelas’ new house in the Orlando East section of Soweto. Payne spotted the armed security officers from the ANC guarding the perimeter and got her first look at the controversial house whose construction she had defended two years earlier. Three stories tall, with four bedrooms, it was, in Payne’s words, “tastefully furnished, but not lavish.”
In the living room, Payne drank coffee with Winnie Mandela, whom she met for the first time after years of correspondence. Still clad in his pajamas, Nelson Mandela greeted Payne. The two sat down and he answered her questions for thirty-five minutes, twenty more than the fifteen-minute audience that had been promised. Payne asked about the ongoing negotiations with the government and resistance among white South Africans. Despite his imprisonment, Mandela remained conciliatory in freedom. “The majority of whites want to see a peaceful change,” Mandela told her. “Whites have nothing to fear from sharing power with all the people of South Africa.” Payne was amazed at Mandela’s attitude. “Ethel could not understand why Mandela was not angry,” said C. Payne Lucas of Africare, who saw Payne upon her return to the United States.
The interview completed, Payne, dressed in a colorful floral outfit with a long strand of pearls, stood for a photo next to the much taller Mandela, in his red bathrobe tied closed with a cord. When she returned to the United States, Payne told her friends that lots of reporters had interviewed Mandela since his release but she was the only one to have done so while he was in his bathrobe.
A month later the Mandelas made a triumphant tour of the United States. A reporter with a Philadelphia paper asked Payne what she thought of it all. “I don’t want to get too carried away,” she said, “but I think Nelson Mandela is probably the best thing that’s happened to us since Martin Luther King.”
AT THE END OF THE YEAR, Rodger Streitmatter, an American University professor of journalism, began assembling an exhibit chronicling Payne’s life for the public library in Anacostia, a neighborhood where Frederick Douglass had once made his home. He selected two dozen photographs and an assortment of artifacts. When the exhibit opened in January 1991, the Washington Post, referring to Payne as the Black Press Corps’ “unsung heroine,” ran a photograph of Payne holding up an enlarged picture of herself as a six-year-old. It had been taken in 1918 when Chicago, like many cities, was hit by the influenza epidemic. “My mother suddenly realized that I might pass away, I might die, so she said she was very disturbed because she didn’t have any photograph of me,” recalled Payne. “So there was a photography shop up on Sixty-Third Street, about five blocks away, so they bundled me up and rushed me up there to have that picture taken, so my mother would have something in case I passed.”
In April, Payne left her apartment on a personal mission. Two years earlier she had confessed to her nephew a need that had grown within her with each passing year. “In the time which is left to me,” she told him, “I need to work faster and harder to leave something of value to you and the coming generations.” The idea that had taken hold of her was to launch a kind of think tank staffed by young idealists to work on the most important issues of the day. Calling it her “magnificent obsession,” she went to see James A. Joseph, president of the Council on Foundations, a national association of foundations and corporations.
Payne brought with her a prepared proposal for the Twenty-First Century Fellows Program, which would comprise a mix of black, white, Hispanic, and Asian students. Despite what she saw as a reemergence of racial tension and a growth in hate groups, “our very existence compels us to accept our interdependence,” Payne told Joseph. “No one should understand that better than the young men and women who will be leaders of tomorrow.”
On May 23, Dean Mills, the dean of the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri in Columbia, put his signature on a letter to be mailed to Payne. The members of the faculty of the nation’s oldest school of journalism, which would not have admitted her on account of race when she was of college age, had voted to award Payne the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism. “We hope you will be able to join us on November 8 at our Honor Medal banquet to accept the medal,” he wrote.
As his invitation was making its way through the post, Payne’s presence was hoped for at another event. John Rougeau, the youngest son of Payne’s devoted friend Shirley Small-Rougeau, was among the 1,519 students slated to receive undergraduate degrees at Brown University on Saturday, May 25. In addition to inviting Payne to the commencement, Small-Rougeau had also arranged for them to travel to New York City to meet law professor Derrick Bell, who had famously been dismissed by Harvard University for refusing to end a two-year protest over the university’s failure to hire and promote minority females.
Upon reflection, Payne and Small-Rougeau concluded it would be too much to take in both the graduation in Providence and a visit to New York City in one trip. Instead they decided Payne would forgo the graduation and they would travel to New York City by train a week later. “She was feeling a little ‘poorly’ when I left but was sure she would be ‘bright eyed and bushy tailed’ when I returned,” said Small-Rougeau.
On Monday, Payne stopped in at the apartment of her Rittenhouse neighbors Jesse and Jackie Jackson. He had just been sworn in as the “shadow senator” for the District of Columbia, an elected post with no powers that was created as part of an effort to win statehood for the city. He was not in, but she spoke briefly with Jackie and their son Yusef. The following morning, the Washington Post lay uncollected at Payne’s apartment door. Wednesday, a second paper joined the first. On Thursday, a neighbor seeing the growing pile of newspapers alerted the building’s front desk.
Meanwhile Small-Rougeau and her son John had returned to Washington. She received a call from the front desk of the Rittenhouse. “Cold chills ran down my spine even though the caller had told me nothing yet,” said Small-Rougeau. “When I asked if Ethel was all right, she told me no, that she had been found dead in her apartment. I fell to the floor in total shock.”
Small-Rougeau went to the building and let herself in with the key Payne had given her. “There she was, lying on the floor looking so small; her robe and gown in disarray and her cup still half filled with her morning coffee; her toast untouched.”
“All the years, the many projects, the people that we knew, the funny stories that she told, and her favorite saying of having a ‘window seat on the world’ raced through my head as I stood frozen in disbelief. I gently cover
ed her and sat stroking her forehead with tears covering my face.”
CHAPTER 40
CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
ETHEL LOIS PAYNE HAD DIED OF A HEART ATTACK, eleven weeks shy of her eightieth birthday. The news was reported in both the white and black press of the United States and as far away as South Africa. In addition to publishing an obituary, the Washington Post devoted an entire editorial to her passing. “Her voice was low, but her questions were piercing, and her reports on the world were cherished by millions of readers,” the paper said. Recalling the remarks of a Howard University professor, the Post said, “Had Ethel Payne not been black, she certainly would have been one of the most recognized journalists in American society. . . .
“Those of us,” the editorial concluded, “who did know Ethel Payne’s work and enjoyed her friendship will miss the good company of a pro whose insight and graceful writing served to bridge so many worlds.”
As a reporter, Payne had unswervingly remained faithful to the black press even when it decided it no longer needed her services. She was convinced to the end that, as during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and early 1960s, the black press had an activist’s role to play. In fact, she never gave up on the idea. “Somehow the black press has forgotten how to agitate for the purposes for which it was founded,” she complained a decade later. And ten years after that, she told a student, “The black press can be a formidable instrument for change, if it just realizes its potential, its responsibility, its historical past, and if it lives up to that credo, because the fight is far from over.”
Eye on the Struggle Page 36