‘Eye on the Struggle,’ James McGrath Morris’s Biography of Ethel Payne
By KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD
New York Times Book Reviews
APRIL 2, 2015
In our uncertain news media landscape, the black press is not what it used to be. At their height during the Great Migration decades between 1915 and 1970, dozens of weeklies — including The New York Amsterdam News, The Pittsburgh Courier and The Los Angeles Sentinel — reported the news of black America. The Chicago Defender, unofficial organ of the migration, had a national circulation of 130,000. Everything that was fit to print, from the latest racial pogroms to Negro League baseball box scores, filled its pages, giving voice to the voiceless along the color line of American political and social life. In 2000, Vernon Jarrett, a longtime Chicago Defender reporter and a syndicated columnist at The Chicago Tribune, described black newspapers as “the most predominant media influence on black people. . . . They were our Internet.”
Next to preachers, politicians, postal workers and Pullman porters, men of Jarrett’s profession and generation are well remembered for being esteemed members of black communities. And yet, the nearly forgotten Ethel Payne was, by any measure, their match. Few journalists of any race, especially among women of her time, could match her longevity and reach across seven occupants of the White House and several continents. Payne was one of two women journalists to visit Red China in January 1973. Susan Sontag, then a contributing editor at Ms. magazine, was the other.
Payne’s was an unlikely journey, according to James McGrath Morris, whose previous books include a biography of Joseph Pulitzer. A native daughter of Chicago’s South Side, she was born in 1911, into a world of striving newcomers. Her Tennessean father left the terrors of sharecropping and lynch mobs before the war to become a Pullman porter. Her mother was from steel country in nearby Gary, Ind., where residents processed the raw materials that black convicts extracted from the coal mines of Tennessee and Alabama. Her parents were among Chicago’s early black homeowners before the redlining began. The fifth of six children, Ethel came of age as Chicago’s “Black Belt” tightened its grip on the lives of African-Americans, hemmed in by white gangs, restrictive covenants and abusive police officers.
Morris has written a fast-paced, engrossing biography, weaving the details of Payne’s personal and infinitely intriguing professional life against the backdrop of 20th-century race relations, the civil rights movement and Cold War anticolonialism. At the age of 20, she had the audacity to ask W.E.B. Du Bois if she could write his official biography. What she lacked in “experience,” she told him, she made up in “nerve.” (“If Du Bois replied,” Morris writes, “the letter was lost to history.”) During the Great Depression and early days of World War II, she worked as a city librarian, a job she found deadly boring but better than the prospect of cleaning white folks’ homes. “A professional black woman was as rare in the Windy City as a warm day in winter,” Morris notes.
What wasn’t so rare, however, was the network of black women deeply enmeshed in local racial justice work. By her late 20s and early 30s, Payne was fighting housing segregation and defense industry discrimination with the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. When A. Philip Randolph, the founding president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters — the most powerful black union in the country — reached out for local support for the emerging March on Washington Movement, Payne answered the call. This was the opening salvo of the civil rights movement, and she was right smack in the middle of it. The organizers pressured Franklin Roosevelt to desegregate defense industries by executive order or face the embarrassment of 100,000 Negroes protesting American racism on the National Mall while Hitler’s racist army conquered Europe. The strategy worked. Yet Payne learned quickly how little respect many of the men, Randolph included, had for women like her. “Too many bossy dames around here,” one male organizer complained. Payne told Randolph he himself had better “straighten up and fly right.”
Payne never lost her connection to the labor movement or political organizing. A half-century before the Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, Payne was a lead organizer for the Democratic National Committee’s black voter initiatives. Her job as deputy field director in 1962 was to convince black women that their husbands should no longer do all the “voting in their family.”
Payne was an activist who became a journalist. The Chicago Defender hired her in 1951, and in 1953 she was promoted from a reporter of local feature stories to the position of Washington correspondent. In the nation’s capital, she became only the third black journalist, behind Louis Lautier and Alice Dunnigan, to join the White House press corps, arriving just in time to cover President Eisenhower’s descent into civil rights hell.
Unsurprisingly, Payne established herself in a sea of white male reporters as a vocal and deft interlocutor of presidential news conferences. Ike liked her at first; she seemed safe and unassuming. She was, as Morris puts it, “the White House’s favorite Negro reporter.” That didn’t last long. Over and over again, she put Eisenhower on the spot. “You said then that you would have an answer later for this,” she once told him in regard to housing policies. “May I cite to you the situation at Levittown in Pennsylvania as an example where members of minority groups are being barred.”
At the same time that civil rights were taking off at home, the darker races of the world decided they had endured enough of colonialism. African and Asian leaders gathered in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955. No white Americans or Europeans allowed. Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York called the trip “a pilgrimage to a new Mecca,” and Payne was one of the reporters to cover the event. For years following, the C.I.A. and State Department kept track of Payne’s international travels, sometimes even sponsoring her, as Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon did in 1957 in support of Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and his newly independent Ghana. Similarly, two decades later, under President Ford, Henry Kissinger invited Payne on a 26,000-mile tour of Africa. He knew her as a national correspondent on CBS radio and television. She was the first black woman to hold such a position on a national network. Payne had also traveled three years before under Kissinger’s watchful eye on the 1973 China tour, sponsored by the China-American Relations Society. “You can’t help but be impressed,” she wrote to her family of the trip. “There are so many things our American system could take note of.” Her high-profile international work in the midst of the Cold War earned her an F.B.I. file the same year.
On the “deseg beat” she kept an eye on the struggle, covering Brown v. Board of Education, Emmett Till, Montgomery, Little Rock, Birmingham and Selma (“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. . . . ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger’ and ‘Go to hell!’ ”). For her reporting, President Johnson presented her with two signing pens from the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Until she died in 1991, she chronicled everything from Shirley Chisholm’s and Jesse Jackson’s presidential runs to the Reagan White House and the war on crime.
Morris’s fine biography shows that through Ethel Payne’s life, the black press helped change America and the world. “I could not divorce myself from the heart of the problem, because I was part of the problem.” Today’s social media activists walk in the first lady’s footsteps.
EYE ON THE STRUGGLE
Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press
By James McGrath Morris
Illustrated. 466 pp. Amistad/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the author of “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America.”
New York Times Book Reviews
APRIL 2, 2015
In our uncertain news media landscape, the black press is not what it used to be. At their height during the Great Migration decades between 1915 and 1970, dozens of weeklies — including The New York Amsterdam News, The Pittsburgh Courier and The Los Angeles Sentinel — reported the news of black America. The Chicago Defender, unofficial organ of the migration, had a national circulation of 130,000. Everything that was fit to print, from the latest racial pogroms to Negro League baseball box scores, filled its pages, giving voice to the voiceless along the color line of American political and social life. In 2000, Vernon Jarrett, a longtime Chicago Defender reporter and a syndicated columnist at The Chicago Tribune, described black newspapers as “the most predominant media influence on black people. . . . They were our Internet.”
Next to preachers, politicians, postal workers and Pullman porters, men of Jarrett’s profession and generation are well remembered for being esteemed members of black communities. And yet, the nearly forgotten Ethel Payne was, by any measure, their match. Few journalists of any race, especially among women of her time, could match her longevity and reach across seven occupants of the White House and several continents. Payne was one of two women journalists to visit Red China in January 1973. Susan Sontag, then a contributing editor at Ms. magazine, was the other.
Payne’s was an unlikely journey, according to James McGrath Morris, whose previous books include a biography of Joseph Pulitzer. A native daughter of Chicago’s South Side, she was born in 1911, into a world of striving newcomers. Her Tennessean father left the terrors of sharecropping and lynch mobs before the war to become a Pullman porter. Her mother was from steel country in nearby Gary, Ind., where residents processed the raw materials that black convicts extracted from the coal mines of Tennessee and Alabama. Her parents were among Chicago’s early black homeowners before the redlining began. The fifth of six children, Ethel came of age as Chicago’s “Black Belt” tightened its grip on the lives of African-Americans, hemmed in by white gangs, restrictive covenants and abusive police officers.
Morris has written a fast-paced, engrossing biography, weaving the details of Payne’s personal and infinitely intriguing professional life against the backdrop of 20th-century race relations, the civil rights movement and Cold War anticolonialism. At the age of 20, she had the audacity to ask W.E.B. Du Bois if she could write his official biography. What she lacked in “experience,” she told him, she made up in “nerve.” (“If Du Bois replied,” Morris writes, “the letter was lost to history.”) During the Great Depression and early days of World War II, she worked as a city librarian, a job she found deadly boring but better than the prospect of cleaning white folks’ homes. “A professional black woman was as rare in the Windy City as a warm day in winter,” Morris notes.
What wasn’t so rare, however, was the network of black women deeply enmeshed in local racial justice work. By her late 20s and early 30s, Payne was fighting housing segregation and defense industry discrimination with the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. When A. Philip Randolph, the founding president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters — the most powerful black union in the country — reached out for local support for the emerging March on Washington Movement, Payne answered the call. This was the opening salvo of the civil rights movement, and she was right smack in the middle of it. The organizers pressured Franklin Roosevelt to desegregate defense industries by executive order or face the embarrassment of 100,000 Negroes protesting American racism on the National Mall while Hitler’s racist army conquered Europe. The strategy worked. Yet Payne learned quickly how little respect many of the men, Randolph included, had for women like her. “Too many bossy dames around here,” one male organizer complained. Payne told Randolph he himself had better “straighten up and fly right.”
Payne never lost her connection to the labor movement or political organizing. A half-century before the Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, Payne was a lead organizer for the Democratic National Committee’s black voter initiatives. Her job as deputy field director in 1962 was to convince black women that their husbands should no longer do all the “voting in their family.”
Payne was an activist who became a journalist. The Chicago Defender hired her in 1951, and in 1953 she was promoted from a reporter of local feature stories to the position of Washington correspondent. In the nation’s capital, she became only the third black journalist, behind Louis Lautier and Alice Dunnigan, to join the White House press corps, arriving just in time to cover President Eisenhower’s descent into civil rights hell.
Unsurprisingly, Payne established herself in a sea of white male reporters as a vocal and deft interlocutor of presidential news conferences. Ike liked her at first; she seemed safe and unassuming. She was, as Morris puts it, “the White House’s favorite Negro reporter.” That didn’t last long. Over and over again, she put Eisenhower on the spot. “You said then that you would have an answer later for this,” she once told him in regard to housing policies. “May I cite to you the situation at Levittown in Pennsylvania as an example where members of minority groups are being barred.”
At the same time that civil rights were taking off at home, the darker races of the world decided they had endured enough of colonialism. African and Asian leaders gathered in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955. No white Americans or Europeans allowed. Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York called the trip “a pilgrimage to a new Mecca,” and Payne was one of the reporters to cover the event. For years following, the C.I.A. and State Department kept track of Payne’s international travels, sometimes even sponsoring her, as Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon did in 1957 in support of Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and his newly independent Ghana. Similarly, two decades later, under President Ford, Henry Kissinger invited Payne on a 26,000-mile tour of Africa. He knew her as a national correspondent on CBS radio and television. She was the first black woman to hold such a position on a national network. Payne had also traveled three years before under Kissinger’s watchful eye on the 1973 China tour, sponsored by the China-American Relations Society. “You can’t help but be impressed,” she wrote to her family of the trip. “There are so many things our American system could take note of.” Her high-profile international work in the midst of the Cold War earned her an F.B.I. file the same year.
On the “deseg beat” she kept an eye on the struggle, covering Brown v. Board of Education, Emmett Till, Montgomery, Little Rock, Birmingham and Selma (“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. . . . ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger’ and ‘Go to hell!’ ”). For her reporting, President Johnson presented her with two signing pens from the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Until she died in 1991, she chronicled everything from Shirley Chisholm’s and Jesse Jackson’s presidential runs to the Reagan White House and the war on crime.
Morris’s fine biography shows that through Ethel Payne’s life, the black press helped change America and the world. “I could not divorce myself from the heart of the problem, because I was part of the problem.” Today’s social media activists walk in the first lady’s footsteps.
EYE ON THE STRUGGLE
Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press
By James McGrath Morris
Illustrated. 466 pp. Amistad/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the author of “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America.”
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