One of my college professors often counseled her students to always find their way to the YWCA when in a strange city. “It’s the best, cheapest, and safest place to stay,” she’d advised. I learned she was right when I went to Louisville to work on a newspaper and again when I accompanied “Uncle Joe” Bowles on his New York adventure. So that’s where I headed when I arrived in Washington.
The Phyllis Wheatley YWCA was a busy, crowded place during those early war years, with an influx of young women, like myself, converging upon the capital city for war work.1 Like many other girls, I ran into a little difficulty attempting to register for an indefinite stay. The registrants were required to name three reputable persons as references. I had no difficulty naming prominent people back home, but that didn’t suffice. The registrar required three Washington references.
I immediately named three Washington celebrities whom I had met quite formally when they were guest speakers on various occasions—Mary McLeod Bethune, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, and the Elks’ grand exalted ruler, J. Finley Wilson. If any of these references had been checked, I’m confident not one would have remembered me. But it worked, and I was accepted as an indefinite resident. I lived there comfortably until the YWCA, through a special home placement committee, found a suitable furnished room for me with the wonderful Pratt family in the fourteen hundred block of “R” Street.
I spent the first few days of my government job in a typing pool. Then I was assigned to the filing section of the War Labor Board on what was known as the “swing shift,” working from three until eleven o’clock at night. A number of Howard University students worked this same shift. I learned that the Howard men were all classified as grade CAF-3 clerks, earning an annual salary of $1,620 while still students, as compared with my CAF-2 grade and annual salary of $1,440, although I had a complete undergraduate education and fourteen years of working experience as a teacher, lecturer, journalist, and politician.
The $1,440 salary had sounded very good to me when I left my $623 per year teacher’s salary in Kentucky (my top salary was $89 per month for a seven-month school term). I didn’t realize, however, that a grade-two job was practically at the bottom of the federal service. When I found out, I did not hesitate to let my displeasure be known. A longtime believer in organized labor, I joined the United Federal Workers of America (UFWA),2 and with its support I launched an all-out fight for a job more commensurate with my qualifications. Within a few months, this battle was won, and I received a grade-three rating as an assistant statistical clerk with the coding section of the War Labor Board at an annual salary of $1,620. Still working below my capabilities, I fought on and within a year received a second promotion to CAF-4 statistical clerk, earning $1,800 a year.
Still interested in newspaper work, I contacted Claude A. Barnett of Chicago, founder and director of the Associated Negro Press (ANP), a national news-gathering agency serving 112 Negro newspapers throughout the United States.3 Although ANP had a Washington representative, Ernest Johnson, Mr. Barnett agreed to employ me on a space-rate basis covering national affairs that the regular correspondent missed. For this he offered me one-half cent per word for all material accepted. Although I didn’t make much money, I could do this part-time while still working for the government. It was great fun, and my name became known as a national reporter.
I still believed that my grade-four rating as a government clerk was not commensurate with my academic record or sixteen years of prior professional experience. Grade four, however, was about the limit that black workers could reach at that time, and only a few (mainly lawyers) had pierced that ceiling. It was not until some two decades later that New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. brought this unwritten policy to public attention, leading to its eventual crumbling. After taking evening classes at Howard in economics and statistics, I transferred to the Office of Price Administration (OPA), the most liberal of all wartime agencies, where a promotion would be more likely. Soon thereafter, I was promoted to my first federal professional grade (p-1), which at $2,000 a year seemed like a huge milestone. It also meant greater respect and prestige, perhaps the most immediate manifestation of which occurred on paydays, when checks were delivered to the professionals’ desks while clerical workers from grade four down had to stand in line to receive their pay envelopes.
When the war ended in 1945, OPA was no longer needed and was given a year to gradually terminate. Employees were let go as their particular section was abolished, but because of my tenure, I was shifted from section to section until the very end of the agency’s existence in late December 1946. As providence would have it, the Washington correspondent for the Associated Negro Press was leaving his job about this time to accept employment in New York, leaving a vacancy. Since I had been doing part-time work for the ANP, I had no difficulty being hired on a trial basis for what the ANP termed chief of the Washington Bureau. But there was a hitch. Since the news agency was not sure how well I could handle such a big national assignment, it was not willing to set a salary and insisted that I continue working through the trial period on a space-rate basis of half a cent per word.
I agreed to try it for a month and sent in loads of copy each week. At the end of the month, I received a check for thirty dollars. “This is ridiculous,” I argued. “No one can live on thirty dollars a month.”
During this period, my husband joined me in Washington after much back-and-forth in letters in which he expressed a desire to seek federal employment. After considerable persuasion, I finally agreed, thinking and hoping that we could make a better life together in a different environment among new acquaintances. But after a fair trial, it still didn’t work out—our values, aspirations, and goals were still very different. Finally Charles and I decided to part ways, and I continued to navigate on my own.
After some debate, ANP agreed to pay one cent per word, and I agreed to try it for two more months. The same amount of my copy was used, and my monthly checks came to sixty dollars each. I managed to survive these three months on a payout for unused leave from OPA and a refund of my federal retirement contributions. When this money was gone, I informed ANP that I must have a definite salary. The agency agreed to pay me twenty-five dollars per week as a base salary and gave me permission to pick up some extra money doing other jobs to supplement my ANP salary. Freelancing for magazines and doing some political work, I managed to make this arrangement work for fourteen years, and I was averaging more than eight thousand dollars annually when I left newspaper work to accept a political appointment in 1961. It was a rough ride at times but also a good one, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.