Inadequate revenue was the perennial plight of most Negro publications. Since circulation was limited almost exclusively to the black community, advertising sales were very low. The big national companies and chain stores refused to buy space in these periodicals, which had to depend chiefly on subscriptions and operate on a shoestring.
Not able to place reporters on the scene in the nation’s capital or other major cities, local editors depended on news supplied by ANP, which they bought for a minimum fee. Very often, they were not able to meet these subscription payments on time, and the news service, having no outlet for the sale of advertising space, had to limp along on whatever it could collect from other subscribers. Ultimately ANP seemed to be supplying copy to newspapers more as a crusading cause than as a high-powered, profit-making business.
Despite the thousands of words and countless exclusives I filed, working day and night seven days a week, often paying my own expenses to get these stories, the news service insisted on holding my wage to a bare minimum. Fifty dollars per week was the highest salary I ever earned from ANP. Thus it was a big surprise when Mr. Barnett once rewarded me for an extra-good job with a bonus check and a note reading, “You know our limitations as well as we do, but we really want you to prosper and be happy, which we will promote to the best of our ability.” It rankled, however, that the company defended its position to the government’s wage-hour office by claiming that I was employed part time and paid on that basis.
I’m not sure how editors of all Negro newspapers operated during those years, but I know that ANP expected reporters to “pick up” extra money from news makers—publicity seekers—just as waitresses paid the lowest possible basic wage were expected to make up the difference in tips. My agency, for instance, stressed the writing of profiles based on personal interviews of individuals rather than general political news. “Write more stories about people and fewer about issues,” ANP advised. It was even suggested that a reporter representing a national news outlet should have no compunctions about proposing to prominent people that, for an under-the-table handout, she could get their picture published in newspapers all around the country, provided they supplied the photograph and paid for the mats and postage. In other words, it was implied that ANP furnished a vehicle that could be used to the reporter’s advantage if she showed a little initiative. Emphasis was even placed on the logic of collecting an annual retainer from national organizations as an assurance that their activities would be given priority in the press on a national level. Or perhaps arrangements could be made with fight promoters to give advance publicity about an upcoming bout for a fee or an offer made to a trainer to “build up this boy” in the press.
This practice was commonly known in the trade as a “hustle.” Such hustles might have worked out for reporters who had the brass to request, or even demand, some compensation for their favors. But it didn’t meet my approval. I considered it not only unprofessional and unethical but dishonest as well. I refused to degrade the professional standing I had worked so hard to attain. There were rules, furthermore, that applied to Capitol and White House accredited reporters—foremost among them being accuracy, honesty, and reliability. So throughout my career, I preferred to suffer dire poverty rather than play this hustle.
And dire poverty was at times the only way to accurately describe my circumstances. Besides being meager, my weekly checks never arrived on time. I constantly requested that the home office in Chicago post my check via airmail, special delivery on Thursday, in time to reach me before the banks closed on Friday. But they were always mailed on Saturday and would not reach me until Monday. Since there was never enough money to carry me from one payday to another, I usually found myself broke every weekend, without even money for food.
Out of necessity, I established the humiliating practice of putting an old scarf on my head every Saturday night and strolling through the Seventh Street slum area, passing dumps and dives, bootleg and gambling joints, practically stumbling over winos and junkies, ignoring insulting remarks from the riffraff, and making my way to a pawn shop to put my watch (my most valuable possession) in hock. Since it was an inexpensive item, I was never allowed more than five dollars on it, just enough for Sunday dinner. On Monday when my check arrived, I would go down and redeem my prize possession by paying an extra dollar and a half for interest. This happened practically every week.
I was fortunate enough to maintain residence in Brookland, a highly respectable Washington neighborhood surrounded by many first families of Washington (FFW), who composed the cream of the district’s social and professional sets. Included among the educators, doctors, dentists, and other black professionals on my block were people like Ralph Bunche (chairman of the Department of Political Studies at Howard University, and future Nobel Peace Prize winner). I was not ashamed to give my address to anyone or to point out the neatly kept townhouse with its well-manicured front lawn, but I was definitely ashamed to invite anybody inside. I occupied a one-room basement apartment in the home of Dr. Samuel Thompson, a dentist. The house had a huge, old-fashioned coal furnace in the center of the kitchen, and I received a considerable reduction in rent for shoveling coal into the furnace to heat the entire three-family unit and pulling out the ashes.
Even with the low-rent arrangement, I was always behind in paying and was occasionally threatened with eviction. Since it was important to me to live up to a certain standard and keep up a decent appearance while at the same time struggling to keep my son in college, I finally concluded that I would have to find a second job—one that would still allow me to do my usual amount of newspaper work.
Jobs in Washington were scarce and had been since the end of the war and the closing of a number of war agencies, leaving so many Washington newcomers unemployed. Opportunities were even more scarce for Negroes and women, and I combed the want ads daily for leads. One day, I found an ad for a typist at an embassy. There was no name given—only a telephone number, which I called and was given an appointment for an interview. It turned out to be the embassy of Thailand. Upon my arrival, I was met by a white American male who looked me over and asked, “Are you a Negro?” When I emphatically replied in the affirmative, he said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were Negro or I could have saved you a trip. This embassy does not employ Negroes.”
I was so shocked and amazed I repeated his statement, “Doesn’t hire Negroes? I can’t conceive of that. Why would they be prejudiced? They’re as dark as we are. What’s the pitch?”
“That’s just it,” he replied. “It is because they’re dark that they do not want to associate with colored people for fear that they will be mistaken for American Negroes. They try hard to avoid them.”
Then the man went on to explain that he was from Virginia but he liked Negroes. He often attended plays at Howard University, he said, and had some friends who worked there. “This is not my idea,” he continued. “It’s just the policy of the embassy. I’m just a hired man here.”
I was so thoroughly disgusted that I left without further protest and let the matter drop.
Since I still needed money desperately, I went to the local bank, where I did my limited banking transactions and asked about borrowing $150. The bank executive inquired as to why I needed the money, and I answered truthfully, “To pay my son’s college tuition.”
“This bank doesn’t lend money for luxuries!” he snapped. “College is a luxury. If you’re not able to send your son to college, then keep him home.”
I almost broke down on the spot, so brutal and unexpected was this racial sting. My first thought was that he’d never make such a statement to a white mother struggling to educate her child.
I was so determined to find a way to make some extra money that I even considered driving a taxicab, but friends talked me out of it, citing not only the danger but the damage it would do to my prestige as a journalist, which I’d worked so hard to establish.
Then one day, a man whom I’d met casually in my political activities, who perhaps recognized my financial straits, asked for an appointment to discuss a business deal. We met, and he told me right away that he was a hip-pocket bootlegger. I had never heard this expression.
He explained that his job was to hang around a certain location with all of his pockets filled with half pints of liquor, which he sold after hours and on Sundays to people who wanted a drink after liquor stores were closed. He was now interested in expanding his territory to include another hotel that was located near where I lived. He wanted to know if he could arrange with me to stash his whiskey at my place until needed.
He had already arranged for a liquor store to supply the stuff. He would retail it. All they needed now was a cache. He would pick it up as needed and deliver it to the desired customer at a given location, and I needed not get personally involved at all. He explained, however, that there was a third factor needed for safety’s sake—police protection, which had already been arranged. The profits, he continued, would be split three ways among the supplier, the peddler, and the stasher, each of whom would ante up to pay for the protection.
I had never been involved in anything illegal, and the very idea sounded fierce and frightening, though he did his best to make it sound easy and safe as well as innocent and rewarding. No one would ever suspect, he added, that the stuff was hidden in the basement apartment of a prominent newspaperwoman in a building housing a distinguished dentist’s office in an exclusive vip residential neighborhood.
The proposition was tempting given my financial straits, about which I was sure my employer did not give a hoot, and the feeling that nobody else even cared whether I ate, starved, or was evicted, much less whether I had any money for transportation to do my job. Fortunately, however, while I rolled the opportunity around in my despairing mind, word spread that the government had launched an all-out campaign against corruption among law enforcement officers. Investigations of bribery began within the police department, and the bootlegger’s protection deal was canceled. The anticipated protector went undercover and warned his contact to get off the street and find himself a job. When the bootlegger objected that he had nowhere to go because he couldn’t find a job, the protector was said to have found a job for him as a “super” in an apartment building. Luckily for me, I had never become involved!
I was complaining to a friend one day about my financial difficulties when he apparently tired of my squawks and said sarcastically, “If you’re the hot reporter you think you are, why don’t you write and sell some magazine articles?” I had been thinking about this for some time, and his taunt actually prompted me to accept the challenge.
Since Tuskegee’s Service magazine had already used some of my articles, I had no problem putting together a two-part feature that it readily accepted on the U.S. Capitol, describing everything from its structure and daily operations to the part played by Negroes in day-by-day activities. I interviewed all the Negro employees I could find, including the library assistant, employees in the docket room and cloakroom, barbers, messengers, waiters, and the Senate’s only black doorkeeper. The first installment was published in November 1949, and afterwards a Tuskegee official wrote the editor that the articles were “so packed with historical matter” that he was asking that they be used as a supplementary history text.
After writing a number of other articles for Service magazine, I was employed on a regular basis to supply the magazine with one story each month dealing with some aspect of the food business since Tuskegee was interested in encouraging more students to enroll in its newly organized dietetic department. Although this magazine paid only twenty-five dollars for the monthly feature, it gave me an opportunity to broaden my reputation as a writer, especially since my name headed the list of contributing editors on the magazine’s masthead. I held this position along with my regular ANP reporting until the magazine finally folded many years later, and I had a lot of fun doing it. It also led to other magazine opportunities, which I welcomed as a means of expanding my experience as well as my reputation and, at least somewhat, my income.
In 1952, I followed a long, continuous hearing before a Senate Rackets Committee on racketeering and police corruption in the District of Columbia, reporting on the fascinating stories told by underworld characters known to the public only as Catfish, Bucklejaws, Jim Yellow, Pudden Head, White Top, and other such monikers. As a result of my crime reports for ANP, I was requested by a national magazine in 1953 to do an article on crime in D.C. The magazine wanted an “inside” story complete with photographs of numbers writers jotting down figures in their little black books, hip-pocket bootleggers sneaking a bottle of booze to a buyer, and gamblers engaged in a crap game in an alley.
I realized this was an impossible assignment if I wished to keep healthy. Since I was around the streets quite a lot and frequently circulating through the slum areas, I had met, by chance, many underworld characters and had a pretty fair knowledge of what was happening. While I felt free to write about it, I dared not reveal names or take pictures of these lawbreakers if I wanted to live.
The upshot was an agreement that I would do the story using young male amateur models for the pictures, which the magazine’s editor would identify as such in the publication. It was a great embarrassment to all concerned, therefore, when the magazine failed to do that, and the young men, well known around town, were recognized by the magazine’s readers. For a brief time, it appeared that both I and the magazine might be sued, but the matter died with time when nothing came of the article anyway.
ANP and I continued to disagree (through the mail) on an appropriate salary, knowing that neither would dare to cut the other loose. Through my hard work, Mr. Barnett had built up a satisfied clientele, and his subscriptions were increasing. He knew full well it would be impossible to get another person to turn out the vast amount of copy I did for the measly amount of money he was paying me.
On the other hand, I dared not cut myself off from ANP because it would cost me my White House and Capitol credentials, drying up my sources of fresh, interesting, behind-the-scenes material that was the lifeblood of my success. There was no other employment where I could keep these accreditations because only reporters for daily papers or news services were eligible for them. There was only one other Negro news service in existence at the time, and it was already well covered. There were only two Negro dailies: the Atlanta Daily World, which either was not interested in national coverage or was not in a financial position to employ a full-time Washington reporter; and the Chicago Daily Defender, which was already covered. No Negro reporters were being employed at that time on white dailies or other media such as radio or television. So ANP and I stuck it out and fussed it out together for fourteen years.
In all fairness to the ANP, however, I am grateful to the company, despite our financial conflict, for affording me an opportunity I could never have obtained elsewhere. I wept bitter tears at Claude Barnett’s passing in 1967, and although I was no longer associated with ANP by then, I was deeply grieved when the great news agency he’d founded in 1919 gradually faded out soon after his death.