CHAPTER 10

MORE UNWANTED BABIES

WITHIN A FEW MONTHS OF RETURNING TO CHICAGO, Ethel Payne embarked on a mission of sorrow. With a Defender photographer to chronicle the moment, Payne traveled to Buffalo, New York, bringing with her an urn containing the ashes of a two-month-old child of a Japanese woman and her husband, a black soldier who had gone missing in action in Korea. She delivered the remains to the soldier’s mother, who was campaigning to win a visa for her daughter-in-law and a surviving granddaughter.

Payne had not shaken off her experience with the Japanese orphans. Looking around Chicago, Payne discovered that black orphans in Chicago faced a dismal fate similar to that of the tan orphans of Japan. They weren’t wanted. The nation treated all of its citizens unequally, including babies. The offspring of unmarried white women received care and found a path to adoption from a bevy of foster homes and adoption agencies. But such agencies in Chicago might as well have posted a “whites only” sign on their front doors. Black mothers were told they could be charged with child abandonment if they tried to put their child up for adoption.

As a result, few institutions accepted black babies, and those that did struggled to find them a home. Adoption by families other than black ones was completely out of the question. In fact, white parents were permitted by the courts to return a child whose pedigree later revealed black ancestors.

In the spring of 1952, Payne began visiting the city’s adoption agencies. In one orphanage, she met seventeen-month-old Davey, who had been abandoned by a mother too young to care for him. “Davey has a pair of the biggest, most beautiful sad eyes in the world,” wrote Payne. “There is a haunting depth to them which makes one remember him long after the first sight.”

“The instinct to be loved makes Davey reach out his arms to be cuddled every time one of the nurses comes near him,” said Payne. “But the busy nurses, who have 200 other children to look after, have only the time to give him an occasional pat on the head as they hurry about their duties.”

Payne made Davey the center of the first installment of a series of articles, which appeared in mid-April. But after introducing the cute toddler to her readers, Payne explained that Davey was one of thousands of children looking for a home. “What makes his problem a little different than many of the other children in the institution is that Davey is a Negro child and there are not enough qualified applicants for the adoption of Negro children.”

Consequently, most black children would remain in orphanages or foster homes, Payne said. “Or worse still, remain with their mothers and grow up under the blighting stigma of illegitimacy.” Sixty percent of the children put up for adoption were born out of wedlock. But at the time thirty states still prohibited or restricted the advertisement or sale of contraceptives. So Payne crafted her next comment carefully so as not to mention sex, offend readers, or transgress the line of what could permissibly be said about the issue. There is, she wrote, “a basic need for educating people on what are the causes of the problem and how a more intelligent approach to it can be taken.”

For four weeks the Defender splashed Payne’s series on the front page and included, on the inside pages, a guide on how to adopt, a report on cases of successful adoptions, and a heartrending account of children in foster care. Seventy-three of every hundred children under the care of Chicago’s Children Division were black because there weren’t enough foster homes for them. At the end of the series, Payne pleaded with her readers to help. “It’s a grand feeling,” she wrote, “to know that you have not only saved a child, but you have done your share toward making better citizens for tomorrow.”

The series was a smash hit. Within weeks the city’s welfare offices reported an uptick in adoption applications from African Americans and an increase in the number of families volunteering to provide foster care. Her profiles, her feature articles, the series on employment, and her investigation into the plight of orphans taught Payne a valuable lesson about reporting. “Early on,” she said, “I decided that my best bet in newspapering was to build up a bank of contacts, and it proved very worthwhile, because people began to, well, admire me for my aggressiveness in going after something. So they cooperated by giving me information.”

THE EDITORS ASSIGNED PAYNE to do a follow-up series of stories on the mothers of the orphaned babies. To illustrate their plight, Payne settled on using the experiences of Amy Lester to tell the story of the others. “She was pert, pretty, young and sick with fright and worry,” wrote Payne in her front-page story. “Clutching a brown suitcase as she shuffled through the crowds coming down the ramp in the railroad station, she was unaware that she was one of a hundred thousand women in the same embarrassing condition.” Some 25,000 white and black pregnant unmarried women leave the small towns they grew up in and seek the anonymity of life in a large city, where, according to Payne, “they wait out their time to deliver the results of an illicit love affair away from the prying eyes and the wagging tongues of neighbors and friends.”

Payne followed Lester as she registered under the name Mrs. Carl Brewster in a dingy hotel and watched as the desk clerk took her cash payment for a week’s stay. After Lester settled into the room, Payne said the clerk called an abortionist to alert him of a new prospect. “All that is left now for the abortionist to do is to make contact with Amy and find out how much money she has or can get without arousing suspicion,” explained Payne. Unless she could get care from a licensed welfare agency, Lester, like others in her condition, had only two options: “Either seek relief from the ever-present abortionist or very often abandon the child shortly after birth.”

In subsequent installments, Payne reported on the opinions of social workers and highlighted the stigma borne by these women, not unlike like that of Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter. “Today, a century later, it is still the woman who pays and pays for the crime of bastardy; because the cruel and inequitable fallacy still exists that it is the woman’s fault in all cases,” Payne wrote. “On the other hand,” she continued, “the father of the illegitimate child is looked upon as merely a youth having its fling and to some extent, indulgence of this laxity goes to the point where it becomes a huge joke as to how many ‘outside children’ ‘so and so’ is the father of.”

Lester did not succumb to the abortionist’s offers, Payne informed her readers at the conclusion of her series. Instead, she was taken in by a maternity home. There she awaited the birth of her child with twenty other young women. After consultation with a minister, a psychiatrist, and a psychologist, Lester decided to give up her child for adoption and try to continue her college education in Chicago.

There was little doubt where Payne stood. In a world in which unwed mothers were pariahs, Payne was not going to join the condemnation. “There need not be illegitimate children or illegitimate parents,” Payne wrote. “It is an illegitimate society which fails to give each one of its members a chance to make good.”

The series resonated with other journalists. The Illinois Press Association selected it for first prize among feature stories appearing that year in communities with populations greater than 10,000. In writing this series, more so than her previous two on employment and adoption, Payne had found her journalistic voice.