CHAPTER 11

A TASTE OF NATIONAL POLITICS

IN THE SUMMER OF 1952, DEMOCRATS GATHERING IN CHICAGO for their presidential convention gave Payne an opportunity to try her hand at some political reporting. Until now, with the exception of a couple of press conferences, her reporting had been solely devoted to features and profiles. But a gathering of national political leaders a couple of miles west from the office sent Payne into her first political arena as a reporter.

For the Defender, the big story of the convention was civil rights, which threatened party harmony as it had in 1948, when a group of Southern Democrats bolted and nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina to run as the States’ Rights Party’s nominee. Four years later, Southern Democrats had returned to the fold. But it was not long before they and Northerners began arguing over the party’s civil rights plank.

Payne, who was paired by her editors with another Defender reporter, headed over to Chicago’s International Amphitheatre and the Conrad Hilton hotel to see the fireworks. The two arrived in time to see New York senator Herbert Lehman, a member of the platform drafting committee, squash any talk of compromise. He was demanding a civil rights plank that called for new Senate rules to break filibusters.

This was a direct attack on Southern senators who had successfully used the tactic in the Senate to forestall federal civil rights legislation. Lehman’s speech deepened the chasm between the Southern and Northern delegates and increased the likelihood of a floor fight. “I should regret a floor flight,” Senator Lehman said, “but I will press for a strong civil rights plank even if it makes such a battle inevitable.”

Lehman wasn’t the only national figure that Payne witnessed campaigning for civil rights. “Fighting also for the respect of individual dignity and first class citizenship for Negro Americans was Minnesota’s fiery senator, Hubert Humphrey,” Payne noted. It was, indeed, an unusual spectacle for Payne. With the exception of Chicago African American congressman William Dawson, who was on the platform committee, here were white politicians publicly fighting to advance the cause of civil rights. They were motivated by the changing color of voters, Payne concluded. Keenly aware that the Negro vote had delivered Ohio and Illinois in the 1948 election, they wanted to capture a larger share of the vote. The fight, Payne concluded, “demonstrated the vast importance of the Negro vote.”

Instead of seeking time with the Democratic leaders who supported her cause and rewarding them with flattering pieces, Payne took an entirely different tack. She decided to enter the enemy’s lair. She sought an audience with the die-hard segregationist senator Richard Russell Jr., one of the four leading candidates for the presidential nomination. His membership in the Democratic Party, like that of other segregationists, raised the hackles of the NAACP. “If the Democrats win,” asked its magazine Crisis, “won’t the Dixiecrat-GOP coalition kill civil rights?”

Slender in build, with a Roman nose and large ears made more pronounced by his close-cropped hair, Russell graciously received Payne in his ninth-floor room of the Conrad Hilton. He represented the bulwark of resistance to federal civil rights laws and was the wiliest of opponents. When he first reached the Senate in 1933, Russell had taken it upon himself to become the chamber’s most astute parliamentarian. He skillfully opposed every effort that he deemed a threat to the Southern way of life. He fought against anti-lynching bills, removal of poll taxes, and equal employment opportunity measures and linked such plans to communism.

Sitting before Payne with a coterie of staff members hovering behind him, Russell affably told her that Georgians were unalterably opposed to integration of any sort. If integration were to come to schools, for example, he promised the state would shut down its public schools and replace them with private ones.

“Will you support whatever civil rights plank the Democratic Party platform will contain?” Payne asked.

“I believe I can support the kind of civil rights plank which the party will produce. I am absolutely opposed to a compulsory jailhouse FEPC,* which will throw a man in jail for not hiring somebody. I believe the Constitution guarantees civil rights to all persons. We must use the education approach to the problem, not the compulsory one. The method of approach should be left to the states.”

At this point Russell broke off from his well-honed speech about states’ rights to launch into a complaint about extremists. His sycophantic staff members nodded approvingly.

“What do you mean by ‘extremists’?” she asked.

“The senator,” said one of the staffers, taking up the question, “means the radicals on both sides; the ones who want to push integration by force and the few who don’t want to see Negroes have anything. Now believe me, the senator is just as fair as he can be about trying to see that the Negroes get just as much as anybody else; and believe me, he’s a lot more honest than this crowd that runs around making a lot of promises they don’t mean.”

The interview at an end, Russell rose, shook Payne’s hand, and apologized for not having more time for her. But Senator J. Lister Hill of Alabama caught up with Payne in the hallway as she was leaving to lecture her further on the segregationist cause. Back at the Defender she tried to make sense of the experience. What Russell said did not upset her, she told her readers. She had anticipated his answers. Nor did Senator Hill’s impassioned hallway speech get under her skin. It wasn’t even the denunciation by Russell’s staff of radicals that troubled her.

“What really upset me,” Payne wrote, “I guess is what poet Robert Burns describes as the ‘Unco good’ or the ‘rigidly righteous’ who so firmly believe they are right. It’s the same kinds of fanatic religious who freely quote the scriptures to [support the] righteousness of Prime Minister Daniel Malan of South Africa to back up his claims for white supremacy.” Payne was confounded to find that not only did Russell earnestly believe he was right but also he had the temerity to tell her he was the best friend the Negro has ever had in public office. “Negroes,” he had told Payne, “have absolutely nothing to fear from me.”

The convention provided Payne with her first exposure to the federal legislative battleground for civil rights. This was an Alice in Wonderland world where Northerners were attacked as hypocrites and Southerners resolutely proclaimed that Negroes back home lived in harmony with whites, accepting their respective social roles. If they complained, it was only because they had been instigated to do so by Northern meddling.

Her time with Senators Russell and Hill made it clear to her the immense and entrenched national power held by opponents of desegregation. “I came away from the interview,” said Payne, “feeling depressed and sick.”

THE ELECTION DID NOT GO as the Democrats had hoped. Instead, the nation’s voters selected war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, sending the first Republican to the White House in twenty years. Thirty-three percent of African Americans, almost all in the North, voted in the election. They supported Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate, by a margin of three to one. Yet Eisenhower did not engender the enmity of their community. In a sense, no verdict had yet been rendered on the civil rights record of the general who like Cincinnatus had assumed power.

Having recently lost its Washington correspondent, the Defender dispatched Payne for the inauguration. The choice made sense. She was now among the paper’s most visible reporters, with a story on the front page once every four or five issues in 1952. Her coverage of the Democratic convention had demonstrated her skills as a political journalist.

Reaching Washington on the eve of the swearing in, Payne found the city jammed with visitors. Republicans euphorically converged in record numbers. Pullman cars parked in the rail yard were being used as temporary hotels, and apartments in a not-yet-occupied building had been filled with cots. At noon on January 20, 1953, Payne watched as Eisenhower took the oath of office and Pennsylvania Avenue was overtaken by a massive inaugural parade made up of 22,000 military and 5,000 civilian participants, 350 horses, 3 elephants (and even an Alaskan dog team), 65 bands, and floats from all states.

That evening, in the company of her sister Thelma Gray, Payne made the rounds of the social events. They first attended a gathering of Howard University faculty wives and then made their way to the east side of Washington to the National Armory, where one of the two inaugural balls was under way; there they listened to Lionel Hampton leading his band and blues artist W. C. Handy.

Payne was enchanted by the gala’s glitter and glamour. Dozens of the most prominent black judges, lawyers, professors, doctors, publicists, and politicians dressed in tuxedoes and glistening evening gowns mingled freely among Washington’s power elite. Defender columnist Marion B. Campbell ceded her Mostly About Women space entirely over to Payne for a who’s who of the festivities. Gushing about the “breathlessly radiant” women with “sparkling warm personalities,” Payne filled an entire page of the paper, dotting her account with well-known names, all set in caps and surrounded by photographs.

A more demure version of Payne’s reporting was reserved for the front page. There she updated readers on the black cabinet, the nickname given to the Federal Council of Negro Affairs that had been created in the Roosevelt years as an informal advisory group of African Americans. Composed of blacks who had been appointed as special assistants to cabinet secretaries, the group advised the administration, acted as liaisons with the African American community, and represented the administration in the Negro press. It had included Walter White, Robert C. Weaver, and Mary McLeod Bethune, among others.

“As the last strains of the last band in the inaugural procession died away,” Payne reported, “jockeying for position in the ‘new black cabinet’ grow more intense and capital corridors hummed with predictions.” At some length, Payne ran through all the rumored judicial, administrative, and diplomatic appointments that might include an African American.

The celebrations at an end, Washington settled in under its new administration and Payne headed back to Chicago.

AFTER THE GLAMOUR and excitement of Washington, Chicago took on a dull sheen. Instead of national politics and high society, Payne found herself covering meetings of the American Library Association, press conferences, and endless church leadership meetings. Not that the church was not important. To the contrary, Defender readers were very religious, and the church was one of very few institutions over which blacks exert unfettered control.

But her stories slipped to the inside pages of the paper. In the following eight months, her reporting made it to the front page only six times, one of which was a story on the awarding of an honorary degree to her publisher. Such stories as “Prayer Guides Lives of St. Jude Nuns” or “3,000 Attend Christian Congress” weren’t exactly page one material. But even the two substantive series she wrote that year, one of which was about the integration of the State Street shopping district, didn’t merit front-page treatment. “I really didn’t have an inclination or a desire to do straight, mundane, local reporting,” Payne said. “I just didn’t have a feel for it.”

On the other hand, the work did put Payne on the road. She covered AME church leadership meetings in New Orleans, Philadelphia, Nashville, Atlanta, and Houston. She loved the travel and the perks, such as a steak dinner at the Top Hat Lounge in Nashville, tea at the Ministers Wives and Daughters Alliance of New Orleans, and a performance of the play Portrait in Black at Ohio’s Wilberforce University, the nation’s oldest private, historically black university.

Quite to her surprise, the Southern cities won Payne over. “I’ve fallen in love with the South—some parts of it. So far I’m torn between Atlanta and Nashville,” she wrote during one of her trips. “There are slums here just as in every other city: but compared to the litter of Chicago’s sore spots, the streets were far cleaner.” Later she added Houston to her list of favorite cities. There she found a black family residing in a residential community with large homes and front lawns, quite unlike anything available to blacks back in Chicago. “Yes, this is the South!”

While in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in mid-August to cover a church conference, Payne met with Edward L. Goodwin Sr., who owned the Oklahoma Eagle, the city’s black newspaper. A successful businessman, Goodwin had entered law school and was looking for someone to run his paper. “You know,” he told Payne, “I think you’re just the person I need.” He offered her the post of managing editor with complete control over the paper, a salary of $300 a month, which was a little less than she earned at the Defender, and an option to buy up to 49 percent of the paper’s stock. Payne told Goodwin she would consider it and he had his lawyer draw up a contract stipulating that she would report to work in early October.

An Eagle staff member drove Payne out to the Tulsa airport to catch a flight back to Chicago. It was unusual for African Americans to take to the skies. Those who traveled at the time did so mostly by car, bus, or train. The bible for black travelers was the Green Book, published by Victor H. Green, a Harlem postal worker. Frequently updated, The Negro Motorist Green Book, sometimes called The Negro Traveler’s Green Book, listed those businesses that blacks could safely use to get their cars repaired, find a meal, get their hair done, or spend the night. A traveling African American blindly entering a business establishment, particularly in the Jim Crow South, risked danger or even death.

Seating in airplanes was not segregated, but airports in the American South certainly were to different degrees. When Payne flew into Atlanta, she found the lounges to be integrated but colored and white signs above the bathroom doors. National Airport, a federal facility that served the nation’s capital, had only recently opened its restaurants to blacks and only after President Truman interceded.

After securing her seat on a Chicago flight at the Tulsa airport, Payne and her companion from the paper decided to get some coffee. At the restaurant the waitress told them they could not be served. When Payne complained, the assistant manager said that she was only following state Jim Crow laws. The establishment was operated by the Sky Chef chain, whose executives had instructed its staff that it would be to their peril to overlook local customs. With no other option, Payne waited for her flight without coffee.

WHEN SHE RETURNED TO WORK at the paper, she wrote up a page one item about her treatment at the Tulsa airport and vowed that she and the Eagle staffer would sue both the airport and the restaurant chain. She let the threat die because she had another, more pressing item on her agenda.

She drafted a request for a leave of absence and left it on Louis Martin’s desk. “You would have thought I had released an atomic bomb,” Payne said. “The place went up in smoke.” Martin said it was out of the question.

“See,” Payne said, brandishing her offer from the Oklahoma paper in front of Martin, “if you don’t appreciate me, then here’s somebody who does.” Martin took the papers and looked them over. “He acted like a Philadelphia lawyer before the Supreme Court,” said Payne.

If she took the proffered job, he said, she would make less money, work harder, and lose the prestige and advantage of working for the Defender. More important, she would give up the national reporting opportunities for which the paper was grooming her.

It all gave her a splitting headache. “The only reason why I listen to Mr. Martin at all is because he is respected as one of the smartest men in the newspaper game, white or colored,” she wrote to a friend. “The biggest thing which is swaying me at the moment and something which he knew would hit home with me was my fear of taking a long-shot gamble and losing.”

Holding Payne’s documents in his hands, Martin snorted.

“Forty-nine percent? Forget it!” he said. “If you don’t have fifty-one percent, you ain’t got nothing.

“You know,” he continued, “if you’re so restless, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you go down to Washington?”