“You have asked a question,” Eisenhower replied, “that I will have to ask Mr. Hagerty [Eisenhower’s press secretary] to look up for next week. I know this: I know that every administrative part of government knows my policy and is trying to do it. Now, they may be slow getting around to it, sometimes.”
A few weeks later, a tenacious Payne followed up on her housing pursuit. “Mr. President, I would like to refer to the question asked you on April 7th, as to whether the several housing agencies had issued any regulations to implement the statement in your housing message to Congress, that everything should be done to assure good and well-located homes for all citizens. You said then that you would have an answer later for this. So far as we have been able to learn, no such specific regulations have been forthcoming. May I cite to you the situation at Levittown in Pennsylvania as an example where members of minority groups are being barred. I would like to know if you have any information at this point on this matter.”
“Just a minute,” said Eisenhower. He leaned over and conferred with Murray Snyder, a former New York City reporter who had come on board as an assistant in the press operation. “Mr. Snyder,” Eisenhower resumed, “tells me that there have been some reports come to the White House, but they are of a general character; and the only hope of getting a detailed report, such as you describe, is to go to the FHA [Federal Housing Administration] people themselves, that department.”
Payne’s two attempts to pin the president down on a matter of federal housing policy, clearly an issue important to her readers, failed to elicit much of an answer. But she had no plans to cease trying. Just asking paid dividends. In the six months she had been in Washington, Payne had learned, no matter what assurances Rabb—Eisenhower’s point man on race issues—gave privately, that matters of importance to black Americans remained absent from the public agenda in the capital. “The white press was so busy asking questions on other issues that the blacks and their problems were completely ignored,” she said. Presidential press conferences offered a national forum at which these issues could be raised. “So therefore I would think carefully about what kinds of questions I would ask the president, and before I did, I would research it and I went to the one man who I considered an authority and that was Clarence Mitchell Jr., the director of the Washington Bureau of the NAACP.”
PAYNE COULD NOT HAVE SELECTED a better ally. Mitchell was an old hand in Washington who was also press savvy, having once worked for the Baltimore Afro-American. He first came to Washington in 1941 to take a job in the Negro employment and training branch of the Office of Production Management. The work, he said, quickly gave him a taste of what he was up against. “After a long conference with the vice-president of Goodyear Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio, about the importance of using all the nation’s manpower in defense plants without racial discrimination, he concluded the meeting by asking me, ‘Do you know where I could find a good cook?’ ”
Following his stint with the government, Mitchell moved to the NAACP’s Washington office, eventually rising to become, by the time Payne met him, the organization’s chief lobbyist and director of the bureau. In the halls of Congress, the sight of dark-skinned, professionally dressed Mitchell—like the sight of Payne and her two black press colleagues—was rare. It had been only a few years, said Mitchell, since “on the floor of the U.S. Senate, the voice of Bilbo* could be heard yelling ‘nigger’ as often as the prayers of the Senate chaplain.”
“You know,” she would say in her meetings with Mitchell, “I want to raise a question next week at the press conference. What do you think I should ask the president about?” Mitchell would then brief Payne on the status of legislation important to African Americans, and the two would craft a question that might draw out the president’s sentiments, reluctant as he was to show his hand in matters of civil rights. Unknown to Payne, Mitchell was playing the same game with Dunnigan, although she was far more timid than Payne in pursuing her quarry.
Payne appreciated the help. Unlike her white colleagues in the press corps who had offices with desks and support staff, she was a one-person shoestring operation. “My office,” she quipped, “was the cluttered living room of my small apartment and the murky depths of a battered bag.” She slept little and kept a grueling schedule of cranking out three, four, or even five stories at a time to make up for the paper’s lack of wire services. Sometimes she had to head out into the night at two or three in the morning to get her stories into the mail in time to reach Chicago before the weekly’s deadline. “I got to be known among the cabdrivers and they sort of formed a benevolent protective association,” she said. “One of them, one of this crew, would wait for me until I came out. ‘Come on, it’s time for you to go home. You shouldn’t be out by yourself.’ ”
But Mitchell was rendering more than just assistance. His counseling and eventual partnership with Payne provided a sense of a mission larger than reporting alone did. “I really, actually, became the conduit for getting questions directly to the president and then the information would come back,” said Payne, “and I felt I was doing a real service that way.”
LOUIS LAUTIER DIDN’T SHARE Payne’s view of her work. In fact, he used his column in the Afro-American to sarcastically chastise her and Dunnigan for competing with each other as to who could ask the longest question. While he was right about the length of their questions, the pair weren’t in a competition. Rather, they were working together. “Alice Dunnigan and I,” Payne said, “put our heads together and decided to team up so that each week there would always be a question on some phase of civil rights.”
Mitchell publicly rebutted Lautier’s criticism. He published a letter in the Afro-American expressing the NAACP’s delight with the pursuit of the president by Payne and Dunnigan. Specifically he explained that Payne’s questions on housing were of vital importance because nothing had been done to act on the president’s promise to reduce discrimination in the assisted housing program. “I am grateful that these questions have been asked,” wrote Mitchell, “and I hope that they will continue because, after all, that is what a press conference is for.”
The president resumed taking Payne’s questions when Brown v. Board ceased to be as newsworthy. In mid-June, Eisenhower told Hagerty that he had deliberately called on Payne during the spring because he didn’t want to give the impression he was ignoring the black press even though he considered many of her questions foolish. “You know, Jim,” said Eisenhower, “I suppose nobody knows how they feel or how many pressures or insults they have to take. I guess the only way you can realize exactly how they feel is to have a black skin for several weeks. I’m going to continue to give them a break at press conferences despite the questions they ask.”
Two days later he did just that. Getting the nod, Payne once again pursued her line of questioning about civil rights. On her mind was a recent incident on an interstate bus bound for Atlanta. Police officers had forcibly separated a white student from Italy from his seat next to his black friends in the Jim Crow section of the bus. After telling the president about the incident, Payne said there were several pending measures in the House to ban segregation in interstate travel. “I understand that the attorney general was asked to render an opinion on this. I would like to know if you plan to use any action to get these bills voted out of committee?”
“The attorney general hasn’t given me any opinion on the bills; I haven’t seen them; I know nothing about them,” Eisenhower answered. “I think my general views on this whole subject are well known, and you also know that I believe in progress accomplished through the intelligence of people and through the cooperation of people more than law, if we can get it that way. Now, I will take a look. I don’t know what my opinion is, really, at this minute on that particular law.”
And so the president and Payne resumed their cat-and-mouse game.