CHAPTER 24

THE DOOR REMAINS CLOSED

IF THE CHICAGO DEFENDER NO LONGER WANTED HER IN Washington, Ethel Payne decided to find someone who did. She turned to organized labor. The CIO, which earlier had given Payne freelance work, had merged with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The resulting labor behemoth found a place for her in its new ten-story modernist edifice on Sixteenth Street overlooking St. John’s Church, known as “the Church of the Presidents.”

In June 1958, less than a month after leaving the Defender, Payne was installed as the first black employee at the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education (COPE), which worked for the election of candidates friendly to the labor movement and tried to ensure their subsequent loyalty by monitoring and publicizing their voting records once in office. With a salary of $170 a week, 60 percent more than what she had earned at the paper, Payne became the highest-ranking African American women in organized labor.

Payne put her pen to work promoting the agenda of the labor movement, particularly among African Americans and women. She channeled her journalistic experience into producing two biweekly publications, one that went to the wives of union members and another for minority leaders in and out of the labor movement. She also prepared press releases for black newspapers.

But the union had hired more than a writer. In Payne, COPE found someone who could carry the union’s message to previously impenetrable black organizations. Within a year, Payne logged more than 100,000 miles in travel attending such varied gatherings as the Imperial Court Daughters of Isis, an auxiliary to the Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order Nobles Mystic Shrine of North and South America and Its Jurisdictions, and the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks of the World, both African American versions of the white fraternal orders better known as the Shriners and the Elks. Payne even attended the annual convention of black beauticians in Cleveland, which welcomed civil rights activists, especially a female one.

With the hike in salary Payne converted her membership in the NAACP, dating back more than twenty years, into a life membership. The $500 gift, however, went astray and it wasn’t until months later that the organization acknowledged it. “No voluntary organization chooses to offend anyone,” Roy Wilkins wrote in a contrite letter. “But if I had a choice, you would have been the last person to be accorded this treatment.” A month later, wearing one of her distinctive feathered fascinator headbands, Payne went to the house of the Right Reverend Stephen Gill Spottswood, a member of the NAACP national board, to receive her life membership plaque.

After years of being on the outside of Washington, Payne was on the inside.

WORKING FOR A LABOR UNION removed any remaining fetters on Payne’s partisanship. In early 1959, Clare B. Williams, the assistant chairman of the Republican National Committee, returned from a tour of the South and proclaimed that moderation, understanding, and time would be required to end segregation. “To say that I was indignant is an understatement,” Payne wrote to Williams, making sure to send copies to the GOP’s Val Washington and others. “Seldom have I seen a more contemptuous attitude displayed in your quoted statements on the integration question.” The word moderation has the connotation to black Americans of “never never,” Payne said. “Worse still, you have committed the Republican Party to condoning lynchings, violence, and defiance of the law.”

Payne also found herself freed from the conventional journalistic restraint on seeking personal favors from those one covers. Back in Chicago, her nephew James A. Johnson, who was a good student and ambitious, worried that his public school’s rough-and-tumble student culture was endangering his dream of becoming a doctor. Payne’s years on Capitol Hill and her network of contacts gave her an idea. During the 1957 Christmas holidays, Payne talked with Congressman Barratt O’Hara, an avuncular member of the Chicago delegation and a onetime newspaperman, about the possibility of nominating Johnson, who lived in his district, for a position as a Capitol page. If the plan worked, Johnson would come and live with Payne and attend the Capitol Page School, benefiting from its topflight instruction. The idea excited her nephew, to whom Payne had been the “mysterious aunt who was always doing exciting stuff.”

In the summer of 1958, Johnson had reached the minimum age of fourteen and O’Hara pushed ahead with the nomination for the congressional session beginning in January. O’Hara was under the impression that there had been black pages in the past. “I did not want to push the boy into an integration battle that might prove embarrassing,” he said. He was mistaken. At the time, neither the Senate nor the House believed it had ever had a black page.

In a chamber in which everything from committee assignments to parking and stationery allotments was in the firm control of veteran Southern representatives, the nomination of a black youngster as a page remained out of the question in 1959. But the committee that made the decisions regarding pages was under the misapprehension that O’Hara and Representative Thomas O’Brien, the state’s senior member of the congressional delegation, were sponsoring the same page candidate, a white teenage boy. The staff only glanced at O’Hara’s letter before letting him know his nomination had been approved. Then the trouble began.

THINKING EVERYTHING WAS ALL SET, O’Hara’s staff telephoned Payne several times to plan for Johnson’s arrival and provide a list of the clothing—blue suit, white shirt, black tie—that the youngster would need when he reported for work. Payne called her sister and told her to put herself and her son on a plane.

Only when the two arrived did O’Hara and Payne learn that the chair of the patronage committee, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, had declared the young boy was not in line for a page position, nor would he get one. The Southern leadership of the House had put the kibosh on Johnson’s nomination and was surprised and furious at O’Hara’s gumption. Both O’Hara and Payne acted dumbfounded, although they had to have known of the potential roadblocks. While leaders claimed the denial was procedural in nature, no one was fooled. “Most Negroes are firmly convinced that Jimmy Johnson was knocked out by the Dixiecrats,” wrote Louis Martin in his Defender column.

Meanwhile the press, white and black, glommed onto the story. The Chicago Tribune’s Washington correspondent persuaded Johnson to be interviewed on the steps of the Capitol, where he posed for an Associated Press photographer. “The Southern congressmen don’t want me,” Johnson said, almost in tears.

With the Page School’s door apparently solidly locked shut, Payne enrolled Johnson in a Washington public school “while,” she told reporters, “we continue to try for a page position.” But none materialized. Instead, O’Hara and Payne came up with an alternative plan. According to the rules, one did not have to be a page, only an employee of Congress, to attend the Page School. So five members of the House agreed to each hire Johnson as a part-time messenger. By March, Johnson was attending the Page School; he dressed and worked like a page, but remained barred from the floor of the House.

With a partial victory achieved, Payne had a new concern. At age forty-seven, she suddenly found herself in charge of a youngster for the first time in her adult life. Fortunately she found help. The pastor in Johnson’s Chicago church contacted his counterpart in a church in Payne’s neighborhood. A meeting was arranged at which Payne and Johnson were introduced to the Davises, an African American family who were members of the mostly white congregation of the Augustana Lutheran Church. In fact, their teenage son Herman “Skip” Davis was the church’s first black acolyte. The pastor explained to the Davis teenager that Johnson would soon be the first black page on Capitol Hill and that his aunt was one of the first black White House correspondents. “But as young kids fourteen years old,” said Davis, “all you are thinking about is how we can have fun together.”

The two boys immediately became fast friends and the Davis family relieved Payne of the worry about what to do with her nephew while keeping up with her busy schedule and travel. If the two were not at Payne’s apartment they could be found in the Davises’ house. “But we knew what rules were,” recalled Davis, “and because Aunt Ethel traveled a lot, we never caused any problems at all out of respect for our parents and Aunt Ethel.”

Johnson did well with his schoolwork. “He’s faithful to the books. He’s never allowed the frustrations to discourage him,” Payne told Ebony magazine. “He should be made a page—just for one day—under suspension of House rules.”

THE CONTROVERSY OVER Payne’s nephew died down in the press, but its lingering effect had national policy implications. In late January 1960, civil rights legislation intended to plug some of the holes in the weak 1957 Civil Rights Act was bottled up in the House Rules Committee. Payne’s friend Clarence Mitchell, the lobbyist for the NAACP, was searching for signatures, particularly Republican ones, for a discharge petition that would pry the bill out of the committee and send it to the floor for a vote.

Representative William H. Ayres, a Republican from Ohio, saw a golden opportunity to needle the Democrats, whose members were divided on civil rights issues. He informed the Democratic leadership that he would sign the petition “as soon as they do justice to little Jimmy Johnson” by giving him his promised job as a page. “If they can’t keep their word to one Negro,” he added mischievously, “how do they expect to handle the problems of eighteen million?”

Mitchell was beside himself. “I too believe that it is a national disgrace when Congress finds it impossible to give one little boy a job simply because of the color of skin,” he told Ayres. But it wouldn’t help Johnson or other victims of racial injustice if civil rights legislation remained held up in committee. “It amounts,” Mitchell said, “to punishing those who need legislative protection of their civil rights because of unjust discrimination against one member of the racial group most effected by segregation.”

Eventually the bill found its way to the floor and was passed. But as with the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which this one was intended to improve, the law was mostly a symbolic gesture that did little to strengthen the federal government’s hand on matters of racial discrimination. Its passage, as well as that of the 1957 law, revealed that Southern lawmakers could no longer halt legislation abhorrent to them, but they could still gut the bills that endangered their beloved segregation.

TWO YEARS INTO HER NEW LIFE at the AFL-CIO, Payne found her job increasingly intolerable. The work was dull in comparison to her former life. Instead of being able to dash off to some trouble spot in the South, she now had to fill out travel requisitions weeks ahead of any trip. She had become a bureaucrat.

More odious to her was organized labor’s dismal record on race in its own affairs. In Washington, for instance, black workers were barred by union rules from working on a major restoration project to the U.S. Capitol. Union president George Meany refused to fix this injustice. A. Philip Randolph, with whom Payne had worked side by side on the March on Washington Movement, sought to create the Negro American Labor Council to put pressure on the AFL-CIO to end segregated locals. For his actions, Randolph became a Meany target and was censured by the AFL-CIO’s executive board. “Who the hell appointed you guardian of all the Negroes in America?” Meany yelled at Randolph during the union’s annual convention.

“Now the letters are pouring into headquarters here in protest of this latest business,” Payne told her mother. Inside the AFL-CIO headquarters, Meany’s inaction in regard to the racist behavior of its member labor unions put the spotlight on Payne and the handful of black employees. “It means,” said Payne, “that we have literally become ‘sacred cows,’ so afraid are they of offending us any further!” But Payne was trapped. With her lack of a college degree, she couldn’t walk away from her high-salary job without some alternative, especially with her nephew living with her.

But that did not mean she had to remain loyal. She bit the hand that fed her when the AFL-CIO turned its attention to the 1960 election. It sought to strengthen its hand within the Democratic Party by winning coveted seats on the Democratic National Committee (DNC). In Washington, the AFL-CIO believed it had a lock on getting J. C. Turner, a prominent white Washington labor union official, onto the DNC. Payne, however, had a different plan.

She and several other women formed the Metropolitan Women’s Democratic Club to, in Payne’s words, “give the girls a chance to flex their muscles in the political action field.” The club was an affront to traditional political organizers. Women were counted on to work in politics but not to take on leadership roles.

Payne was elected the club’s first president. For its initial foray into the political arena, the women decided to work to elect to the DNC underdog Frank D. Reeves, a Canadian-born black NAACP attorney. With their help, Reeves pulled off an upset, denying the AFL-CIO its seat on the DNC and becoming the first African American on the party’s governing board.

The Metropolitan Women’s Democratic Club and other similar organizations connected career-minded women, particularly black women. At the time, women were expected to find fulfillment in domesticity, not activism. In these sororal organizations they could be appreciated for who they were. Payne valued the support all the more because she remained alone in life. She had not married and had not sustained any serious relationship with a man. Her success and stridency was off-putting to African American men. But club friends, such as Arabella Denniston, Mary McLeod Bethune’s former right-hand person, provided important companionship. The two single women played the board game Scrabble, often into the wee hours of the morning, fighting furiously over words. “She’d grab her dictionary,” recalled Payne, “and I’d say, ‘Your dictionary is no damn good!’ So I’d bring my own dictionary. We used to have a lot of fun.”

Payne was soon at odds again with her bosses over their support of the leading Democratic Party candidates for the nomination, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Stuart Symington, and Adlai Stevenson. Payne knew from firsthand experience on Capitol Hill that even Richard Nixon, the likely Republican nominee, had a better civil rights record than any of the Democratic contenders. In particular, Payne retained serious reservations about Kennedy. “My doubts grew out of the senator’s switching positions in a crucial test on a civil rights vote in 1957.”

IN JULY PAYNE WENT to Los Angeles for the Democratic National Convention. It was the first time she had sat with the party activists rather than in the press box at a convention. The morning after Kennedy secured the nomination on the first ballot, rumors circulated that he was going to pick Lyndon Johnson as his vice-president. Seeing a South that was growing hostile to the Democratic Party, Kennedy wanted a Southerner, especially one who could secure the electorally rich state of Texas. Payne, like many other blacks, was leery of the choice. She was willing to forgive Kennedy’s transgressions in the fight over the 1957 Civil Rights Act, but she still blamed Johnson for the evisceration of the act.

Kennedy, as predicted, picked Johnson. Payne and every black delegate, elected official, and party activist at the convention received a telegram inviting them to a meeting at the Biltmore Hotel. Chicago congressman William Dawson, who had given the seconding speech for the Johnson nomination, and Reeves, who had seconded the Kennedy nomination, greeted the group. But Payne observed that the crowd remained skeptical, even sullen. After some delay Kennedy arrived, accompanied by Johnson. “There was muted applause and some grim-faced onlookers kept their arms significantly folded,” Payne said.

Johnson told the gathering that he understood how African Americans felt about him but pledged that if they were elected, he and Kennedy would not disappoint them. “I’ll do more for you in four years than anyone else has done for you in one hundred years,” Johnson said. Payne looked at Reeves. He had, she said, “the satisfied look of the broker who has delivered for his client.”

In the fall the Kennedy-Johnson ticket prevailed by the smallest of margins made possible in part by winning 70 percent of the black vote. Not long after, Payne’s nephew came back to the apartment carrying a large package. Johnson proceeded to take down some pictures on one wall and put in their place a large picture of John and Jackie Kennedy. “That’s our leader,” he said to his aunt.

THE YEAR 1961 SPARKED hope among many African Americans. In Walter Mosley’s novel Black Betty, Easy Rawlins considered the prospects of the year: “About our new young Irish President and Martin Luther King; about how the world was changing and a black man in America had a chance to be a man for the first time in hundreds of years.”

For Payne the year brought hope that she might be able to leave the AFL-CIO. She did not want to give up her life in the capital. “I’m now in my eighth year of life in Washington, and still fascinated by the panorama of politics and its accompaniment of rumors, intrigue, cynicism, frustrations, and pomp and circumstance,” she told her family.

After the new president took office, Payne’s name showed up on a list of rumored appointments. It was thought she might be given the assistant directorship of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau. The invitation never materialized. The lack of a college degree took her out of consideration. “Contrary to all those speculations you may have read about my going into the administration,” she wrote to her family, “I’m right here at the AFL-CIO and as the kids would say: ‘Nothing is shaking.’ ”

On Monday, June 12, 1961, Payne, her sister Avis and Avis’s husband James, as well as other relatives, gathered to watch as James Johnson and thirteen other boys graduated from the Capitol Page School. “You have been privileged to serve in one of freedom’s greatest institutions—the Congress of the United States,” Vice-President Johnson told the students. Then, almost as if he were addressing Payne’s nephew, he said, “You know the frailties of its members, but you know the vastly greater strengths of the institution.” When the time came for James A. Johnson to receive his diploma, the audience stood on its feet applauding, providing him with a send-off to a college education, medical school, and a naval career culminating in the post of rear admiral.

“Although his family is disappointed that he did not realize his dream of being accepted as a page on the House floor,” said Payne, “he had made so many friends and well-wishers that it has been a great experience.

“He thinks philosophically that he has paved the way for Congress to relax its resistance and in the future, some other colored boy will get the opportunity to break the iron curtain and become a page.”

A YEAR INTO THE KENNEDY administration, on January 26, 1962, COPE fired Payne. No public reason was given. Some press accounts attributed the termination to an economy move. “Ranks of the AFL-CIO’s staff employees and some labor circles are wondering out loud why it happened,” reported the Pittsburgh Courier. When she was asked, Payne refused to comment beyond confirming she had been let go.

The speculation was that Payne’s independent political streak had become too much for union leaders. From the beginning her fidelity to the labor movement’s alliance with the Democratic Party had been suspect because of the widely publicized visit to her home by then vice-president and 1960 Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon. Payne’s support for insurgent candidate Frank Reeves had certainly not helped.

At first it was thought that Payne might become deputy director of the newly created Agency for International Development. Instead, Payne accepted an offer from the Democratic National Committee to become the deputy field director. Margaret Price, the director of women’s activities for the party, hired Payne to recruit and organize black women. “The appointment is the first move of the Dems to develop a striking force among Negro women,” noted Jet magazine.

In September, the White House dispatched Payne, along with presidential aides Hobart Taylor Jr., special counsel to the Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, and Andrew Hatcher, the first black person to serve in the White House Press Office, to the annual meeting of the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World, the largest black fraternal organization, in Detroit. The goal of the White House emissaries was to win support for Kennedy’s Medicare bill. But the Elks’ Grand Exalted Ruler, who was a Republican, declined to lend his organization’s support to the controversial legislation. However, before Payne left Detroit, he permitted her to argue in favor of Medicare in a closed session. In doing so, she became the first woman to speak before the group. The audience did not buy Payne’s message, but she received a standing ovation.