CHAPTER 30

NIXON REDUX

ARRIVING IN MIAMI IN THE MID-AUGUST HEAT TO COVER the 1968 Republican Party convention, Ethel Payne might have rightfully thought that Resurrection City had not died two months earlier but simply moved. Veterans of the Poor People’s Campaign, dressed in denim overalls, work shirts, and straw hats, occupied the lobby of the swanky Fontainebleau Hotel. Leading them was Ralph Abernathy, sporting a Brooks Brothers suit. “True to his promise that ‘poor people no longer will be unseen, unheard and unrepresented,’” Payne reported that Abernathy aimed to make sure Republicans were confronted with the needs of the poor.

“If nothing else,” said Payne, “the whole episode gave the convention the electric charge it was lacking to really get turned on. The sedate ladies from the Women’s Division who were selling tickets to a Wednesday brunch for the leading GOP feminists sat in a state of shock at the carryings on.”

To the relief of the ladies, the protesters soon vacated the hotel. Payne watched from across the street as the bedraggled group spilled out. She also spotted a yacht making its way down the bay, loaded with Rockefeller delegates and festooned with balloons. “The poor people,” wrote Payne, “their tattered banners waving, moved on, inevitable and inexorable—a reminder that ‘the problem’ was not only there, but was sitting in the midst of the many splendored palaces of Collins Ave.”

In the Miami Beach Convention Center, a phoenix-like Richard Nixon, long thought politically dead, locked up his second nomination for president. Eight years earlier, when Payne had been distrustful of candidate John F. Kennedy for his conduct in the 1957 Senate consideration of the Civil Rights Act, Nixon had not been the anathema represented by his new incarnation. The old Nixon was one she had known well. But the man who once pushed for the Civil Rights Act, went to Africa, met with Martin Luther King, and came to her house with a bottle of bourbon was now unrecognizable, wrapped in the rhetorical shroud of his law-and-order campaign. Suggesting that government was soft on crime and police were unduly restricted in their work, Nixon’s law-and-order rhetoric appealed to white Southerners who harkened to a life before all the “troubles,” as they might refer to the civil rights struggle. Blacks, on the other hand, were leery, concerned that talk of reducing crime was aimed at them.

From Miami it was on to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention. The small protests the Republicans faced were nothing in comparison to what awaited Democrats. Their party was in complete disarray. President Johnson had startlingly withdrawn from the race after faring poorly in the New Hampshire primaries, and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated. “The Democratic Convention, which a year ago was rated the most likely to be routine, promised to provide the most suspenseful event of the year,” wrote Payne.

In assessing the field, Payne concluded the nomination would go to Hubert Humphrey. In Chicago, where the police fought protesters on the streets and bedlam reigned inside the International Amphitheatre, Humphrey was indeed selected on the first ballot. Payne voiced her doubts of the Minnesotan’s prospects on the fall ballot. “Today’s generation doesn’t remember 1948,” she wrote, referring to the period when Humphrey stood up at great political risk for a civil rights plank. “It is not impressed with the reminder of what happened then. To the reckless and disenchanted younger voters, to the disillusioned black voters today, Hubert Humphrey is regarded as a puppet of Lyndon Johnson, who in turn is denounced as a warmonger, as he strikes out now on the campaign trail.”

But the convention did, in Payne’s view, have some positive moments. There were a record number of black delegates. The integrated delegation from Mississippi that had been barred from the 1964 convention was seated. And for the first time, the names of two African Americans were put into nomination at a major political party. Channing Emery Phillips was nominated for president and Julian Bond for vice-president. (Bond, however, pointed out that at twenty-eight he was below the constitutional requirement that he be thirty-five years old.) “Whatever else may be said about the disastrous effects of the Democratic Convention, black political power came on strong,” wrote Payne.

IN THE FALL CAMPAIGN, Payne wrote almost every week about Humphrey and rarely, if ever, mentioned Nixon, except when there were unflattering reports. As Election Day neared, Payne joined the Humphrey campaign plane. Between San Jose, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada, she talked with the candidate. In her report, she highlighted Humphrey’s excoriation of Nixon on the issue of race and the Republicans’ failure to rebuke George Wallace, a third-party candidate whose campaign rested on appealing to disaffected white segregationists. Her old friend Nixon couldn’t catch a break with her. But on election night Nixon prevailed, and eight years of a Democratic White House friendly to the civil rights movement came to an end.

In December the four hundred or more black appointees in the Johnson administration began packing their belongings and saying their farewells. In the presidency that had brought about the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, African Americans had been appointed in record numbers to government posts. Their futures, however, were less secure than those of departing white officials. “While such well-known personages with the Kennedy-Johnson administrations such as Pierre Salinger, Bill Moyers, Theodore Sorensen, Mike Feldman and Joe Califano have left government service for six-figure jobs,” Payne told readers, “black members in the super grad categories have only a minuscule chance of landing fat incomes in private industry.”

On December 17, Payne joined a large crowd, which included 150 black White House appointees, at the resplendent Federal City Club to mark the end of the era and to say farewell to President Johnson. On behalf of the black appointees, Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall presented to the president a mahogany and silver desk set containing an exact replica of the first voter registration certificate issued to an Alabama black voter following the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Johnson was moved, noted Payne, and paid tribute individually to many of the figures in the audience, including Louis Martin, who as an editor of the Defender had first hired Payne in 1951 and now, as an official of the Democratic Party taking his leave, was heading back to the paper in Chicago. The Washington civil rights guard, to whom Payne was a valued ally, was leaving, and in their place was a new crew, for whom Ethel Payne’s name on a telephone call slip—let alone that of the Chicago Defender—would mean little.

AT FIRST PRESIDENT NIXON seemed to make an effort to court the black press. Its newspaper and magazine publishers were invited to a White House stag black-tie event given in honor of Whitney Young Jr., head of the National Urban League, who was thought to be in line for a cabinet post. The appointment, if it came, would be significant. Only one other African American had served in a presidential cabinet, and this happened during a Democratic administration.

The appointment didn’t materialize, although rumors circulated that Nixon had actually offered it to Young. In her reporting, Payne painted an administration hardly sympathetic to African Americans. She filed pieces on Young’s complaint that blacks were not getting jobs in the new administration, Clifford L. Alexander Jr.’s resignation as chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and Ralph Abernathy’s meeting with Nixon, after which he said the president was more interested in the poor of Vietnam than the poor of the United States.

On the other hand, occasionally she saw hints of the old Nixon. For instance, on April 29, Nixon presented Duke Ellington with the Medal of Freedom and put on a gala for the jazz artist’s seventieth birthday. The lavish soiree in the East Room went past midnight as many of America’s most famous musicians held a jam session. The president joined in the music-making at the piano. “It was nice to discover,” said Payne, “that the president wasn’t a two-headed monster, but a fellow who could be jolly and human and could play ‘Happy Birthday to You’ in the key of G.”

When members of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, the renamed trade organization of the black press, were invited to meet with President Nixon, Payne sat in for her publisher. Prior to their meeting with Nixon, Daniel P. Moynihan addressed the group in the Indian Treaty Room of the Executive Office Building where years before Payne had challenged Eisenhower during his press conferences. The professorial presidential adviser was the author of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, a report that for three years had rankled many African Americans because of its conclusion that poverty in their ranks was due to lack of families with both a father and a mother present. Moynihan made no effort to make converts among the publishers, according to Payne. “He continues to be a thorn in the side to most blacks and manages to arouse hostility by the pompous manner in which he speaks.” When he completed his speech one publisher demanded to know what he was talking about. “Whereupon,” Payne said, “Moynihan asked loftily, ‘Were you listening?’”

At 5:00 PM the group was ushered into the Cabinet Room, where Nixon and a number of aides awaited their arrival. The president was cordial and listened carefully as the group’s spokesman explained their concerns about the lack of black appointments in the administration and the dearth of money in the budget for jobs programs. Nixon promised to meet with the publishers again.

Weeks later, from the third row in the press briefing room, Payne watched and listened as Nixon misstated the size of the African American population, cutting it in half, returned to his law-and-order campaign rhetoric, widely regarded as coded reassurance to segregationists, and pronounced that he had full confidence in FBI director J. Edgar Hoover despite recent revelations that the Bureau had tapped the phones used by the late Martin Luther King.

The Richard Nixon of 1957 whom Payne had respected was gone. In his place was the new Nixon, who found a political advantage in the increasing division between affluent whites and poor blacks. “This polarization, predicted by the Kerner Report,* had been developing quietly under a semi-official veil at a rather lighting-like pace during the past six months since President Nixon took office,” Payne wrote.

IN APRIL, ONE DAY SHORT of her eighty-eighth birthday, Payne’s mother had died in a Chicago nursing home where she had resided for the past seven months. In her daughter Ethel’s ledger, Bessie got credit for having instilled in her a strong code of ethics, inspiring ambition, and steering her to a career in writing. With her mother’s death, Ethel’s family was reduced to her two surviving sisters from the original brood of six siblings. Approaching fifty-eight, Payne began to face the sense of mortality that confronts most people as one ages. Within a few years, after the death of yet another friend, Payne would write, “One can be philosophical in accepting death as part of life; nevertheless, the passing of old friends and relatives diminishes one in many ways.”

Payne and her two sisters created the William and Bessie Payne Memorial Scholarship in memory of their parents and as a tribute to their belief in the importance of education. In August, Payne put on a gathering to present a $250 check to Mamie Harriday, a shy, slight young woman with big black eyes, who was attending Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. Thirty friends came, including journalist Sarah McClendon, the cantankerous reporter who had been getting under the skin of presidents since Truman was in office, and Ofield Dukes, who had just opened his public relations firm, with Motown Records as his first client.

When it came time to present the check, the person with the responsibility for the envelope couldn’t find it. Payne had to substitute a blank piece of paper. “At least five people told me afterwards that they were prepared to stay all night to find that check as they weren’t going to have it said that with all those colored people, wouldn’t you know this would happen.” The check was found.

Meanwhile Defender publisher Sengstacke was once again mulling over the idea of bringing Payne back to Chicago to work out of the office rather than in Washington. It was a reprise of the plan that had led to Payne leaving the paper in 1958. When he raised the subject, Payne bristled. “After sixteen years in Washington,” she said, “my roots are here and it is difficult to pull up.”

Payne told Sengstacke and Louis Martin, who had resumed his post as the Defender’s editor, that she had been away too long and become too oriented to national reporting to work effectively at the paper in Chicago. But more important, the paper needed her in Washington. The wire services do not provide the kind of coverage that relates to the interest of black Americans, she wrote. In fact, she continued, they ought to be thinking about creating a larger consolidated Washington bureau to represent the black press. The administration ignored black reporters at press conferences and has failed to live up to the policy promises made during the May meeting with black publishers. “Both of these separate incidents reflect the general lack of respect for the black press and our failure to marshal the strength to command it.”

Sengstacke withdrew his idea of bringing Payne home, but only for the time being.

PAYNE’S FRUSTRATION with the Nixon administration came to a boiling point in March 1972. She was certain that Nixon purposely avoided her and her colleagues in the black press. The Congressional Black Caucus, which feuded steadily with the president, invited Payne to testify at a hearing on the mass media and the black community. She used the moment to describe three years of stonewalling by Nixon and his press staff. “He has given preferential treatment to individual reports or select small groups, granting them exclusive interviews,” Payne said at the widely covered hearings. “No such privilege has ever been given a black or minority reporter, nor has the opportunity to question him during a formal press conference arisen.”

Almost immediately following her testimony, Payne got on a plane for Gary, Indiana, for the first National Black Political Convention. The gathering, which included just about every black elected official and activist in the country, including radicals and Muslims, was organized like a convention with delegates. But unlike meetings of the two major political parties, it sought to agree only on an agenda rather than on a candidate.

The Defender gave the gathering a billing equal to the quadrennial political conventions, including running a two-page spread of photographs. In her first report from Gary, Payne said the convention “could be likened to a fast race horse at the post, restless, impatient, pulling at the bit and challenging its rider to run with it or get off its back.” Gary mayor Richard Hatcher, whose 1968 swearing in as the first elected black mayor of a major metropolitan city Payne had attended, opened the gathering with a speech that she found to be a “ringing challenge to the older order of things.”

“We reject the role of advisor to the parties’ governing circles,” Hatcher said. “Advisors are impotent. We are strong.” Instead, Hatcher claimed, as did the following speakers, they wanted to foster a black political unity. “If we are to support any political party, the price will now run high . . . very high,” he said. The anti-party sentiment was high, according to Payne. “Perhaps the most significant remark came not from a dashiki-clad black militant but from a modestly suited ‘establishment member’ who said ‘to hell with both parties.’ It was a theme taken up by Jesse Jackson. In his speech, which brought the convention to its feet, he warned the Democrats and Republicans ‘cut us in or we’ll cut out.’”

THE 1972 POLITICAL CONVENTIONS played themselves out as they had in 1968. The Democratic gathering in Miami was almost as chaotic as the last time the party had met. Payne found black delegates divided on whether to support Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman in Congress and now a candidate for president, or switch to the front-runner George McGovern, or stick with the old standby Hubert Humphrey. In the end, when McGovern won the nomination with 1,729 delegates, Chisholm retained only 152 delegates.

As she had felt with the 1968 convention, Payne believed “blacks came out of this convention with greater bargaining power than they had as delegates.” In fact, Payne believed that the activism of blacks at the Democratic Convention might spur on blacks in the Republican Party. It ended up being wishful thinking. When Payne returned to Miami Beach for the Republican Convention she found that black delegates had made no progress and were divided even about selecting a strategy to get a black member onto the party’s national committee.

That autumn Nixon won his landslide reelection over McGovern, but 90 percent of black voters remained in the Democratic fold. In Payne’s view, the loyalty paid off. “Despite the debacle of the McGovern defeat, blacks have gained considerably more political power nationally,” she wrote, detailing the increase in black members in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Still, the tone of Washington, set by the White House, was frosty if not hostile to African Americans. The change that Nixon had brought to the capital was never more evident than in December, when Payne was among a thousand people invited to a two-day symposium at the LBJ Presidential Library, which had recently been completed in Austin, Texas. Former chief justice Earl Warren, the architect of the Brown v. Board decision, gave the keynote address. But all eyes were on the former president when he reached the speaker’s platform. To do so, he was defying the orders of his doctors, who were worried about his weak heart. Payne watched as Johnson popped a nitroglycerin capsule into his mouth. “Lady Bird strained forward in her front-row seat and Luci’s hand flew to her mouth, suppressing a gasp of concern,” said Payne. “Nevertheless, his performance was as great as the most famous Shakespearean actor.”

Johnson lamented that he hadn’t “done enough” for the cause of equal rights, repeated the peroration of his famous 1965 speech to Congress, “We shall overcome!” and called for a renewed thrust for civil rights. “It was a signal to the bench,” wrote Payne, “the coach has signaled Congress, the administration and the country that the struggle for equal opportunity is not over.”