AS WASHINGTON PREPARED FOR THE CHANGEOVER IN administrations, Ethel Payne received an invitation that put her on the path of fulfilling a lifelong dream of widening the scope of her reporting to beyond the shores of the United States. Since her days as a student in Chicago, Payne had believed there was a connection between the struggle for freedom at home and that abroad. Whenever she could, she would drive the point home to her readers. But with the exception of two trips in the 1950s, one to Bandung and the other to Ghana, she had done it from Washington. Now this would change. To readers, the byline of Ethel Payne and a foreign dateline, particularly one in Africa, would become inextricably linked.
This began innocently enough with a request from Lillian Wiggins, who worked for the Afro-American, that Payne accompany her to a meeting with Nigerian ambassador Joe Iyalla. It was not a social call. The ambassador wanted help from the two reporters. Iyalla’s native country, the largest black nation in Africa, was in its second year of a civil war that had started after a 1966 coup attempt broke the fragile postcolonial unity among hundreds of tribes thrown together into one nation by European mapmakers. Essentially the Igbo tribe, which lived primarily in the southeastern portion of the nation, had declared its homeland an independent state named Biafra. The Nigerian government launched a military attack to bring the region back under its control.
Although a military underdog, the renegade state was winning the public relations war and gained sympathetic support from the public and politicians in many European nations as well as in the United States, especially after the rebels circulated photographs of children with distended stomachs who were starving as a result of a government blockade.
An immensely frustrated Iyalla told Payne and Wiggins that his government’s side of the story was not being told in the press. “He felt,” Payne said, “that they just weren’t getting a break.” He invited the two women to visit Nigeria as his government’s guests to report on the war.
In late January 1970, Wiggins and Payne left Washington. After a layover in London, where they were ferried about in a Rolls-Royce with a white chauffeur, and lodged in the Royal Garden Hotel courtesy of the diplomatic representative to England known as the high commissioner for Nigeria, the women flew 4,200 miles south to Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, on the Atlantic Coast of Africa.
Unlike life in war-torn Vietnam, the situation in Lagos seemed quite normal to Payne. “Except for a few minor inconveniences, one would scarcely know there was a war going on here,” she said in her first dispatch. “Nobody from the vendor on the street corner to the residents of the palatial homes on Victoria Island or Ikoyi is really suffering.”
But as far as Ethel Payne was concerned, she had not traveled halfway around the world to report on a war from the safe confines of the capital city. She pressed her hosts to send her closer to the fighting. The government agreed to fly Payne and Wiggins to Port Harcourt, which had been recaptured by the most notorious of its military commanders, a soldier with the moniker of the Black Scorpion. Colonel Benjamin Adekunle’s nickname was only a small part of the lore surrounding him, as Payne soon learned. “He is wily and a master in guerrilla tactics as well as espionage,” Payne said. Once he disguised himself as a fisherman to rescue his wife and children marooned on an island under siege by rebels. “Three times the rebel radio has reported him killed,” said Payne, “and he is constantly the target of would-be assassins.”
Excited by the prospect of meeting this wartime legend, Payne and Wiggins climbed into a small plane. On board they found their press party had grown to three, as they were introduced to Winston Churchill, the grandson of the wartime British prime minister. A member of the Conservative Party and a supporter of Biafra, he had come to Nigeria on assignment for the Times of London.
UPON LANDING IN PORT HARCOURT, the three reporters were immediately taken by car to Colonel Adekunle’s house, traversing no fewer than five checkpoints before reaching it. The colonel, in white slacks and a maroon pullover, greeted them in his living room. While chain-smoking cigarettes and offering his guests drinks from a well-stocked bar, Adekunle pored over maps and barked out orders. When he snapped his fingers, his staff began showing The Outsider, an American film in which Tony Curtis portrayed Ira Hayes, the Native American who was among the Marines who raised the flag at Iwo Jima and later died as an alcoholic.
“Adekunle’s particular reason for running this film was to make a point to Churchill on the white man’s bias,” said Payne. The plan did not displease her. She found Churchill to be argumentative and pompous. “Oh, he was so arrogant, so brash,” she recalled. “He came over with a fixed idea, and it was almost like it was British colonialism reasserting itself.” Churchill had the same effect on Adekunle. “It wasn’t long before he came smack up against the leash of the colonel’s temper who damned the ‘bloody British baaastards’ to hell,” observed Payne.
The following morning, the reporters were taken by dusty roads into the bush country to visit government brigades and tour a Red Cross refugee camp. A troop commander showed them two young boys who he claimed were rebel spies because they bore special markings on their toes. Their interrogator, apparently the only one who spoke the captives’ language, was but a child of fourteen. He had been given a job as a military gofer upon the death of his father, who was killed in action. “War is hard on women and children,” Payne wrote in an article about the boys, “especially when they become the pawns and the victims of conquest.”
After two days in the field, Wiggins, Payne, and Churchill returned to Port Harcourt covered in dust and exhausted. But the two women’s dreams of a bath and rest were thwarted when they reached the Presidential Hotel. An army captain who was waiting for them told them to get into his lorry and go directly to the officers’ club, where Colonel Adekunle was waiting for them. When they disembarked, two women in traditional Nigerian garb escorted Payne and Wiggins upstairs and instructed them to disrobe. “At this point,” said Payne, “I was beginning to wonder if we were being prepared for the sacrificial offering!”
It was nothing of the sort. The colonel did not want Payne and Wiggins to come into his club garbed in Western attire. In a matter of a few minutes, the two women were wrapped in skirts, helped into exquisite cloth blouses, and topped with large turbans. “Well,” said Payne, “we walked downstairs and there was a whole company of officers, with the colonel in the middle, all who arose and applauded.” The band struck up a tune and Wiggins and Payne were ushered onto the floor for a dance.
Later that night the reporters retired to the colonel’s house for another movie. Soon Churchill and Adekunle were arguing about the role of the Red Cross. The evening came to an abrupt halt, said Payne, when the Brit “made the mistake of saying something about nobody wanting to come out to this stinking country.” Within twenty-four hours, Churchill was told he was no longer welcome in the region and he flew back to London. Adekunle apologized to the women for the display of his temper and took them back to Lagos in his private jet, where they caught a flight back to the United States.
THE ARDUOUS TRIP to Nigeria was only the first of a dozen such journeys to Africa for Payne. A year later, she returned to the continent to cover Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, William Rogers. His fifteen-day, ten-nation trip would mark the first time ever a secretary of state had toured Africa.
Payne raised the $2,500 she needed for the trip by apportioning the cost to the five members of the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Each of its five members—the Sengstacke publications, the Cleveland Call & Post, the Philadelphia Tribune, the Afro-American, and the Michigan Chronicle—paid $500 to cover her expenses. Sengstacke increased his contribution to $600 to cover incidental expenses. “Bless you love,” Payne wrote back. “You’re the greatest.” This was a different tune than the one she had been singing the month before.
The group traveled across Africa at a rapid pace, sometimes spending only twenty-four hours in one country. Nothing of substance transpired beyond the novelty of having an American secretary of state come by for a visit. As soon as she was back in her Washington apartment at her IBM Selectric typewriter, Payne used what she learned in her travels to churn out a lengthy article and a commentary. In the article published in the widely circulated weekend edition of the Defender, she provided readers with a crash course on the economy, education, and health needs of African nations and a description of what black Africans wanted from the United States and how Africans felt about American blacks. The commentary offered a dim view of the Nixon administration’s policy toward Africa. Rogers’s policy statement, produced following the trip, fell short of any expectation that it might contain new commitments of aid and an increase in sanctions on white supremacist countries. It was clear to Payne that neither the concerns of African Americans nor those of Africans were on Richard Nixon’s mind.
Unbeknownst to her, the White House tape recordings proved her correct. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was jealous of the good press Rogers had received on his trip and shared his annoyance with the president. “Henry,” the tape caught Nixon saying, “let’s leave the niggers to Bill and we’ll take care of the rest of the world.”
WHEN CONGO PRESIDENT Joseph-Desiré Mobutu came to Washington soon after Rogers’s African tour, Payne was among those invited to the White House for a state dinner. It was not her first encounter with the African ruler. During the trip with Rogers, Payne and her colleagues had floated up the Congo River in President Mobutu’s luxurious steamer, eating a meal of beef and asparagus flown in from France. After the White House meal, the guests retired to the East Room to hear pianist André Watts perform. Following custom, members of the press were permitted to mingle with the guests. Payne took a seat behind Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, who had just returned to work after being ill. Pat Nixon made a point of coming over to greet Payne. Her husband, the president, was now rumored to be planning a trip to Africa in the next year. “It’s easier for him to show interest in Africa than it is to take care of urgent problems about blacks here,” Payne wrote to her sister Thelma Gray.
Payne soon torpedoed the administration’s efforts to appear African-friendly when one of Nixon’s cabinet members handed her the necessary ammunition. Maurice Stans, Nixon’s commerce secretary who also served as head of the administration’s Office of Minority Business Enterprise, had gone to Chad on a three-week safari. Upon his return he got professional help to edit and narrate his homemade movie of the trip. After showing it to his neighbors, he put on screenings at the Commerce Department and at the Women’s National Press Club, where Payne was in the audience. That’s where the trouble began.
The film showed Stans and his traveling companion acting like British colonists addressing the natives as “boys” and snatching coins from necklaces on women. More revolting to Payne was a segment of the movie in which a group of whites uncovered an ancient burial ground while the natives hung back, refusing to participate in what they deemed a desecrating act. “After the whites had unearthed the tomb,” said Payne, “it was Stans who displayed the bones and skull and a few artifacts.” The spectators, which included a grimly silent Ghanaian ambassador, were taken aback. James Pope, U.S. Information Agency African press section chief, rebuked Stans for using the term boy and called the film “an Amos ’n’ Andy Show.”
Payne rushed an account of the incident into the Defender, provoking a firestorm that she further fanned by writing a widely quoted letter to the secretary. Working damage control, Stans’s assistant sent a lengthy and feisty rebuttal to Payne’s bosses in Chicago. In turn, Payne took issue with the assistant’s claims. In the end, Stans agreed to shelve the film and not show it, at least while he remained in government.
THE FOLLOWING YEAR, on March 11, 1971, Whitney Young, the longtime head of the National Urban League, who had been rumored to be in line for a cabinet post in the Nixon administration, went out for a swim off a stretch of Nigerian beach with former attorney general Ramsey Clark, his wife, and friends. Young, Clark, along with John Lewis and Jesse Jackson, had traveled to Lagos to attend a conference on Afro-American affairs.
Ten minutes after Young left the shore, his compatriots noticed that he looked like he was in trouble, raising his arms above the water but not his head. Suddenly a wave submerged him. His friends rushed to his aid, but it was too late. The forty-nine-year-old leader had drowned.
To bring Young’s body home, President Nixon dispatched a plane, under the command of Brigadier General Daniel “Chappie” James Jr., who was the highest-ranking black officer in the Air Force. For the journey, the White House selected Payne, Simeon Booker, and photographer Maurice Sorrell, both with Jet magazine, and several Urban League and government officials, including presidential assistant Donald Rumsfeld. Three Southern white pilots and a black navigator guided the plane the 5,400 miles to Lagos. “To Whitney Young,” said Booker, “it would have been a planeload of examples of the kind of equality for which he had struggled.”
Landing in Lagos, as she had numerous previous times, Payne found her way quickly to Young’s sister. The sister had the difficult task of going through her brother’s personal belongings. In a suit pocket she came across a well-worn copy of Joe Darion’s lyrics to Man of La Mancha. Across the top, Whitney Young had penned, “I challenge you to leave this room with the spirit of our founding fathers spurred by Joe Darion’s lyrics.” At Lagos’s Cathedral Church of Christ, Payne joined a congregation of three hundred that included a head of state and many prominent members of the American civil rights movement. In what Payne described as the service’s high point, Bayard Rustin broke off from his eulogy and sang an old song once sung at funerals by Alabama slaves called “Death Ain’t Nothing but a Robber.”
When it was his turn, the Reverend Jesse Jackson recalled urging Young to accept President Nixon’s offer of a cabinet post. “He told me that he wanted the cabinet job and that he knew he could have done a good job,” Jackson said. “But he didn’t accept it because he thought that the ‘brothers’ just would not have understood.” The Air Force jet carrying Young’s casket returned to New York. Just before landing at Kennedy Airport, where a large crowd waited, Payne listened as Jackson told the passengers, “I don’t want to see any of you all going off this plane carrying those souvenirs you picked up in Africa and wearing those funny hats. I want you to button up and be dignified and humble!”
After services in New York City’s Riverside Church, Nixon flew to Lexington, Kentucky, which Young had designated as his final resting place. Payne was again among those selected to accompany the body. On the flight south, Nixon and his wife walked the length of the plane and talked with each passenger on board. “At my age,” said Pat Nixon, who had turned sixty-nine a few days earlier, “it seems one is always going to funerals.” Speaking to Payne and other reporters on the flight, the First Lady said she was pleased her husband planned on recounting at the burial how he had offered Young a place in his cabinet. “I was there,” she said, “when he made the offer and I know that he really wanted him on the team.”
At the grave site in Greenwood Cemetery, where a chain-link fence still stood that once separated the white graves from the black ones, Nixon won points from Payne and other black observers. “President Nixon’s attendance at the burial service in Greenwood and his presence marked the first time that a U.S. president had shown such respect for a black man and such concern for a black family in grief,” Simeon Booker wrote in Ebony magazine, which devoted more than a dozen pages to photographs of Young and his funeral services.
No more than five months later Nixon again called on Payne for funeral duty. This time it was the death of President William Tubman, the longtime ruler of Liberia. Recent racial remarks by the gaff-prone vice-president Spiro Agnew ruled him out as a leader of the funeral delegation. Instead Nixon designated White House counselor Robert Finch, who had actually been Nixon’s first choice for vice-president. Congressman Charles Diggs and the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins also joined the group. Wilkins was making his first trip to Africa, and Payne reported that the last piece of advice given to him was “Don’t go near the water.”
ETHEL PAYNE WAS FRANTICALLY PACKING for yet another trip to Africa in the summer of 1972 when Maurice Robinson, a CBS producer, reached her by telephone. He was producing a new radio program called Spectrum, which featured short commentaries by an assortment of pundits from the liberal Nicholas von Hoffman to the conservative James J. Kilpatrick. Robinson called Payne after lunching with Mildred Roxborough, a friend of Payne’s who worked for the NAACP. Robinson told Roxborough that he thought the show could benefit from the addition of a black woman. “I’ve got just the right person for you,” Roxborough replied.
Robinson asked Payne if she would be willing to substitute for four weeks for columnist Shana Alexander while she took a leave. Payne jumped at the offer and agreed to squeeze in a stop at CBS’s Washington bureau to take a voice test before leaving the country.
Robinson liked the sample of her voice and caught up with Payne again, this time by paging her at Dulles Airport, where she was awaiting her flight to Zaire. He told her he would be in touch. When her plane reached Kinshasa, an aide from the U.S. embassy brought Payne a telegram from CBS offering her the slot on the show, which now also included a weekly appearance on the televised CBS Morning News with John Hart. She would be paid $100 per broadcast; at twice a month it would boost her income by 25 percent. But more important, if she were to get the job, Payne would become the first African American female radio and television commentator on a national network.
Upon her return to the United States, Payne met with Robinson in New York. CBS put her up in a hotel while she recorded her first two-and-a-half-minute commentaries. For the first one she prepared a piece, stemming from her journey to Zaire, about negritude, a movement in Africa that rejected Western ideas and stressed pride in being black. “Basically,” she said, “it’s a philosophy of exploring your inner self and your inner roots, and coming to be comfortable, so that you have a sense of pride and a sense of projection of that particular kind of ethnic identity.”
Robinson was pleased with her early efforts. But he detected caution on her part. “I think anyone with a heavy news background, such as yours, will take a while to realize the complete freedom he (or she) has on Spectrum—to talk about anything on which you have an opinion—and the greater the variety the better.” Payne followed his advice and soon listeners heard her ruminate caustically about noisy children on planes, charitably about George Wallace after an assassination attempt left him crippled, and nostalgically about Hubert Humphrey.
In 1972, with the exception of Belva Davis, a television reporter on the West Coast, and Carole Simpson, who could be seen on television news in Chicago, almost all broadcast news jobs were closed to African Americans, particularly female black reporters. When Payne took to the air she was an immediate source of pride for many listeners and viewers. John Raye, a black reporter with a Seattle television station who would go on to become the city’s first African-American evening news anchor, remembered turning on his set one morning and seeing Payne deliver her commentary. “My gosh, this is something,” he said he thought at the time. “Back in those days you very rarely saw black people on television.”
THE ZAIRE TRIP during which Payne received the invitation to join CBS had been, like the Nigerian tour three years earlier, made on the dime of those who would benefit from her news coverage. The Congo had recently changed its name to Zaire by order of its strong-arm ruler, Joseph-Desiré Mobutu. Courtesy of the Press Association of Zaire, Payne flew to Kinshasa in the summer of 1972 for the meeting of the First Ordinary Congress of the Popular Revolution Movement. In stark contrast to the party politics that Payne covered in the United States, the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (MPR) was the only legally permitted party in the nation. Its convoluted election rules and doctrines were dissimilar only in name to one-party rule in communist nations, with the result of a long, uninterrupted, and autocratic rule by President Mobutu, who had recently changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga,* or Mobutu Sese Seko for short.
Payne was completely taken by Mobutu and the congress. “It was black power in French and Lingala, sleek and lean and exotic,” she reported in gushing tones. Convinced of Mobutu’s good intentions, Payne compared him to Adam Clayton Powell in his sense of timing and described his use of power as having led the country safely out of a bloody past of rebellions fomented by interfering outside powers. Payne went as far as reporting that the MPR was created “to give people a method of becoming involved in political action for the job of nation building. It is participation African style.”
If nothing else, Payne’s dispatches rewarded Zaire’s government’s generosity by producing a round of flattering stories about Mobutu’s rule in the Defender and other black newspapers. “Tribal feuding has given way to the fervency of authenticité [official state ideology] as defined by Mobutu. The army remains the backbone of the administration, but it is disciplined to serve, rather than rule,” said Payne.
Payne was certainly not alone in her praise for Mobutu at the time. His rule had indeed brought stability to his land. “Ask any Zairian whether he or she disagrees with some of his measures or not and he or she will end up saying that ‘Mobutu brought us peace. We don’t want any more wars.’” Mobutu also used the Cold War to his advantage, disguising his repressive tactics as fighting Communists and earning the loyalty of the American government, flattering reports by George H. W. Bush, then ambassador to the United Nations, and toasts by President Nixon at a White House dinner.
But in the end, Payne could not bring herself to publicly criticize a black African leader any more than she could have with embattled civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s. In her mind, to do so would have undercut the movement. Payne believed her duty still lay with the larger freedom struggle, in which, to her way of thinking, journalism was a tool of advancement.