CHAPTER 34

FINDING A NEW ROLE

SIXTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD ETHEL PAYNE FACED A DISMAL future as 1978 began. Not only had her ties to the Defender, an association that had sustained her public identity for almost a quarter of a century, been severed, but also CBS had decided not to renew her contract for her broadcast commentaries. It was, as the network periodically decided, time for new voices and faces. But she was spiritually unwilling and financially unable to retire.

As had happened at other low points in her life, it was a telephone call that offered her a lifeline. An official with the Ford Foundation explained that she had been recommended for a new research program. He told her that the foundation was providing money to George Washington University in Washington, DC, for a variety of research projects and wondered if she might have an idea for one. “So immediately my mind went to the status of black colleges,” Payne said.

The foundation liked the idea for an assessment of historically black schools and provided sufficient funds to enable Payne to travel to fifteen colleges, to attend meetings of national education organizations, and to pay herself a salary. Working on this project with her usual zeal, Payne wrapped up the report within the year. She concluded that black colleges still played a major role in closing an achievement gap between white and black students but warned that the schools should insist on retaining their traditional cultural identity now that they admitted white students. “Just as blacks who are enrolled in predominately white institutions are expected to adapt to the ways of the dominant culture, so whites who attend historically black institutions need to have the opportunity to learn from black culture,” she wrote. “Pluralism does not preclude the sharing of ethnic traditions.”

Delta Sigma Theta published the report as a short book entitled Black Colleges: Roots, Reward, Renewal, and it was circulated among black educators, funders, and civil rights leaders. Benjamin Hooks, the executive director of the NAACP, told others it was “an excellent analysis of a very sensitive and complex subject.” For a South Side Chicago kid without a college degree, it was a nice moment. But like many such reports, it did little to alter the challenges faced by historically black colleges.

The report done and the grant exhausted, the mail brought no encouraging options. The LBJ Presidential Library turned down Payne’s application for one of its grants. Her friend Eddie N. Williams, head of the black-oriented Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, kindly told her that she could make a substantial contribution to his organization’s work. “At the moment, however, your interests and our ability to meet them do not match up.” He even warned that part-time employment at the center was unlikely should she come back to Washington. Harper’s magazine, the New York Times, and the Chronicle of Education were not interested in her proposed articles. Even the University of the District of Columbia passed over her application for the post of “Writer/Editor #78-65.” Adding insult to injury, it did so using a form letter.

It was dispiriting and frightening, but she persevered. She did receive an offer, one for very little money, to continue her Defender column From Where I Sit under a new name, Behind the Scenes, in the Afro-American and the Miami Times, as well as in a small chain of California weeklies. “And that and my Social Security was enough to, you know, tide me over,” she said. “It wasn’t that much, but it was enough to tide me over.”

THREE ALLIES IN WASHINGTON finally came to her rescue: Louis Martin, who was finishing a stint working at the Carter White House; Doris Saunders, an old Defender reporter who was heading up the Census Advisory Committee on the Black Population; and John Raye, the black television newscaster who had been encouraged in his professional pursuits when he saw Payne on television in the 1970s. Raye now worked for the U.S. Census Bureau, which was making an effort to bolster the participation of minorities in the once-a-decade count of the population under orders from the president. He told Payne about an opening for a writer and spokesperson in his office. With his help and Martin and Saunders’s support, Payne landed the job and headed back to Washington after an absence of seven years.

In her new post, Payne put her writing skills and editorial contacts to use for the department. Back in Washington, Payne settled into a third-floor flat in the Rittenhouse apartment building, a multistory edifice looming above Rock Creek Park with four wings jutting off at odd angles from its center portion. Her two-bedroom apartment overlooked the complex’s pool and was well suited to her needs. She converted one bedroom into her office, placing her trusty Selectric typewriter on a table next to her desk. Soon the office was so cluttered with newspapers, government reports, and books that her old friend Catherine Brown, whom she had known since the 1950s, nicknamed it “the CIA room.” On the window were a half dozen potted plants that Payne—as well as her house sitters—doused with water in which Payne placed her used eggshells to reduce the acidity of the soil. The remainder of the apartment was soon decorated with memorabilia such as tribal statues, carvings, her collection of dolls from twenty-nine countries, and photographs of Payne with presidents.

She reconnected with her friends, picking up her old Washington social life as if she had not been gone for seven years. An invitation to a dinner party at Payne’s apartment became much sought after. For Payne, a meal at her place was a way to bring interesting people to the table. Many well-known people host dinners so they can hold court, but this was not so with Payne. She was the opposite. Her dinner parties were a chance to let others shine.

She chose her guests carefully and from a wide array of people. “Lord only knows who you were going to meet,” said one guest. Normally no more than six people were invited, all selected with an eye to creating great conversation. Food was, of course, important. Southern food, lots of greens, sweet potatoes, and the like were often on the menu along with nice wines. “You put Betty Crocker, Aunt Jemima, Maxim’s, and the Tour d’Argent all to shame!” wrote one person in a thank-you note.

AT 2:05 IN THE morning on May 29, 1980, Vernon Jordan, who took over as head of the Urban League after the drowning of Whitney Young, was returning to the Marriott Inn in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the company of Martha Coleman, a younger white woman who had attended his speech that evening and given him coffee at her house afterward. As he got out of Coleman’s Pontiac Grand Prix, an assailant hidden in the darkness shot Jordan in the back, using a high-powered rifle. The wound was serious. As he received medical care in a nearby hospital, the police searched for the shooter, who they believed was motivated by a domestic dispute involving Jordan’s companion. But as it was the first assassination attempt on a major civil rights leader in a dozen years, the media descended upon Fort Wayne. Not far behind were President Jimmy Carter, Senator Edward Kennedy, and Benjamin Hooks. The police finally determined that the shooter was a racist serial murderer who, when he finally confessed, admitted he had been angered by seeing Jordan with a white woman.*

Payne had known Jordan for years as a journalist and frequently had participated in Urban League conferences. In fact, when she left Washington in 1973, Jordan took the time to tell her how much he regretted her departure. “As you move on to your new assignment in Chicago, you leave behind a record of truly outstanding service to millions of readers,” he wrote.

Now Payne was not feeling so charitable about him. What was Jordan, a married man, doing out so late at night with a white woman? “If Jordan has a good answer to all the unanswered questions I am sure everything will be forgotten,” Payne told the Chicago Tribune. “Surely, he owes his constituency an explanation. It must be remembered that black men who align themselves with white women strike a very sensitive emotional nerve with black women. It’s part of the whole pattern of rejection of us by black men, and it’s not taken lightly.”

“There’s one thing that’s a sore point with many black women,” Payne later said, “and that is the trend of black men who have become prominent, who have made it, and who have risen through the ranks, and then the first thing they do is either marry a white woman or live with a white woman.”

This was not a new note coming from Payne. Matters of the heart remained sensitive for her as she approached her seventies without a partner. She had found that her professional success had been an insurmountable barrier for many black men. “You know, black women have a particular problem,” she told a reporter a few years later. “Some black women have succeeded beyond males to some extent. And that has created some friction because black males sometimes—not often, but sometimes—see black women in competition with them.”

“The truth is that black women want to be loved and respected by their own men,” Payne had written two years earlier. “They need to be wanted. If they lash out in fury, it is because there is so much pain from within.” Counting her fiancé in the 1940s, Payne had lasting relationships with no more than three men. “We understood each other and were good company, and that was it,” she said of the men she dated. “But I knew, you know, that there was no percentage in my getting fluttery, you know, because in the first place, I don’t think they were interested to that extent.”

From his hospital bed, Jordan read what Payne said about him. “As deeply hurtful as her comments were—the most important people in my life, my daughter, my wife, and my mother, were black women—I knew that this was just insane,” he said. “It was nevertheless an issue I had to deal with when I began to give interviews after leaving the hospital.”

When he was released, one of his first public appearances was before a group of black women attending an Urban League fashion fair. He was asked to make a few brief remarks. When he was introduced, the women gave him a standing ovation. “As I walked across the stage, I thought to myself, ‘Where are you, Ethel Payne?’”

THE VERNON AFFAIR was soon eclipsed by the news of the election in which the incumbent president Jimmy Carter faced Ronald Reagan, who after several attempts had finally secured the Republican nomination. Payne picked up an assignment to write an assessment of Carter’s chances for Dollars & Sense, a magazine edited by Payne’s friend Barbara Reynolds.

When they first met in the mid-1970s, Reynolds, a Chicago Tribune reporter, had been at work on a biography of Jesse Jackson, with whom she had been a close friend. “The more I dug, the more an unflattering portrait of Jackson emerged,” recalled Reynolds. The result, when it was published, brought the wrath of Jackson supporters down on her. “I was accused of using a white ghostwriter to destroy Jackson,” Reynolds said. “I was accused of being his lover, who turned mean after he spurned me.” Books disappeared from store shelves despite having been on the city’s bestseller list, television bookings were canceled, and death threats prompted police protection. Payne came to the book’s launch. She had never forgotten Payne’s gesture, and now as a magazine editor was able to assign to her occasional articles for $400, money Payne could certainly use.

Payne predicted in the article that Carter could win reelection if he took a number of steps, including paying attention to the black vote. “To do this,” she wrote, “he will have to knock some staff heads together and make them understand that arrogance and insensitivity towards blacks, no matter how inconsequential they may seem, will only add to the president’s problems.”

Payne’s optimism, however, was founded more on hope than reality. By fall, like most observers, she knew that Carter’s chances of earning another term in the White House were slim. The result, predictable as it was, terrified her. “Along towards midnight of November 4, the emotional reaction among blacks across the country to the landslide victory of Ronald Reagan came close to a massive breakdown,” she said. In her own case, the election caused her to wake up in the middle of the night from a dream in which the Ku Klux Klan, the Moral Majority, and the Christian Voice—the latter two being conservative groups that triumphed in 1980—were conducting a purge of undesirable blacks.

IN AUGUST, PAYNE TURNED SEVENTY. “The numeral seventy scarcely perturbs me,” she said. “I am blessed with good health and energy enough to continue my normal peripatetic style of living.” She even found inspiration in the current occupant of the White House, whose policies she held in contempt. “Thanks to Ronald Reagan, seventy no longer carries with it the stigma of being ancient.”

Like the president who had gone from Hollywood to the White House, Payne embarked on a professional transformation. In May 1981, the Fisk University board of trustees adopted a resolution to create a chair in journalism for Payne. The germ of the idea took seed the previous year when Payne’s friend Barbara Reynolds visited Fisk University president Walter J. Leonard. He was eager to create more opportunities for women on his campus and to provide his students with inspirational models of strong, successful women.

Leonard and Reynolds developed a scheme of creating a chair, to be funded by a proposed endowment of $300,000, which would bring Payne to the campus in Nashville to strengthen the study of journalism and recent history. “When such names as Adam Clayton Powell, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and Mary McLeod Bethune draw blank looks from high school kids, we’re in trouble,” Reynolds said.

Payne’s friends John Raye and Shirley Small-Rougeau joined Reynolds in the cause. Raye put together a forty-five-minute documentary on Payne’s life called Portrait of a Queen: The Legacy of Ethel Lois Payne. Small-Rougeau took on the planning of a tribute dinner for June in Washington to raise $30,000 toward the endowment and provide Fisk president Leonard with an event at which to announce the endowed chair that Payne would be the first to hold. Billed with the unwieldy long title of “A Tribute to Ethel L. Payne on Her Selection as the First Recipient of the Ida B. Wells Chair in Journalism and Mass Communication at Fisk University,” the dinner took place at Washington’s Capital Hilton.

“They came from all points of the country—relatives and friends some six hundred strong to demonstrate their faith in an idea,” said a gratified Payne, who basked in the adoration. Comedian Dick Gregory told a reporter at the dinner, “I feel her energy, honesty, and integrity. She represents the lives of all black women, and the beauty of this night is that no one has to tell any lies.”

As she was escorted around the room in the company of a prominent television news anchor, Payne paused before a table at which sat Robert L. Woodson, an African American community development leader whose conservative views made him unpopular among many in the civil rights movement. “Would you come and see me sometime?” Payne asked Woodson. Believing that Payne was only being polite, Woodson was noncommittal. “No,” replied Payne, “I’m serious.”

“The very fact that she made the appointment in such a public place and she said it in front of a television anchor says a lot,” recalled Woodson. “There were some people who were shocked.” Several days later, Woodson did go to Payne’s apartment for breakfast and a vigorous discussion of his ideas, including his opposition to busing. Payne never debated him and only asked questions. “It was refreshing that someone of her age and experience was not full of herself,” Woodson said. “She truly thought of herself as a vessel that sought to be filled.”

After the screening of Raye’s film, organizers put on a version of This Is Your Life, an immensely popular television show from the 1950s and 1960s that took a surprised guest through his or her life by means of cameo appearances by friends, family, and professional acquaintances. Ten speakers in all—including her sister Alice Samples, her former boss Louis Martin, former colleague in the White House press corps Alice Dunnigan, and Organization of African Unity ambassador to the United Nations Oumarou Youssoufou—recounted tales of Payne’s life in politics, journalism, family, foreign affairs, and civil rights.

“Come fall, when I report to the Fisk campus to take up my duties,” said Payne after the soiree, “I shall be remembering the love and support of so many relations and friends who made this dream possible.”