CHAPTER 37

HYMIETOWN

TO ETHEL PAYNE’S JOY, THE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDACY of Jesse Jackson was gaining traction since his announcement in the fall of 1983 that he would become the second African American, after Shirley Chisholm, to make a serious bid for the Democratic nomination. Payne, who had first met Jackson during the 1960s and had once described him in print as looking like Michelangelo’s David, raised more than $1,000 for his campaign from her friends.

In late January 1984, her candidate sat down for breakfast at Washington National Airport with Milton Coleman, a forty-six-year-old seasoned black reporter from the Washington Post who was covering the presidential campaign. “Let’s talk black talk,” Jackson said, invoking a phrase he used when he wanted to say something to a reporter without being identified as the source. “I don’t know what Jackson says to white reporters when he wants to talk on background,” Coleman said. “But with me and other blacks, he has placed it in the racial context: ‘Let’s talk black talk.’”

What Jackson said, however, created an uproar. Discussing what he saw as the preoccupation of Jews with Israel, he used the derogatory terms Hymie and Hymietown. Coleman found he was not alone in having heard these words from Jackson, and in February he shared details of the conversation with another Post reporter who was working on a piece about Jackson and foreign policy.

In the thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth paragraphs of the published story, the reporter mentioned that Jackson had used the terms, followed by a denial from the candidate. No one much noticed it until several days later when the paper published an editorial calling on Jackson to explain his choice of words. For a week Jackson stonewalled as the issue dominated the coverage of his campaign. Finally the contrite candidate spoke at a synagogue in New Hampshire and sought forgiveness for his insensitivity. The episode left Coleman, as the one who had revealed Jackson’s slurs, in the middle of a firestorm of controversy made worse when the often incendiary Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan issued what seemed to many like a thinly veiled death threat. Coleman stood convicted of the crime of betraying his race.

In her apartment Payne took to the keys of her IBM Selectric and poured out her anger in a column unlike anything she had written before. In the past, Martin and other editors at the Defender had blue-penciled Payne’s copy on occasion. But now her self-syndicated columns went directly from her typewriter to the reader, and her venom was unrestrained.

Comparing Coleman to a slave informer in the antebellum South, she questioned his motives. The way she saw it, Jackson had been beguiled into thinking he could “let his hair down with the brother.” In doing so, the candidate had overlooked “the fact that Coleman was programmed to record every nuance, every phrase, every move that might be used in revealing the flaws in the superstar and report it back to his superiors in the citadel of power at the Washington Post.”

Payne suggested Coleman might even be part of a larger plot to thwart Jackson’s campaign. “It was no longer just an aberration on the body politic,” she wrote. “It had become serious and the warning signs were posted—stop him before the whole thing gets out of hand.”

She even invoked the famous Janet Cooke affair, when a black reporter working under Coleman had faked a Pulitzer Prize–winning story about an eight-year-old drug addict, triggering a vain search for the boy while generating paper sales. “The stigma of being involved in a seamy scheme of promoting sordidness at the price of truth left him with a serious credibility gap in the black Washington community,” she said. “That is why many doubted him as the sole witness to the ‘Hymie slur.’”

She didn’t stop there. Even acknowledging, although using quotation marks around the word confession, that Jackson had admitted his use of the words, Payne accused Milton of racial betrayal of the deepest kind. “The question of Milton Coleman and the Judas factor remains,” she wrote.

FOR PAYNE, COLEMAN HAD VIOLATED her lifelong creed: One did not blindly follow the dicta of journalism if they conflict with loyalty to her race, particularly on issues relating to civil rights. “For black journalists, particularly me, I think it made us know that we could not stand aside and be so-called objective witnesses,” she said. “We were absolutely unable to make the distinction between what is ‘objective journalism.’ So I adopted a code of trying to be fair, but I could not divorce myself from the heart of the problem, because I was part of the problem.”

But even fairness became hard for Payne when she thought black figures did a disservice to their struggle for equality. She expected resistance from whites but did not tolerate behavior among blacks whom she viewed as impeding the movement. In 1955, Payne had written approvingly when a Montgomery black woman was ostracized for not supporting the bus boycott, and in 1968 she faulted NAACP leader Roy Wilkins for questioning King’s leadership in front of a white audience.

Three years before attacking Coleman, Payne had lambasted Tony Brown, the host of the popular PBS talk show Tony Brown’s Journal, which focused on African Americans, and Chuck Stone, a former Chicago Defender editor once nicknamed “the angry man of the Negro press.” Their crime in her eyes was their participation in a right-wing Black Alternatives Conference at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, supported by Edwin Meese III, a white conservative about to become President Reagan’s attorney general. Among the leading figures at the gathering were Thomas Sowell, the most visible conservative intellectual, and his follower the future Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. “While politics makes strange bedfellows,” Payne wrote of Brown and Stone and their participation in what she deemed an odious meeting with the enemy, “it included newsmen as participants in the game rather than as critics of politicians.”

Payne’s fight with Coleman also reflected the generation gap that existed between young black reporters and those, like Payne, who had been pioneers. “She was a creature of her generation,” Coleman said, looking back on the incident many years later. “It was hard for her to understand why someone who is black who is reporting on Washington could behave differently than she thought she needed to behave, to remain happy not betraying the race. I respect that because she was from a different generation.”

Her anger also stemmed from angst. In her seventies, Payne found the world was leaving her behind. Whereas she had once had the most recognizable byline in the black American press, she was now reduced to mailing her column to those black newspapers with older readers who still found value in an Ethel Payne commentary. But a shrinking readership put these few remaining newspapers on life support and caused Payne to endure the financial humiliation of collecting on late payments. There simply wasn’t much left of the black press. In the last decade the number of black newspapers being published had fallen by 22 percent and circulation had plummeted by 33 percent.

“Ethel and the black press successfully put themselves out of business by advocating a wider participation in society,” said Ernest Green, a friend of Payne’s who had been among the nine black Little Rock students in 1957 and later served in the Carter administration. He recalled that when he worked for Carter, Payne would come by his office regularly. But she had a hard time getting the Labor Department’s media people to regard her as an important reporter now that the black press circulation was falling and the white press was reporting on minority issues.

The civil rights movement had made it impossible for the white press to continue to ignore the black community. “At first many white publications simply plagiarized articles from black newspapers, but eventually they found it necessary to hire more black journalists than the token few that some had on their staffs,” said Calvin W. Rolark, publisher of the Washington Informer. “Thus began the raid on black newspapers.”

Not only did the best black media staffers migrate to the mainstream media but so did advertisers. Younger black readers, particularly those for whom the civil rights movement was a moment in history, considered the black press stodgy, boring, and irrelevant to their lives. Falling circulation and dropping ad revenues in a publication foretold that the golden days of the black press were over.

A black journalist with talent was an object of desire in the better-paying, better-read white media. But not Payne. Her writing style belonged to an era gone by. The new world of black journalism found Payne’s style quaint and old-fashioned. Essence, a successful magazine for black women, asked Payne to write a personal article about how she remained active at her age. But the slow-paced reminiscences of her family life and the strength it had provided her seemed sadly out-of-date to the editors. Audrey Edwards, the magazine’s editor, offered to take another look at a revised article but added that “editors here are not as excited about the piece as they were originally.”

Even work from publications that once had been sympathetic to the movement dried up with conservative electoral victories. For instance, President Reagan’s Commission on Civil Rights staff appointee Linda Chavez killed a Payne article slated for its quarterly journal, leaving it to her assistant to deliver the news. “You have assumed unwarranted authority in unilaterally dismissing something after the fact,” Payne snapped back at the hapless aide. “I do not take this incident lightly. Too much has gone into the long, hard struggle for equality of opportunity and human dignity to sit idly by and watch the demise of the agency at the hands of insensitive and callous individuals who have abrogated their public responsibility.”

But no one was listening. Payne remained widely admired and the subject of flattering articles, but she had become a relic of another era.