CHAPTER 40

CITIZEN OF THE WORLD

ETHEL LOIS PAYNE HAD DIED OF A HEART ATTACK, eleven weeks shy of her eightieth birthday. The news was reported in both the white and black press of the United States and as far away as South Africa. In addition to publishing an obituary, the Washington Post devoted an entire editorial to her passing. “Her voice was low, but her questions were piercing, and her reports on the world were cherished by millions of readers,” the paper said. Recalling the remarks of a Howard University professor, the Post said, “Had Ethel Payne not been black, she certainly would have been one of the most recognized journalists in American society. . . .

“Those of us,” the editorial concluded, “who did know Ethel Payne’s work and enjoyed her friendship will miss the good company of a pro whose insight and graceful writing served to bridge so many worlds.”

As a reporter, Payne had unswervingly remained faithful to the black press even when it decided it no longer needed her services. She was convinced to the end that, as during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and early 1960s, the black press had an activist’s role to play. In fact, she never gave up on the idea. “Somehow the black press has forgotten how to agitate for the purposes for which it was founded,” she complained a decade later. And ten years after that, she told a student, “The black press can be a formidable instrument for change, if it just realizes its potential, its responsibility, its historical past, and if it lives up to that credo, because the fight is far from over.”

On Capitol Hill, California representative Ron Dellums told his colleagues that when he was a young man, Payne’s reporting had exposed him to a world beyond the confines of the Bay Area. Jesse Jackson asked congregants to pause and pray for Payne at a church where he was appearing in Gary, Indiana. Hundreds turned out at the funeral home to pay their final respects. Delta members Rita Biggs-Booth and Shirley Small-Rougeau prepared a sorority Omega Omega Service for their departed sister. Small-Rougeau was given the honor of pinning white lilies on Payne’s garment.

Small-Rougeau and Payne’s other friends and family wanted to organize a service at the Washington National Cathedral, which sits high on a hill overlooking the city and had been the frequent site of presidential funeral services. But John Walker, the chair of Africare’s board, who knew Payne well, was no longer the bishop, and it seemed unlikely his successor would be amenable to the idea. Stymied in finding a suitable location, the group was relieved when James M. Christian, a loyal friend, provided a solution. He served as chairman of the board of the Zion Baptist Church, on the corner of Sixteenth Street and Blagden Avenue, the northern tip of what old-time Washingtonians referred to as the Gold Coast, where the city’s black elite made its home.

The service began at 10:00 AM on Wednesday, June 5, when Reverend Donald Vails, a noted gospel choir director, played an organ prelude and Reverend Carlton W. Veazey welcomed the large crowd. This was followed by readings from the Old and New Testament, including 1 Corinthians, chapter 13, with its heartening adage: “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

Payne’s nephew James A. Johnson, who had come to live with her in 1959 when he attended the congressional Page School, and her great-niece, Felicity Boyd, represented the fourth and fifth generations of the family and provided remembrances. Tributes were offered by television news anchor Maureen Bunyan, Frances Murphy, whose family owned the long-published Afro-American newspapers, and U.S. representative William Gray III.

Then, from the choir loft, Christian sang. He had chosen to perform the hymn “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” It was Martin Luther King’s favorite and was sung at his funeral as well as that of Lyndon Baines Johnson. “I chose the song because I felt it captured Ethel’s struggle and the fact that she was now at peace,” said Christian, to whom Payne had been an adopted grandmother. He was, however, unaware of another connection he held with Payne. Christian, who had been singing solos since he was in high school, had been a member of the Howard University choir. It was the exclusion of that very choir from a 1954 Republican event that had led Payne to ask her first question at a presidential press conference and discover her power as a member of the White House press corps.

It fell to James A. Joseph, with whom Payne had recently shared her plans for the Twenty-First Century Fellows program, to provide the eulogy. “It is thus my task to say a word about the meaning of this extraordinary life, the message of this extraordinary woman, and the mission of those who must now pick up the torch and carry on,” Joseph said.

“She used her skills not to acquire power for herself but to activate power in others,” he continued. “At a time in which our world seemed to be fragmenting into ‘we’ and ‘they’ groups, Ethel was searching for the social glue of civil society, affirming the connectedness of humanity. She made the case in all sectors of our society that the fear of difference is a fear of the future.

“In her own work, she was not simply reporting the news,” he said. “She was stretching the horizon of the heart, widening the circle of community, seeking to transform the laissez-faire notion of live and let live into a moral imperative of live and help live.

“People in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere have lost an authentic citizen of the world.”

SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, VOICE of America broadcaster Maimouna Mills came to Payne’s Rittenhouse apartment to meet with Ethel’s sister Avis Johnson. Mills interviewed her for the VOA’s Africa broadcast department. The now-silent flat overflowed with mementos and awards. “We tried to catalog them,” said Johnson of the awards, “and our last count was more than eighty, and they represent all kinds of organizations, not necessarily newspapers or journalists, but community groups, national groups, that respected the fact that she was out there on the cutting edge.”

Johnson recounted for Mills the influence of their parents and grandparents, the high points of her sister’s career, her world travels, and the excitement she had felt returning from her meeting with the Mandelas a year earlier. “She has left a wonderful legacy,” Johnson said. “There are people all across the world who have been touched through her interest and her work who I feel will want to carry on some of the things that she dreamed should happen.”

Indeed, two years later the National Association of Black Journalists undertook such an effort when it launched the Ethel L. Payne Fellowship to fund reporting projects in Africa. Wayne J. Dawkins, a longtime member of the NABJ and author of its history, described the creation of the fellowship as a big move for the organization. The NABJ had regularly complained about lack of coverage of Africa in the American media, he said. “The fellowship was a way of stepping out on our own and not just waiting for the largesse of the newspapers and networks to do something.”

The first two recipients were Karen Lange, a Chapel Hill Herald reporter, and Michelle Singletary of the Washington Post. For a decade, before the fellowship ceased to be able to raise sufficient funds to operate, the NABJ sent more than a dozen young reporters to Africa to pursue stories of their choosing. Typical of the group was Tracey Scruggs Yearwood, a CNN producer who now works as a producer for Oprah Winfrey. She used the money in 1997 to support a television documentary on grassroots women’s movements in South Africa’s post-apartheid era. Fred Harvey, a longtime journalist, used his fellowship to go to Sierra Leone to pursue his passionate study of African influence in the food, speech, and religious practices in his native South Carolina. The recipients were engaged in the kind of reporting that would have thrilled Payne.

In September 2002, the U.S. Postal Service selected Payne to be among four journalists it would honor on 37-cent commemorative postage stamps. The other three were Nellie Bly, Marguerite Higgins, and Ida M. Tarbell. Designer Fred Otnes created a collage featuring a black-and-white photograph combined with memorabilia for each of the women. For the Payne stamp he chose a black-and white photograph of Payne surrounded on one side by the nameplate of the Chicago Defender and the headline of the article she wrote about the Montgomery bus boycott.

The fellowship no longer has funds and the postage stamp remains visible only in the collections of philatelists. Payne’s papers are scattered among three libraries and two museums. The Newseum in Washington maintains a display about Payne’s career in its News History Gallery. But more than two decades after her death, only the rarest of visitors would recognize her name. As is true of much of the civil rights struggle, much is forgotten.

Civil rights activist Julian Bond has spent many years in the classrooms of American University and the University of Virginia. His time with students confirms what studies have shown about the dismal lack of knowledge of the civil rights era. His students, for instance, could not identify George Wallace, although one hazarded a guess that he might have been a CBS news reporter. Worse, the entire grassroots movement has been replaced by a popular classroom fable, according to Bond, that goes, “There used to be segregation until Martin Luther King came along, that he marched and protested, that he was killed, and that then everything was all right.”

A decade before her death Payne intuited that the great movement she had chronicled was fading from public memory. On a Sunday in February 1983, Payne spoke to the congregation at St. John AME Church in Nashville. “Ours was a generation which spanned the time when black bodies were on the line,” she said, “and as we struggled to send our children to college, we forgot to tell them about our past.”

IN 1987, WHEN PAYNE SAT DOWN to record her oral history, she told Kathleen Currie that she had led a charmed life.

“Why do you say ‘charmed’?” asked Currie.

“Because,” replied Payne, “I’ve been able to be such an eyewitness to so many profound things and so many changes, and I’ve lived through it and I’ve witnessed. I’ve had a box seat on history, and that’s a rare thing.”