CHAPTER 5

MUSKETEER

MONOTONOUSLY STAMPING LENDING SLIPS OR SORTING books at the Chicago Lawn Branch Library was hardly the life Ethel Payne had imagined for herself. “Work at the library was boring for me,” she said, “and I’m almost sure I was a bore to it.” But Chicago remained intransigently inhospitable for an ambitious young black woman. Seven out of ten employed black women worked as domestic servants. Other than that, the few jobs that could be had were in eating and drinking establishments, clothing stores, and, with the right credentials, black schools. A professional black woman was as rare in the Windy City as a warm day in winter.

Preparations for war in 1940 reinforced the resolute racism. The conflagration in Europe fueled a government armament-spending spree that fired up the economy and wiped out the last vestiges of the Great Depression. But the economic growth left most African Americans behind, a bitter reminder of the racial divide. Nearly one in two blacks in Illinois remained without work. Picking up a copy of the Chicago Defender was discouraging. The paper’s Los Angeles correspondent reported finding only one Negro among the thousands employed in the city’s booming aircraft industry. A plant manager in New York told the Defender there was no company policy against hiring Negroes. “He said that objections to working with Negroes undoubtedly would come from the men already in the plant and that the company did not wish to experiment at this present time because of the possibility of labor difficulties or the impairment of the morale of its workers.”

Following the disheartening racism of the 1920s and 1930s, the stoicism of urban African Americans reached its limit. In the fall of 1940 three black leaders met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to seek an end to segregation in the military and defense industries. Roosevelt listened sympathetically, but the White House soon made it clear that it would not alter the policy prohibiting the intermingling of colored and white soldiers.

The White House tried to mollify the black leaders. But A. Philip Randolph, the founding president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, was not to be placated. As he rode the train into the South, he brooded over the impasse. By the time he reached Savannah, Georgia, Randolph had a plan. Proposing his idea first to small gatherings and then finally to the nation in January 1941, Randolph called on African Americans to march on Washington as had Coxey’s Army of unemployed workers in 1894 and the Bonus Army of unpaid war veterans in 1932.

Over six feet tall, elegant in gestures, and possessing a baritone voice once described as being as musical as an organ, Randolph rallied his people with an eloquence in speech and writing that belied his limited education. “The virtue and rightness of a cause,” he said, “are not alone the condition and cause of its progress and acceptance. Power and pressure are at the foundation of the march of social justice and reform.”

The planned protest struck terror in the administration. Roosevelt turned for help to his wife, who enjoyed considerable respect among African Americans. With the date of the march drawing near, an anxious Eleanor Roosevelt pleaded with Randolph to call it off. If the arrival of thousands of blacks in the nation’s capital, still a deeply segregated city whose hotels and restaurants barred Negroes, triggered an incident of any sort, it would set the cause back, she wrote. “You know that I am deeply concerned about the rights of Negro people, but I think one must face situations as they are and not as one wishes them to be.”

To the president, his wife, and such allies of theirs as New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, such a protest march was unfathomable, especially in wartime. This fear was Randolph’s trump card. The march, he promised, “would wake up and shock official Washington as it has never before been shocked” because “Negroes are supposed not have sufficient iron in their blood for this type of struggle. In common parlance, they are supposed to be just scared and unorganizable.”

He invited African American laborers and lawyers, doctors and nurses, mechanics and teachers, men and women, young and old, to join in. The black press, with the exception of the Pittsburgh Courier, supported the plan. “To get 10,000 Negroes assembled in one spot, under one banner with justice, democracy and work as their slogan would be the miracle of the century,” proclaimed an editorial in the Defender. “However, miracles do happen.”

TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD PAYNE was among the believers. Randolph had long been a respected figure in her house for having organized the Pullman porter union. But professional frustrations and her reporter-like observations of life in South Side also fueled Payne’s discontent. “Already,” she said, “I was beginning to have the seeds of rebellion churning up in me.”

She was an active member of the Chicago branch of the NAACP, honored for recruiting more than twenty new members. The chapter was fighting the housing covenants that blocked blacks from living in 80 percent of the city and was campaigning to get blacks employed in defense factories. Payne had also organized a community improvement program in her neighborhood through the Modern Women Social and Charity Club that she helped establish at St. John AME Church. The program included a story hour for children at the YMCA, a community council aimed at reducing juvenile delinquency, and a college scholarship fund. Payne, with three volunteers, raised the scholarship money by going door-to-door and soliciting funds from merchants and organizations. Within a few years it provided $500 annually to a college-bound Englewood student.

Nor was she sheepish about speaking her mind. When President Roosevelt sought to weaken the Supreme Court in 1937 by expanding its membership, Payne denounced the plan in a letter published not in the Defender but in the Chicago Tribune calling the court the “final, greatest hope for political, moral, and economic justice” for American Negroes.

Throughout the spring and into the summer of 1941, no one in South Side could escape the buildup to the march. Each week the Defender reported on the growing plans as well as administration efforts at preventing its occurrence. Finally, with only a few days remaining before the march, the president capitulated. On June 25, 1941, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) and requiring that companies with government contracts not discriminate on the basis of race or religion. Randolph called off the march. In its place, he redirected the planned protest into the March on Washington Movement aimed at solidifying the gains and making sure the new employment committee lived up to its promise.

Hammering away at the military’s discriminatory policies, the lack of jobs in taxpayer-supported defense industries, and the Red Cross’s refusal to use Negro blood, Randolph announced a series of mass meetings in major cities. In mid-February he brought his campaign to St. John AME Church across the street from Payne’s house. Payne enlisted and was given the post of chairman of the planning committee for the mass meeting in the city’s Coliseum.

It fell to Payne to turn out a crowd for the rally planned for the Coliseum on June 26, 1942, one of three events the movement planned over the course of the year in large cities with black populations. By April the group opened an office in the center of Bronzeville and installed a telephone and typewriter. But trouble brewed behind the flurry of activities and the veneer of unity.

The prickly personalities of the various male Chicago leaders stirred up friction, made worse by their mulish resistance to put any of the women volunteers in leadership posts. “I had hoped that we might proceed in the greatest harmony possible,” Payne reported to Randolph, “but it seems as if there are some squalls which come up and must be weathered.” Payne chafed at the slow pace of the organizing work, caused by what she saw as a needless redrafting of letters and flyers by Charles Wesley Burton, a member of Randolph’s executive committee. She felt blocked at every turn by him. “I am to work in close cooperation with the chairman of the city wide committee, but if I go ahead and take action, I am constantly reminded that I am usurping authority,” Payne complained. She warned, “I cannot sit by and wait for orders to proceed.”

IN THE END THE WORK moved sufficiently forward. WAKE UP, NEGRO AMERICA! blazed the headline on the Chicago group’s flyer. “Do we want to work? Do we want our full rights? Do we want justice?” it asked, inviting black Chicagoans to send in a dime for membership dues, attend Friday-night meetings at the YMCA, or volunteer to work on the Coliseum rally.

Armed with the flyer, Payne and two volunteers canvassed neighborhoods on foot until a supporter offered the use of an automobile. “So you can imagine our raves,” reported one of the tired women, “when he stands in our planning committee meeting and quite nonchalantly offers the use of his car without any strings attached, except that most of the time we shall have to furnish our own driver.”

As the day of the rally neared, Payne drew up instructions for Bronzeville businesses to close their doors and extinguish their lights, inside and out-, on the night of the event. The gesture, borrowed from wartime blackouts in London, was intended to symbolize the manner in which African Americans were “blacked out” of American democracy. Payne dispatched dozens of volunteers sporting armbands to visit merchants and small-businessmen. The request to join the protest was hardly an invitation. “Stores that refuse to cooperate,” Payne wrote in her instructions, “should be blacklisted, boycotted and picketed as enemies to the fight for Negro rights.”

The work paid off. From her perch on the stage of the Chicago Coliseum, Payne watched as thousands streamed in. Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, warmed up the crowd before Randolph’s appearance. At length he explained that the federal government’s racist policies stemmed from the inordinate influence of Southerners, who controlled 50 percent of the congressional committee chairmanships.

“In the light of the control of our government by these men who spit upon democracy whenever the Negro is involved, is there any wonder that meetings like this are tragically necessary at a time like this?” White asked. “Or that, irony of ironies, we Negroes must fight for the right to fight when the world is threatened with destruction?”

Then, after a theatrical play whose humor brought the house down, and several more speakers, Randolph finally took to the stage at 11:00 PM. He recounted how at American train depots, USO canteen workers rushed out to greet white soldiers with cigarettes, candy, and drinks but refused to provide such service when the trains pulled in with Negro soldiers.

After detailing a litany of military discrimination and war industry prejudices, Randolph told the thousands that it was their responsibility to wage the struggle. “History shows that Jews must depend upon Jews to fight the battles of the Jews; Catholics must depend upon Catholics to fight the battles of Catholics; women must depend upon women to fight the battles of women; Negroes must depend upon Negroes to fight the battles of Negroes.”

Surely, he said, Negroes can’t be expected to fight for democracy in Burma when they don’t have it in Birmingham.

THE NEWS COVERAGE of the event was gratifying. On the Defender’s front page, headlined with 12,000 IN CHICAGO VOICE DEMANDS FOR DEMOCRACY, was a photograph of Payne wearing one of her many hats, a fashion accessory for which she would retain a preference until the end of her life. Other black papers increased the crowd estimates and carried long excerpts from the speeches. Even the white press felt it necessary to say something. The Chicago Tribune included a short report buried on page 20 that 10,000 Negroes had gathered to protest what it called “alleged discrimination” in the armed forces and war industry.

The rally took in $1,449.71, Payne excitedly reported to Randolph. “The main questions now being asked by the man on the street are what’s next and how are you going to keep interest alive?” Exercising his tendency to aggrandizement, Randolph told Payne that her work contributed to “making the great Coliseum Meeting the biggest demonstration of Negro power ever witnessed in the history of the world.” With the success of the rally Payne became, in Randolph’s words, one of the movement’s Three Musketeers.

The rally over, the planning committee disbanded. But Payne didn’t let up in her efforts. When the Pittsburgh Courier accused the movement of intensifying racial antagonism and weakening support for the war among African Americans, Payne rushed to its defense. Taking a cue from Randolph’s hyperbolic style, she wrote to the editors that the executive order opening factory gates to blacks was the most important victory since the Emancipation Proclamation. For too long the Negro has “depended upon the interest and sympathies of his white friends to intercede for him.” Instead, the movement is based on a principle “that the salvation of the Negro people comes from within.”

She took the lesson to heart. While holding down a full-time job in the library, she maintained the movement’s office after hours and worked on a mammoth tea party intended to sustain interest among Chicago women. For two weeks straight, she did not get to bed before one in the morning. In mid-December, Payne awoke complaining of a persistent headache and went to see her doctor. He told her that if she did not curtail her many activities she would have something far worse than a bothersome headache, namely a complete breakdown.

At home that night, Payne wrote to Randolph. “I am feeling at my lowest physical ebb so much so that I can scarcely hold the pen.” While she reported that the outlook for the organization was better than at any time since the Coliseum rally, there remained much to be done. New members needed to be managed, a constitution or bylaws had to be written, and planning had to get under way for the proposed May conference. “Now as egotistical as it may sound,” Payne wrote, “the strain of trying to balance these pressures is really telling on me. I think that if some of that burden were lifted I would not be so worried and nervous.”

With rest, Payne recovered her strength by summer’s end and was able to be among the sixty delegates who assembled in Detroit in September to design a permanent structure for the movement. The group voted to hold a national convention in Chicago the following year. Randolph thanked Payne for her participation but again voiced some trepidation about her Chicago colleagues. “I hope,” he wrote to Payne, “they will drop all bickering and grievances and concentrate on the conference.”

IN 1943, WITH THE UNITED STATES in its second year of the war, the movement redoubled its efforts. As the summer approached, Payne took a short leave of absence from her job at the library to work full-time on preparations for what was now being called the “We Are Americans, Too” convention set for the end of June. For her efforts she was paid $500, a considerable sum for the cash-strapped organization. Knowing that Randolph was the movement’s biggest draw, to publicize the convention she booked him for four community meetings in churches serving the city’s burgeoning black population.

Once again rebellion surfaced among Chicago members. This time the insurrectionist was Payne. Free labor from women, particularly admiring ones, had made it possible for Randolph to run his movement on a shoestring budget. But he regularly disregarded their advice and never considered them equal to men. During the previous year’s campaign, Payne had gotten a taste of this when Randolph had done nothing to help when male Chicago organizers undercut her. Many of Randolph’s numerous female supporters tolerated his paternalistic treatment of women, but not Payne.

She picked up the telephone and called Randolph. She told him that she wanted her duties and powers clearly spelled out. The call was insufficient. She took pen to paper. “I simply refuse to be treated like a worrisome child and patted on the head and told to run along,” she told him. “This is your brainchild and I simply want to help it grow, but if you’re going to be indifferent I don’t see why in hell I should get my blood pressure up for nothing. I refuse to be taken for granted and I hope I made myself clear.”

Payne had reasons to worry. The men in the movement remained uncomfortable with women in positions of authority. “Too many bossy dames around here,” complained one male organizer. When she was done itemizing her complaints in the letter, she closed with a promise. “I know,” she wrote, “you are relieved that this is all I am going to say, but if you don’t straighten up and fly right there’s more yet to come.”

Randolph got the message and Payne resumed her organizing work. The convention’s agenda was announced. The focus would be on ending “Jim Crow in uniform” and the conference would include strategy sessions on eliminating military segregation and creating a program to do the same with American civilian life. Patience among Negroes was at an end, Randolph warned. “The pulse beat of the nation is being quickened by this restless volcano that disturbs men’s souls.”

RANDOLPH WAS PRESCIENT in a way that he did not anticipate. Roosevelt’s executive order, although weakly enforced, had given blacks access to the lowest-paid jobs in the defense industries. Their presence, however, created animosity among white workers in Northern cities who feared that their jobs would be threatened.

On a warm Saturday June evening, a week before March on Washington delegates reached Chicago for their meeting, a fight broke out between black and white youths at Detroit’s Belle Isle Park. Fueled by rumors, the clash escalated and spread into the Motor City, creating the worst urban riot in more than twenty years. It took three days for authorities to restore order. Thirty-four people died, twenty-five of whom were black, and 760 were injured.

The riots in Detroit, as well as ones at the Beaumont, Texas, shipyards, created a sense of urgency when the conference opened in late June. Randolph laid the blame for the outbreak of violence on the doorstep of the White House. “Riots are the result of the government policy of segregation of and discrimination against Negroes,” he said. Once again the specter of a march on the nation’s capital appeared as the gathering approved a resolution giving the executive committee the power to set a time and date for one.

Payne had all the details well planned out for the gathering. For five days, 109 delegates from fourteen states, meeting inside the South Side’s Metropolitan Apostolic Community Church, debated and voted on resolutions ranging from supporting the war and opposing the Communist Party to demanding a revision of the Atlantic Charter to include the darker races and require the Allied nations to give up their colonies.

During the meeting Payne intermingled with emerging civil rights leaders such as Edgar D. Nixon, who a decade later would organize the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, and Bayard Rustin. Only thirty years old and working as Randolph’s youth coordinator, Rustin had caught the attention of many activists for his principled devotion to nonviolent direct action inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s struggles against colonial British rule in India. The year before, Rustin had refused to give up his seat in the front of a bus while traveling in the South and had not fought back when police officers beat him. He now faced prison for draft resistance. His presentation on this new strategy moved the delegates to act audaciously. Under the watchful eyes of FBI informants, Payne and other delegates formally pledged to adopt nonviolent direct-action tactics. At the time, a fourteen-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. was preparing to enter his final year at Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School.

THE 1943 DETROIT RIOTS not only agitated the conference delegates but also panicked politicians throughout the United States. In Illinois, Republican governor Dwight Green looked anxiously at his 1944 reelection bid. He won the office in 1940 when support for the New Deal was waning. Voters were now preparing to reward him for three years of dependable service free from the chicanery of the Chicago Democratic political machinery. A riot could upset his reelection plans.

The concern was real. “It CAN happen here, because at the present time, living conditions here are worse than any city I’ve been in,” wrote a Pullman porter to the Defender. “Someone should wake up and look around Chicago if they want to avoid trouble here, because it is more serious than you realize.” The NAACP called on its interracial committees in nineteen potential trouble spots to persuade newspapers to suppress unsubstantiated rumors that could incite violence. Even CBS Radio joined in by airing an anti-riot program featuring thirty famous actors and writers.

Governor Green was not taking any chances. “We have been alarmed,” he said, “by recent outbreaks of interracial strife in other states and we are determined to prevent any such tragedies in Illinois.” To that end he selected seven white and seven black citizens from around Illinois to serve on an interracial commission aimed at easing racial friction. For its black members, Green selected two prominent pastors, a funeral director, a vice-president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a physician and former track star, a housing bureau official, and one other.

“I hereby appoint you to be a member of the Interracial Commission for Illinois,” Green wrote to Payne in late July, “for the purpose of investigating means, not only of preventing racial strife, but of effecting permanent improvement of racial relations in the State.” Her appointment stood out. Payne was one of only two women on the fourteen-member panel; the white side had a female elected politician. More striking, Payne was the only one without a post of some stature.

The March on Washington Movement had made Payne into a prominent Chicago activist with a reputation that reached the corridors of the state capitol.