CHAPTER 6

TIME TO LEAVE

IN SEPTEMBER 1943, ETHEL PAYNE RODE UP TO THE CHICAGO Loop and walked into the twenty-two-story La Salle Hotel, one of the city’s toniest hotels, a world away from South Side. There she joined the Interracial Commission for its inaugural meeting. The governor, underscoring his support for the group’s work, attended the session. “I’m looking to this commission for advice and counsel on a program that will lead us nearer to the American ideal of equal opportunity for all our citizens,” Green told the panel’s members, hoping his words would win him support among African American voters.

Getting down to business, though its members remained in the dark as to exactly what work they were empowered to do, the commission urged that similar organizations be established in Illinois communities that had substantial black populations. Payne brought her industriousness, her activism, and her impatience to the work. From the start, commission members turned to her for help in preparing reports and drafting resolutions.

In one of its earliest meetings, the commission identified housing as central to improving relations between the races. It charged Payne and two other commission members, a white judge and a black physician, to draft a resolution that could be quickly adopted. But compromise would have to be the order of the day to obtain an agreement from the biracial group. In its final version, a watered-down resolution urged that laws be enacted to tear down unsuitable housing, prohibit overcrowding, prevent overcharging rent, and secure cooperation from landowners to provide new housing. In only one instance in the seven-point resolution was discrimination even mentioned, and only in reference to public housing. The commission was hardly going to promote the change Payne believed was necessary.

Payne’s impatience for the weak declarations of the commission soon surfaced. She had met the night before with fellow commission member Catholic bishop Bernard J. Sheil, who was known for his outspokenness. He shared Payne’s more ambitious hopes for the commission. “Justice for minority groups is the ultimate test of our domestic processes,” Sheil told the press, “and this commission must proceed fearlessly to lead in this grave problem for Illinois and America.”

Payne described to her fellow members the plans she and Bishop Sheil had devised. “We both arrived at the conclusion that we feel it would be well to recommend to this commission that we hold a series of regional meetings, because we cannot adequately cover the problem unless we are on home ground,” she said. The meetings should particularly be held in areas of tension such as East St. Louis. The commission agreed to the idea but limited the hearings to a single day. When Payne complained, the chair told her the discussion was over.

When members turned to talk about instructions they believed should be provided to law enforcement in case of riots, Payne interrupted. “May I inject this thought,” she asked. “I have noticed that this commission was created out of an emergency because we thought there was enough racial tension throughout the state to warrant the establishment of this commission.” Now she wondered if the commission believed the tension had eased to the extent that there was not much to worry about. The chair replied, “The most dangerous situation in America regarding race relations is the tendency to feel we have gotten over the hump.” Then he quickly moved to the next item of business, closing off further discussion of Payne’s concerns.

Frustrated, Payne nonetheless remained on board. In contrast to her dull work at the library, the commission gave her status and a sense that she had a platform. But she was keenly aware that the commission, like most such political contrivances, lacked teeth. It was a point a Defender editor drove home when he appeared before the panel. He urged them to seek policing powers such as those granted to the Federal Fair Employment Practices Committee. “You would be wasting your time and energy,” he told them, “to sit here philosophying on social conditions and racial tensions, housing, etc., if you do not have the power to act upon those things.”

PAYNE’S WORK WITH THE March on Washington Movement was so rewarding that in the fall of 1943 she applied for a job as a field-worker at the NAACP. Randolph promised to talk to Roy Wilkins, then the editor of Crisis magazine, on her behalf. In the meantime, she received a surprising letter from the U.S. Department of Justice. Two years earlier, she had taken a civil service test and had earned a sufficient rating to be a government librarian. The letter asked if she would be interested in a library post. “Unquestionably,” Payne replied.

In Washington on a lobbying trip for Randolph a few months later, Payne stopped in at the Department of Justice to seek out Matthew McKavitt, the librarian whose signature had been on the letter. Directed to the fifth floor of the department’s new building, which was decorated with WPA art, Payne found McKavitt. Although he greeted her warmly, McKavitt told her that her name had been struck from the list of candidates. “From some of the statements on my application,” said Payne, “it was ascertained that I was colored and so the conversation revolved around the difficulties which would arise upon having a Negro on the staff.”

There were, indeed, Negro women running the elevator, McKavitt said, and five Negro men working as messengers and clerks. No thought, however, had been given to having a Negro in a professional position. In fact, after learning of Payne’s destination, the receptionist who had greeted her downstairs had already called McKavitt to warn him not to hire her. All the while praising her qualifications, McKavitt apologetically said his superior from Georgia would oppose giving her the job. The next morning Payne sought out the Civil Service Commission. The best the staff there could do was to offer her a junior clerk’s position if she was willing to take yet another exam.

Payne retreated to Chicago by overnight train. When Randolph heard of Payne’s Washington ordeal, he immediately wrote to Attorney General Francis Biddle, saying that he was sure Biddle would not tolerate this kind of discrimination if brought to his attention. Press savvy as he was, Randolph also gave a copy of his letter to newspapers.

Hardly anyone paid attention. Segregation, while frowned on by some in the North, was widely accepted as a matter of fact, and jobs in Washington’s federal bureaucracy continued to be off-limits to African Americans unless they wanted to operate elevators, run messages, serve food, or clean bathrooms.

THE FAILURE TO GET the job in Washington or one with the NAACP intensified Ethel Payne’s despondency at being stuck at her Chicago library job. Her life was dull, punctuated only by volunteer work at a community house and the occasional Interracial Commission meeting. “I was definitely ready for a change, something more challenging,” she said. Even Chicago, her birth city, discouraged her by its lack of progress. “When I ride down South Parkway now or State Street or similar streets, I get a bitter nausea at the grimy squalor of Chicago’s South Side. It makes me ashamed, disgusted and fighting mad that a city of this size should allow such.”

The massive immigration of African Americans to Chicago worried her. Like many of the established black settlers, Payne was not immune to developing an antipathy toward the newcomers and what she saw as their general rowdiness and bad conduct as well as the crime and disease that accompanied them. “They even trespass the quiet somber decency of my own street and I resent it. They’re like barbarians overrunning the civilization that I’ve known,” she said. “I know they are my own people and somehow they must be taught the better way of life.”

The March on Washington Movement occasionally showed signs of life, but Payne recognized that its time had passed. “It was good to see you again and to hear you speak in this old familiar way,” Payne wrote Randolph after hearing him talk in September 1945. “It brought back memories of old times.” She retained some optimism that the end of the war might reinvigorate the movement. “I am hopeful,” Payne told Randolph, “that the Negro who has been deaf to all warnings of coming cutbacks and indifferent to problems of his own welfare will now have time to and cause to think and act. Soon the field should be ripe for reorganizing. Something has to be done.”

The war’s end was bringing a more tangible and personal change for Payne. Her brother, Lemuel, had enlisted in the Army and joined the approximately 125,000 African Americans who went overseas. Now he would soon be home and the family would once again be together. “Although he is anxious to return home,” Payne wrote to Randolph, “he dreads the thought of returning to the old American discrimination after he has had a chance to see some of the liberalism of such places as Paris, Belgium, and even some parts of Germany where the German people despite the verboten of fraternization have heartily welcomed Negro troops.”

As desired as it was, the international peace renewed economic challenges for African Americans. Returning white veterans displaced the black workers who had taken their places. (The same held true for those women who had worked during the war.) “The collapse of Japan this week,” the Defender told its readers, “boomeranged on Negro workers here with the devastating effect of an atomic bomb, blasting thousands from their well-paying wartime jobs.” Even those African Americans who served the country were behind the eight ball. Holding the lowest ranks in the military, they were often discharged later than white soldiers, and by the time they got home, most jobs were already filled. The peace, it seemed, would be no easier than the war. African American living standards rapidly deteriorated. By 1947, the unemployment rate for blacks was twice that of whites.

ON A HOT AUGUST DAY in 1947, Payne and her sister Avis came home from a picnic. When they got off the bus at the corner of Sixtieth and Racine in Englewood, they spotted police officers arresting a group of black men in front of a tavern and loading them into a paddy wagon.

“What’s going on?” Payne said.

The question prompted two plainclothes police officers to cross the street, cursing at the two women as they approached. “Get the hell out of here!” they yelled.

“This is not Mississippi or Alabama,” a furious Payne replied.

One of the officers struck her and dragged her to the paddy wagon across the street while Avis screamed and ran home. Their mother was on the front porch when she arrived. “Somebody get the bail money together,” she ordered, adding to send for her son-in-law the attorney.

The wagon delivered the two dozen or so arrested men, along with Payne, to the police station about five or six blocks away. An aging Irish captain asked, “Now what’s the trouble?” Payne lit into him. “This is an abuse of citizens’ rights,” Payne exclaimed, citing her membership on the Interracial Commission.

Her brother-in-law arrived and listened to the captain’s explanation. “Well,” he said in an apologetic manner, “the boys got a wee rough. They just went a wee bit far, but you didn’t do anything really wrong.”

“You book me,” Payne insisted, “because I want to go to trial. This is police brutality. You book me.”

“Let’s just settle this. Let’s go and have a peaceful weekend.”

“No, you book me. I want to be booked.”

So in due course the police officers fingerprinted her, booked her, and asked what else they could do.

“You let those people out of their cells downstairs, that’s what you can do. You let those people out.”

The officer, probably glad to be rid of Payne, relented. The others were released, and a month later a judge threw the case out. The incident became a favorite in Payne family lore.

IN 1948, NOTICES BEGAN APPEARING in newspapers that the U.S. Army wanted to hire at least 250 single women between the ages of twenty-five and forty for staff service club posts overseas. The chief Army hostess for the Far East command told the press there was a “desperate need” among enlisted men for organized recreation. The ideal hostess, she said, “must be of a high type, capable and energetic, and must bring a wholesome feminine touch to the service club.”

During World War II, when the Red Cross previously operated these social clubs, Payne had considered trying to obtain work in one. “I’m glad that I didn’t now,” she wrote Randolph when the war was over, “because the stories of discrimination and restrictions on staff workers are too convincing. I might have been frustrated and anything could have happened.” Instead, Payne did get a job for nine months as a hostess at Camp Robert Smalls, part of the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in North Chicago, where the Navy was training African American enlistees, including a group who became the service’s first black commissioned and warrant officers.

In March Payne submitted an application for the position of assistant service club director. She had the prerequisite two years of college and, more important, the Camp Smalls experience. Within a few weeks Payne got word that she had the job. She was given the choice of being assigned to Korea or Japan. She chose the latter. The Army remained segregated, “so I knew in advance I would be going into an all-Negro unit,” Payne said.

At the Throop Street house, she called her brother, sisters, and mother together for one of their family councils. She told them the news. Her sister Wilma objected. “Why can’t you settle down and be satisfied?” she asked. “You’ve got a good job with the Chicago Public Library. Why can’t you be satisfied with that?”

Bessie sat quietly listening to her children take different sides. “Well,” she said, joining in at last, “she’s been raised to know the difference between right and wrong, and she’s been raised in a religious atmosphere. At this point in time, I think it’s up to her to decide what she wants to do with her life. So if she wants to go, she has my blessing.”